Goethe and Beethoven

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There is always something pathetic about pictures or accounts of holidays in wartime - people trying to relax, to pretend that life goes on, going to the beach or to the mountains, and perhaps seeing bombers or battleships in the distance. And that, surely, must have been how it was in the summer of 1812: what was left of European society still taking the waters, still ordering their clothes from Paris or from good imitators, still meeting to converse and pay each other respects - forgetting, or trying to forget, the endless round of wars, the monstrous, never satisfied, unfulfillable ambition that had convulsed Europe for more than a decade, shaking the whole continent like a hare in the jaws of a terrier - by the will of a single man; a will and an ambition that even now were dragging the armies of defeated enemies - Prussians, Austrians, other Germans - into yet another fit of organized violence, further and further into Russia, the almost-empty edge of the European world. Another of its grand armies was bogged down in devastated Spain, where a great painter would soon memorialize the horrors of that war for all centuries to come, while other convulsions were gripping Turkey, India, America. The echoes of violence, disease, starvation and horror reached the centre of Europe from west and east; but the noble and the wealthy of Germany still met in spas such as Teplitz, in Bohemia, still walked down the main roads to be seen, or processed in open carriages to be gawped at.

That summer of all summers, that summer whose pathos and horror would not be repeated for a century, was the summer when the two greatest men of their age came to Teplitz. They were the best that Europe had to offer. Travel from Lisbon - indeed, from New York or Mexico or Chile - to Moscow, and you would not find another such man, let alone two; posterity has confirmed the verdict of contemporaries. And in a world already dominated by newspapers and gazettes, their meeting had a touch of the foreordained; it was almost due to the public that Goethe and Beethoven should meet.

What were the odds that two such men should be so close in time and space? No smaller, of course, than that JS Bach and Haendel should be born in the same year and within a few kilometres of each other - and yet never meet - or that the same country should at the same time contain Michelangelo, Raffaello and Tiziano. When genius comes at all, it tends to come in batches. And yet there is something about these two men, about their contemporary eminence, about their meeting, that strikes me as strangely, almost uncannily right; as though these two giant lives could be said to sum up in themselves a whole world of possibilities, of internal oppositions, of alternatives. Born within a few miles and a generation of each other, in the same region, in the same general social stratum and culture, and both intensely involved in the cultural mainstream of their time, they nevertheless could stand for all the distance and difference there can be between two men even when they are countrymen, men of genius, and respect each other.

Johann Wolfgang was tall and handsome; indeed, he was something more - his size and beauty conveyed an inner power that people had no difficulty in feeling. Painters drew him as a masterful figure in the landscape, drawing into himself all the significance and power of the desert around him; and even Eckermann’s description of his dead body, at more than eighty, have an intensity of admiration for its sheer physical presence that would, to a modern reader, suggest homosexual love. He was gracious, occasionally mischievous - especially in his youth - but could be freezing. Ludwig was short and stumpy, enormously strong - his students learned to dodge the occasional clout, thrown when their musical thinking did not prove able to match his eagle’s flight - with marked but disorderly features, messy black hair, and eyes of such intensity that witnesses were never able to agree on their colour, and we hear of brown, blue, green, even golden eyes. In spite of his strength, he was permanently sickly, of a complex of diseases on which scholars have debated ever since (only one thing is certain: it was not syphilis).

Beethoven’s permanent illness may well depend on his ruinous familiar heritage. His father was a chronic drunkard whose death was marked by his employer (the Elector-Archbishop of Cologne) with the unfeeling remark that the takings of the local taverns were bound to go down. He had married a woman who was already a widow at 19 and who was to die of tuberculosis in a few years. As soon as Beethoven was of age, he petitioned his father’s employer to pay half his wages to him, to keep it from wine merchants. (This starts a long subtext of fighting for money that ran all through Beethoven’s life.) Goethe’s father was a successful citizen of Frankfurt who greatly rued his own lack of education and used his ample means to be sure that his son and heir would suffer from no such problem. From his early years, Johann Wolfgang was encouraged along every possible path of learning, until there blossomed what was not only the most eminent poet but the most encyclopedic learned man of his time, one, what is more, who never grew tired of reading and learning more and making forays in new fields of knowledge. Ludwig’s father, on the other hand, did not help his son along any road but the family trade of music, and seems to have done so in a brutal and unsympathetic way - if we are to judge from Beethoven’s long-lived dislike for fugues (the classic schoolroom exercise) and, alas, for the work of JS Bach, on whose Well-Tempered Klavier he had been trained. Beethoven did grow up to be an omnivorous reader, but he was slovenly in his method and taste, as capable of growing enthusiastic about the best of his time - Goethe, Kant - as about worthless popular preachers and transient figures such as Kotzebue. They were both multilingual, but while Goethe was near-perfect in all the languages he mastered, Beethoven spoke bad French, bad German and bad Italian. (One of the funniest solecisms in Italian - un pochino maestoso - comes from the directions for the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony.)

To characterize them as members of the Rhenish middle classes is, in all but the most broad of senses, misleading. Between their births and backgrounds there was a good deal of distance. Goethe was born in a large house on the Rhine, the scion of one of those merchant houses whose past and passing were celebrated by Thomas Mann in Buddenbrooks. Even forgetting Mann’s occasional hyperbole (in one scene, he makes the head of the House of Buddenbrook deal with a Prussian Junker as an equal!), such people were well above the average; their houses were well-staffed with servants, and busy with clerks and apprentices going to and fro. They were masters. Goethe in person was so obviously distinguished (“Monsieur de Goethe, vous êtes un homme!” said to him none other than Napoleon) that to most people his early advancement to the nobility seemed no more than natural; indeed he had a trickle of blue blood from his mother’s side. Beethoven’s father, on the other hand, was a member of someone else’s household - a servant himself, although of a very high class indeed. He came not from a family of merchant princes, but from one of those lines of near-hereditary musicians, printers and artists that were found all over Germany - the Bachs being today the most famous. In spite of that mocking, meaningless Dutch “van” which suggested noble birth to a German ear, there was nothing in his behaviour of the easy confidence and well-coded manners of the aristocracy. Some of those who liked him least perceived a certain element of chip on the shoulder. He was disorderly in his private life, and by the time he met the older man he had already been branded by something worse than fire - by the inevitable and terrible progression of his deafness.

Indeed, not only was Beethoven born in a hereditary trade, he was the only one of three brothers who stayed in it. He did, like them, move out of the sphere of courts and liveries, to earning his own living from the free market. Some of the silliest pieces of pseudo-sociology on record, yet repeated to the point of orthodoxy, were caused by the coincidence that both he and his predecessor Mozart had decided (like hundreds before and after them) to earn an independent living in the huge music market of Vienna. There was no “rise of the middle classes” at any time in his life and for more than a generation after his death; what changed was not an increase in the professional opportunities offered by an urban free market, but the fall in the number of those offered by courts and palaces. These were ground down by a quarter-century of warfare and violent political change, which only the strongest or the favoured weathered. Indeed, Mozart himself did not so much choose Vienna for himself, as much as he was forced out of his native Salzburg by his detestable master Archbishop Colloredo - a brutal and unpopular enforcer of the anti-clerical reforms of Emperor Joseph II; this anticipates the destiny of many court musicians who lost posts and careers in the Napoleonic age.

But there was nothing new about Mozart and Beethoven’s adventures in the big city. For centuries, ambitious and talented young men had tried their luck at court - not only as politicians, but as poets, musicians, architects, financial and agrarian experts, diplomats, soldiers, etc. For just as long, equally ambitious people had been able to make private fortunes without the benefit or concern of any prince, most of the time resorting to large cities such as Vienna or Paris. Goethe’s father was one such. The economic catastrophe of the Napoleonic wars, and the reduction of the number of German courts from more than three hundred to thirty-nine, certainly decreased the amounts of court career opportunities; but it scarcely put an end to it. The case of Goethe shows that it was perfectly possible to continue to live entirely in the official sector, without ever needing to trust to the whims of the market.

It is however remarkable that neither Goethe nor Beethoven remained in the modestly prosperous Rhineland environment of their births. Each of them, early in his adult life, left their native land for an environment that suited them better - the gracious little court among the hills of Thuringia, the crowded and messy, music-mad imperial metropolis in the lee of the Alps - and stayed there, apart from Goethe’s curious two-year Italian revolt, till their deaths. This is a matter of personal qualities and tastes; Goethe fitted better in a courtly and somewhat rural environment, Beethoven in a metropolis. The mixture of urban and rural environment of their Rhenish home could have opened them to either; they both made a choice.

Consciously or unconsciously, however, their private choices placed the two artists at the opposite ends of a dichotomy that was until recently specific and fundamental to European civilization. From the beginning of the Middle Ages, the cities were the seats of representative government and popular freedom, but also of crowded living, mob violence, and intense politics. City air, someone said, makes you free. Early in Italian history, the communes forced the landowning nobility either to move out or to reside in permanently and submit itself to the power of the civic institutions. As opposed to this, the countryside was the area of hereditary noble rule, however circumscribed and defined; paternalistic, authoritarian, hierarchical. There was a second, subsidiary dichotomy, that between city and court: just as the nobles in general learned to stay away from cities, so too did the nobleman of noblemen, the king, tend to stay away from the largest cities of his kingdom. In England, the kings built their political capital at Westminster, bracketing the City of London (in which they were not and still are not allowed to enter except by permission of the city authorities) between it and the feared Tower of London. In France, the King escaped Paris for the hunting park of Versailles - a well chosen seat, from which (as the republican government discovered in 1871) it was easy to target and assault a revolted city. This dichotomy is not as radical as that between city and country, for there is no doubt that a court tends to become a city. Westminster is now part of London, and Versailles is a municipality on the verge of Paris. Nonetheless, Goethe’s court life in the sloping hills of Weimar, as conmpared with Beethoven’s commercial adventures among the teeming crowds of Vienna, almost define it visually. Even Beethoven’s famous and artistically fertile love for “nature” is a decidedly urban passion.

Even at the height of the Napoleonic period, Germany still had plenty of little courts with musical establishments. There was no reason why Beethoven, swiftly acknowledged as a major figure, could not have become someone’s court musician. The truth is that he simply found himself more at ease in the free market; not just in the good but in the bad of it. He did not have the endurance, let alone the manners, to put up with a patron. He was far more at home fighting with publishers, impresarios, performers. And so he never had an official rank, never was made Kapellmeister of anything, and did not try very hard. Living in the largest music market in existence - the music-mad metropolis on the Danube - he had no need to. And once he had established himself, others took care that he should not leave. When he was in fact offered the post of court Kapellmeister (by Napoleon’s spoilt brat little brother, Jerome, briefly King of Westphalia), three wealthy Viennese noblemen offered him a permanent pension to prevent the catastrophe. He was happy to take it. But even in that story one sees his tradesman’s attitude. First, the pension was offered to him as an alternative to his taking a post outside Vienna, that is, as a commercial negotiation. Second, it involved no such dependent relationship - residence in a patron’s palace, conducting the patron’s orchestra, etc. - as Haydn’s relationship to Prince Esterhazy. And in the end, too, it led to nothing but lawsuits, Beethoven claiming it as his contractual right even after two of the three had gone bankrupt and could not pay their shares. We are in a different world from the hierarchical, almost feudal world of Haydn and Goethe.

In fact, Beethoven always fought for money like a wildcat. Even the premiere of the Ninth and three movements from the Solemn Mass, a concert that has gone down in legend, ended in what we would consider a rather squalid squabble over receipts. He was apt to be loose, if not exactly mendacious, in his dealings with publishers and impresarios, and if challenged he would have said that they would be just as bad to him if he let them - which was probably quite true. The history of music is littered with tales of great musicians robbed, swindled or downright ruined by unscrupulous business partners, but no doubt anyone who tried it on with Beethoven would find him a snarling watchdog over his interests.

Behind this lay the anxiety of the slovenly householder depending on the money he earned or was offered in order to live at all, and to pay for any servant who would put up with him. Goethe, by contrast, never seems to have found money a problem, even during his rare quarrels with his father, and by the time he was thirty he was set for life as a minister in Weimar. He could afford the enormous and financially fruitless expenditure of a two-year grand tour of Italy - something that even the richest English lords would think of twice - merely because he wanted to. However - again - while there is no reason to suggest that he might be even close to stingy, I read nothing about him that matches the frequent records of Beethoven’s generosity. Beethoven may have clawed every bit of money he could from publishers and impresarios, but he did not cling to it. Whenever anything touched his oddly shaped but overgrown sense of morality, he never stinted, not only in money, but in time and work. He gave generously, and with the kindest words, to an Ursuline monastery in Linz, and when the Viennese village of Baden burned down, he immediately organized a charity concert along with another musician who happened to be around. According to a newspaper report quoted by Thayer, the result was prompt and abundant help; but then Beethoven’s career is dotted with charity concerts, so he knew how to set one up. And if he could not be present, he would send recent compositions along to be played. It was, after all, his work and his money, made freely on the open market, and he was responsible to nobody except his own conscience how he spent it. That, too, might have been different at someone’s court.

And there is yet something else in the family background of the two which is again strangely contradictory and not insignificant for their life and character. The tall, marvellously healthy and active, long-lived Goethe was the only male survivor from a genuine slaughter of the innocents: brothers and sisters were born around him only to die after weeks or months, till only one sister was left - an unusual story even in those days of bad sanitation and medical ignorance. Beethoven, on the other hand, the unhealthy son of the drunkard and of the tubercular young widow, had two brothers born in the small interval of time before his mother died, and these both grew to be fairly healthy and fairly successful in their fields, leaving a descent behind, and, above all, surrounding Beethoven with all the rows, uproars and peace-making of a real family.

In the light of this, we cannot but think of their contrasting characters. . One thinks of Faust’s two children: the baby slain by Margaret even before it had a name, and that strange half-incarnate dream, Homunculus, who could have been anything, had the power to be anything - had he only been able to be born. Looking at Goethe, one is struck by something like a sense of hauteur and separation, behind which one can perceive a fundamentally defensive attitude to the world at large. One reads with some disconcert that even a friendship that was to become central to his life - that with Schiller - had to be waited for, carefully negotiatied, even formally offered. At the heart of Goethe’s famous conservatism, we will find, lies a deep pessimism, that has a real touch of bitterness, even of stridency. Even as a red-hot young poet, he could be found telling the father of the future painter Dora Stock that he had better train his daughters “in nothing but the art of housekeeping, let them be good cooks, that will be best for their future husbands” - a piece of sour and biting negativism well out of keeping with the age when the University of Bologna had already had not only a female graduate but a female professor.

(Fortunately, Herr Stock, an illustrator who was already busy passing his trade to his daughters, had no intention of listening to his clever young friend. And one wonders whether Goethe ever thought back on that absurd piece of personal provocation as another brilliant woman friend, Angelika Kaufmann, was busy making the beauty of his features immortal in the one art, painting, that he had longed to master and never did.)

Nothing similar turns up in Beethoven’s life. Although a poor teacher, he was always encouraging his students, and his treatment not only of women but of women’s intellect and ambitions was always as respectful and positive as his rather irritable personality could make it. Of course, he came from a trade where female presence was widespread and natural (setting aside the matter of castrati), but other musicians have been less open. (The worst case was Mendelssohn, who, fully aware that his sister Fanny’s genius was greater than his own, nonetheless did his best to discourage her from becoming a professional musician. Mendelssohn’s family, however, was more like Goethe’s than Beethoven’s, and music was to them all something of an aristocratic pleasure rather than a trade.) In the end, one thinks of Beethoven’s spontaneousness, his ability to find new friends at any stage in his life - an ability that probably saved him from the more self-destructive features of his character - his disposition for clamorous rows and equally clamorous reconciliations, and the intense, permanent, personal affection that he was capable of inspiring in all sorts of people in spite of all his enormous flaws; and one thinks of growing up in a huddled, noisy, crowded, often unhappy, but living family - without the ghosts and absences that must have been such a real presence, even among the sheltering abundance of prosperity and culture, in the great house in Frankfurt.

We can imagine them side by side, Beethoven, short and squat, stomping along with his blazing eyes looking straight ahead and yet at nothing in particular, following the thoughts in his mind, while Goethe walked with a long elegant stride, his eyes darting here and there, taking in capriciously any object that might interest him, and occasionally offering a courteous salutation - carefully graded by rank - to one of his very many acquaintances as they went by.

It is on one such occasion, when the Imperial Household had gone by with a suitably humble salutation from Goethe, that Beethoven is said to have told him: “You should not humble yourself so before those people, Herr von Goethe; we are more important than they are.”

This episode, if it ever happened, should not be given excessive importance. It was probably more indicative of Beethoven’s awe and respect for Goethe’s own genius, than the display of bad manners that Goethe probably took it for. Beethoven was certainly a liberal and ultimately a republican; but he did not scruple to address his most high-born student, Archduke Rudolph, as “Imperial Highness”, nor to offer him a coronation Mass for his enthronement as Archbishop of Olomuc. The Mass in question turned out to be the Solemn Mass and could only be finished two years after the enthronement; but Beethoven also wrote two absolutely magnificent suites of stage music for the Emperor of Austria as king of Hungary, The Ruins of Athens and King Stephen. Both are absurdly neglected masterpieces, absolute masterpieces; neglected, I would imagine, because they prove beyond reasonable doubt that this archetype of the rebellious republican artist-hero could use his music to flatter like the best of courtiers. We like to think of Beethoven one way, and we aren’t too ready to be faced with thunderingly obvious evidence to the contrary. The concept of The Ruins of Athens, in particular, is ridiculous beyond salvation: to celebrate the building of a new theatre, endowed by the King-Emperor, in the Hungarian capital, it pretends that the glory of the arts of ancient Greece has now been resurrected in Buda and nowhere else! And with all that, anyone who denies that this great ten-part suite, especially its magnificent march to the altars and a bass part that easily matches Mozart’s Sarastro, is a triumphant product of Beethoven’s genius, must be deafer than the great musician himself. Beethoven was forthright in his opinions and, especially in the later stages of his deafness, perilously loud; but as any good tradesman would, he adapted himself to the needs of his clients.

Conversely, Goethe’s conservatism is not quite what it seems. It is not so much that he has a positive affection for monarchy or absolute rule; if he has an ideal, it is that set out by Faust as he is about to die, that of an aristocratic republic of men who are free because they earn their freedom day by day. It is significant that both he and his friend Schiller had written tragedies on the legendary version of the rise of the Dutch republic (so legendary, indeed, that even that dreadful man J.Lothrop Motley, whose Rise of the Dutch Republic poisoned international understanding of history for a century, had to point out that neither Schiller’s Don Carlos nor Goethe’s Egmont bore any relationship with history), and it is perhaps no coincidence that their lifetimes saw the collapse of that same Republic, and of the Republic of Venice as well. To the eyes of someone who priced a sort of republican oligarchy based on courage rather than birth, the Napoleonic age must have been peculiarly discouraging; the glorious old republics died, and the brief terror of the new French state seemed to have died stillborn, replaced by another monarchy. And even had it not died, what had been seen of republicanism in France resembled in nothing the dignified and gilded power of the Dutch and Venetians of old. There was one state whose condition seemed to approach that ideal - but what could German poets know or care of the little American republic, far away on the edge of the world?

We can find in Goethe’s own work the evidence that, even if he believed in such a government, he could not believe that it would work in the real world. The ideal is poisoned and contradicted by his all too clear understanding of the faults of both people and rulers. The whole of Faust, First and Second Part, has among other things much to say about this: its picture of political power focuses on its inevitable corruption, at both ends, from the side of the people and from the side of the rulers. When, at the end of the First Part, the lovely Margaret is taken to be executed for murdering the baby that Faust begot on her by Mephisto’s help, this has directly to do with Goethe’s own experience of political power. Goethe, as member of the Secret Council of Weimar, had taken part in passing at least one sentence of death of this kind. And looked at it properly, the tragedy of Margaret embodies a bitter and angry irony that extends to the whole world, indeed to the very idea of causation. Yes, Margaret had murdered the baby - killed it with her own hands - and deserved to die according to the law; but then, Margaret had been the victim of her lover, and Faust himself the victim of the Devil’s offer of a swift way to fulfil the love he so desperately felt. This is almost Brechtian in its indictment of the whole world in one crime, one destruction of an innocent life. And there is a refinement of horror that only comes out on re-reading: Margaret, at the beginning, had got Faust’s number good and hard. She knew that he was “no Christian”, and did not trust his “companion” the Devil, and the only response he had been able to give her had been a burst of pantheitstic babble that had not deceived her for a minute. And still, and in spite of that, the two lovers, driven by the most tremendous of all feelings - for which Goethe finds words worthy of Shakespeare - had allowed the Devil to steer them to each other’s arms - and then to manoeuvre them far enough that Margaret had to have the baby alone and murder it in a fit of fear and shame.

If the Devil perverts love and private happiness into murder and parricide, he is also present at the very core of public life, that is, of politics. This is synthetized in the dreadful closing scenes of Faust’s life, when he thinks that he is setting out to build a republic like the Netherlands (there is a deliberate allusion to draining swamp and reclaiming sea tracts), when in fact the only thing he has managed to achieve is to destroy the home of a couple of good old folks and kill them and an innocent, nameless guest. This is the bitter and honourable statement of what political power does, made by a man who had been - though in a small way - a political leader most of his adult life, the leading minister in the private cabinet of a small German sovereign, and who had passed sentences of life and death over its subjects. And it is not by chance that it is so, either; Goethe’s Devil may not exactly be “the ruler of this world”, but without his help, the victorious authorities of the world, beginning with the Emperor, would not be in charge. It is he who gives the Emperor victory over his enemies, just as he gives Faust the women he wants.

As the end of the Second Part shows political power ridden by demons and incapable of achieving its conscious and benevolent goals - a free people ruled by law and kept by endeavour, a Republic “established upon labour” as our Constitution has it - so the end of the First Part shows private life being hounded by demons and incapable of achieving its conscious and benevolent goals - marriage, children, a long life in common. In Goethe’s world, you can neither escape from the miseries of private life into some purposeful public service, nor from the horrors of politics into an idyllic, or at least restful, private life. The Devil twists and distorts human endeavour from the beginning, when Faust sets out to translate the Gospel into German and finds - while the Devil, disguised as a dog, yaps and growls at him - that he is in fact rewriting it. At the end of it all, the only products are negative: innocent victims - Margaret’s poor little baby, murdered by the woman who had given him life; Margaret’s brother, dead in a hopeless attempt to get conventional justice from the Devil with the sword; Margaret herself (whom we all ache to call innocent, though she is in fact guilty as Hell); the good old couple and their unlucky guest, slaughtered by the very political power to whom they should have looked for protection.

My conclusion about Goethe and about Beethoven is that, in actual fact, both men are realists in their way. Each of them is disposed to live with the world as it is, even where they may not approve of it, and even where they may wish for a different order - a republican order ruled by merit rather than birth. But there are differences. Beethoven, even at his bitterest (and Beethoven’s bitterness actually impressed Goethe: “He is quite right,” the poet said, “to consider the world detestable, but does himself no favours by showing it so openly”) never leaves the impression that he regards the world as demon-ridden to the extent that Goethe does, nor that he is pessimistic as to the final result of any action as Goethe is. To the contrary, however complex his musical reasoning, however many terrors are to be surpassed, the result is almost always an assertion of the value of an active life, of human life rising to the level of heroism by accepting and meeting the challenges that come.

Goethe’s conception of evil simply dwarfs Beethoven’s. It is, of course, dangerous to compare Fidelio, just one of Beethoven’s many masterpieces, with Faust - a work that dominated all Goethe’s life, from his Rhenish youth virtually to his deathbed. But there can be no doubt that in Fidelio Beethoven had intended to create a genuinely evil character, and had done his best to do so. It would be exaggerated to the point of paradox to call Don Pizzarro an artistic failure (in the same way as it would be to call Dante’s Inferno an artistic failure); but one cannot doubt that, as a representation of evil, he is a failure. He is nothing more than a vindictive man who will not let go of a grudge. Certainly one can see that Beethoven could feel in himself the possibility of this unfettered rage, this sadistic pleasure in the destruction of imagined enemies; and the character is to that extent a success: he incarnates a kind of evil that its creator understood all too well. But as compared with Mephisto - Mephisto with his urbane irony, his ruthless rationality and pragmatism, his suggestion of infinite and dreadful power, his capacity to manipulate reality till emperors and lovers are nothing more than pawns in his hand, his pseudo-philosophical rants that can never quite be taken to mean what they say - Pizzarro barely exists. Even in his own drama, he is overshadowed by the good guys; Fidelio is an opera where the angels, rather than the Devil, have all the best tunes. You cannot envisage Pizzarro as a real devil. Devil-ridden, yes; to the point of making all his subordinates both partners and subjects in one vast work of tyranny. But not corrupting in any essential way; soldiers and subordinates are not corrupted. As soon as they have an opportunity to escape his command, they take it with perfect speed, falling at the feet of Don Fernando to the point where he is embarrassed and has to remind them that he is “a servant, like them”.

The Biblical reference is mine, not Beethoven’s; but it fits. It is, in fact, hardly to be believed that a Spanish minister of the crown in the fabulous ages of Spanish power in which the playwright and Beethoven’s librettists have set the story would refuse such homage; feudal honour, in Spain, was a living, and frequently murderous, reality. But Beethoven did not really want to create a realistic historical picture, of the kind that his contemporary Scott was pioneering and that the likes of Rossini were already taking up. In this scene more than in any other, it is clear that what he is out to show is a fable of moral choice, of good and evil - like the curiously timeless place and time of Goethe’s Faust. Don Fernando’s humility in calling himself “a brother come to seek brothers” is as significant as Faust’s finally establishing himself as a feudal lord with a political project (which Mephisto takes good care to screw up). A minister of “the best king” takes the attitude of one of the obedient angels of the Bible, equal to mere mortals; a mortal who takes it on himself to “play God” with the future of the country he rules has his plans (and himself) destroyed by the rebellious angels. The religious overtones, in both stories, cannot be missed.

That Goethe was no Christian is well enough known to be a commonplace, and he was the first to advertise the fact. In this, he was a child of the culture of his time. There is a story about his being shocked out of any childish faith by reports of the Lisbon earthquake, but that is nonsense. Any faith that can be shaken by description - not even experience, description - of a natural catastrophe, can hardly amount to much. The truth is that Goethe was born at the height of the long wave of anti-religious feeling that had become dominant in Europe, and especially in its courts, from the first decade of the eighteenth century. Born in half a dozen different points, but especially in London and Versailles, fertilized by the disgust of Paris courtiers at the crude and inhuman bigotry of Louis XIV’s declining years and by the rebellion of Whig politicians against any kind of religious establishment, quietly fostered by the unacknowledged but very real homosexual revolt of William III and his favourites, this was a mood before it ever was a thought. Indeed. unlike any clearly stated heresy, it remained a mood: a mood to mock and deride any religious commitment. It found its chief interpreter in Voltaire, a man old enough to remember the grim last days of the Sun King, where he had learned that contempt for priests and beliefs that powered his sarcasm his whole life long. Voltaire wasn’t a philosopher - he did not write nearly enough credible philosophy to place him on the level of Hume or Helvetius, let alone Kant - but he was a magnificent essayist, with the qualities that would today make a star journalist, and that insured his pre-eminence in print from Lisbon to St.Petersburg. But as a thinker, he was “Mr.No”, a professional destroyer, or, as Macaulay called him, the Vitruvius of ruin - a man capable of finding dozens of ways to demolish effectively, but never to build. And in this, he embodied something essential about his age.

A boy brought up, as Goethe was, to appreciate and follow every new development of contemporary culture, would be baptized with vinegar - baptized into unbelief. Any conventional move made by his preceptors towards a conventional Christianity would more than be outweighed by the drive and attraction of living contemporary culture. To that may be added his Lutheran heritage. I do not think I am unfair, drawing as I do from my own experience, when I say that the last thing that descendants from a Protestant background unlearn - long after they have lost any theological specifics - is to despise the Catholic Church as backward, ignorant, tyrannical and superstitious. The reasons to believe any of those things are in Lutheran or Calvinist theology; but the habit of mind survive the theology and the reason, and agnostic left-wing journalists in Berlin or Prague or London today still denounce the Papacy in terms that their doctrinaire Lutheran, Moravian or Presbyterian ancestors would have recognized.

That being the case, what is astonishing is not how little of the Catholic heritage there is in Goethe, but how much. And specifically Catholic. From its beginning with the archangels praising the Lord’s creation (a theme that another great contemporary, Haydn, had handled with devotion and genius) to an ending set among figures of hermits taken from Renaissance Catholic paintings (and we are reminded of Goethe the would-be painter and his long stay in Italy), the poem is woven through with Catholic imagery and images. And yet it would be grossly wrong to call it a Catholic poem. Again, Beethoven is the best term of comparison. Having already composed a couple of perfectly orthodox and perfectly beautiful religious works - his Mass op.86 and his handsome oratorio Christus am Oelberge - Beethoven nonetheless felt the need, when he came again to the text of the Mass, to be true to its inmost meaning and with the most extreme precision. That is the main reason why the Mass - as well as its sister composition, the Choral Sympony - took three years of hard work to complete. Beethoven had never before felt so strongly the need to bring out every last layer of meaning in his texts: a poem by he whom he called “the immortal Schiller”, and the sacred text of Catholic Christian ritual. Nothing, in modern culture, is more ridiculous than the continuous attempts to “prove”, by hook or by crook, that this gigantic work of faith is somehow not orthodox or Catholic. The story of its composition - with Beethoven pestering every priest he knew about the precise meaning of every Latin word in the text - would be enough to laugh this notion to scorn, even if the work were lost. But as it happens it is anything but lost. It is played every year in every corner of the world, and to insist, in the presence of the mere aural experience, on its supposed heterodoxy, proves nothing except that the wish to prove one’s point is greater than the ability to hear.

Certainly, it is like no Mass ever composed before, including Beethoven’s own op.86; that is because the great composer is recasting the whole form, moving from a series of operatic “numbers” to five solid symphonic movements. The work of weaving every statement of the five prayers of the Ordinarium into a consistent symphonic argument explains quite sufficiently the difficulty and the novelty of this colossal masterpiece. But there is no statement in it that does not - to quote Chesterton - bear the words, Imprimatur and Nihil Obstat written all over in large letters. For this work alone, Beethoven deserves to rank as a Doctor of the Church, and I am not, repeat not, exaggerating.

My favourite example is the awesome and musically unmatched Sanctus - Benedictus fourth movement. This opens with a slow, circling, brooding world of sound, scarily expressive of unblessed, dull, enduring matter - of existence without a supernatural meaning, enduring by its own power, but unable to rise, unable to be anything beyond itself. This may well be felt as the dull, bestial endurance that must have tided the musician over the worst moments in his own tempestuous and pain-wracked life. Suddenly an explosion of power, entirely alien to it in rhythm and sound, explodes over it from above; but when it is dispelled, the same slow grind of bass chords is heard going on. Supernatural power has manifested itself over the reality of nature, but has not affected it in its depths.

However, this is only the start - one might say, the presentation of the elements in the drama. The real drama begins when the chords of unblessed existence reach, by their own internal drive, a kind of stopping point: and suddenly, miraculously, wholly unexpected in the light of anything that has gone on before, a single violin answers back to them from the top of its range. Now the supernatural is no longer merely manifest as power; it comes to enter the natural, to raise it to itself, to change it from darkness to light. The music takes the form of a slow march, rising, growing, changing. There is no return to the material as we had experienced it at the beginning: the whole mass of sound is taken up into the world of light, of that astounding single violin note that opened the heavens.

This is transubstantiation, pure and simple; the doctrine of the Eucharist, rendered into sound. By the kind of synthesis possible to music, it also evokes two central moments of the story of Christ: His royal entrance in Jerusalem, a city built on a hill, riding upwards on the back of a donkey; and His journey to Golgotha - again uphill, again at a slow walk. The music of the Benedictus is a slow march, and by the alchemy of Beethoven’s genius it manages to express both royal triumph and the slow, agonized march to the place of execution. But this itself is part of the theology of the Eucharist: as the priest says at every Mass, when He broke the bread and gave it to His disciples, He said that it was - and Luther was quite right to say that this meant that it was one and the same with - His body which would be broken for them. Twenty-four hours before He was actually murdered, He was taking His apostles to share in His death and resurrection; time was folded in, to give them access to that one moment before it happened. By the same token, the same miracle is offered to us every Mass. And Beethoven has rendered it by his art, the moment that is at once the march to death and the Deification of everything that is matter and experience.

Nothing in Goethe has anything like this brilliance of faith rising into understanding. He is more haunted by Catholicism than comprehending of it, let alone convinced by it; but haunted he is. All the sarcasm and rebellion of half a century, which was at its height as he was being brought up, did not prevent his imagination from seizing on the Devil, temptation, the saints, redemption, God the Father, creation, the good and evil angels, the Virgin Mary, as matters of the utmost importance. Goethe is the greatest European poet since Shakespeare, and Faust is the greatest single poem since the Divine Comedy. And from my point of view it is part of his genius that he should feel the importance and attraction of Catholicism to such an extent, when his background should have discouraged him.

He was not alone, however; in fact, in that as in so many other things, he is at the centre of the cultural tendencies of his time and place. The greatest painter of Goethe’s own time, except perhaps for Goya, was Kaspar David Friedrich, and Friedrich (who was born in one of the most Lutheran territories in Europe, Swedish Pomerania) was nearly as haunted by Catholicism as Goethe was. The typical Friedrich painting often features a colossal Gothic ruin, towering over a misty and mysterious landscape. These ruined buildings have a moral authority that dominates everything around them; they often reach above the trees and every other object in the composition, and nearly always are at its centre (Friedrich, for all his love of mysterious and vanishing visions, was one of the greatest composition designers who ever lived). The message, recognizably, is that, though gone from the world of daily life - ruined - nonetheless these things have a moral and imaginative power that dwarfs everything else.

I would actually say that the significance of these paintings is not religious. Friedrich never actually tackles a religious subject as such; even when he was commissioned an altarpiece, he presented the Crucifix from behind and downward, in a way that gave scandal. The key to the riddle is in another painting, titled simply “The Cross”. Here the Crucifix is indeed at the centre of the composition and staring straight at the spectator, probably the only one in all his production; but it is framed and indeed dwarfed by a gigantic Gothic building in red stone, which, implausibly, towers straight out of a forest of firs. This is not a realistic picture; it is another of Friedrich’s phantom Gothic buildings, but one whose presence is so fiery and blazing as to impose itself over daily reality. The presence of the Crucifix at the centre of it is part of its power; but it becomes clear that what Friedrich aches for, what he regards as both immensely powerful and tragically impossible to achieve, what he depicts elsewhere as lost, is not the faith so much as the Church. It is the church buildings that he shows as ruined and yet towering, distant from men and yet endowed with a strange moral authority. And the fact that these ruins or phantoms are always found in natural landscapes tells us another thing: that in contrast with a great deal of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing, Friedrich regards the Church not as an alien imposition on the Germanic landscape, but as part of that landscape.

This tells us one thing: why the romantic movement blossomed so vigorously in Germany, England, France (a country that had been largely de-Catholicized by about 1750) and failed to pick up speed in Spain and Italy. (Just compare Friedrich with his great contemporary Goya, who, even at his most nightmarish, is never romantic at all.) It is not just a matter of the cultural disadvantage of the two southern countries, true though that was in the nineteenth century. It is a matter of what they had and northern Europe had not. Quite simply, there were no ruined cloisters to get romantic about there. The greatest Italian writer of the time, Alessandro Manzoni, picked up the tradition of the historical novel invented by Sir Walter Scott, and immediately turned it into something that Scott would never have recognized. The very first personage we meet is a cowardly, cringing, corrupt and poorly educated Catholic priest, Don Abbondio, whose cowardice is the starting point of the whole story. From then on, the image of the Church we get is one of relentless realism, with corrupt vow-breaking nuns, self-seeking priests and lesser members, and on the other hand saintly and heroic prelates and a great penitent of whom it is suggested that his rank was so important that he could not be named. Manzoni was a devout Catholic, who wrote great sacred poetry; but he lived in a living Church, and had no delusions as to its membership.

From this point of view, Goethe was as romantic as anyone. I can hardly recall a single ecclesiastic character in his main works, and the genuine faith of Margaret is there only to bring out the horror of her tragedy - as well as, admittedly, to leave that final hanging question over her fate: is she saved, or is she damned? Even that, though, is the concern of the angels alone; in the depths of her misery and guilt, it never occurs to her to do what any Catholic author would have had her do - to seek out a trusted priest and beg for advice and something like protection. (Think to what an extent two totally opposite Catholics such as Bernanos and Guareschi both have their stories spring from the interaction of village priests and villagers, and compare either of them with, say, Trollope’s Anglican vicars.) That makes her desperate and heart-rending prayer to the Virgin an ineffectual stage in the tragedy, but it also makes it rather unrealistic in terms of a Catholic world (and Margaret and her prayers are certainly Catholic); and we are reminded that the court where Goethe served, and where he had the horrid and haunting experience of passing sentence over a child-murderess, was a Protestant court.

Thomas Mann claimed more or less explicitly the succession to Goethe, and from this point of view he certainly had a right. His religious/philosophical position is not only clearly comparable with Goethe’s, it shows further motion on the same lines. On the one hand he is even more fascinated with the Catholic Church; the narrator and deuteragonist of his version of the Faust legend is a devout Catholic whose friend and confident is a Monsignore from Munich - and here we see a closer and more realistic observation of a Church that, in despite of Scott and Goethe and C.D.Friedrich, is very much a terrestrial phenomenon. Like Goethe, Mann declared himself an agnostic, and yet in his old age he went very far towards acknowledging the Catholic Church - even being received by the Pope and kissing his ring (a gesture he defended in the face of irate or disbelieving colleagues). But he could not become a Christian, any more than Goethe could; and if you read their masterpieces, you will understand why. On the surface of it, and maybe not only on the surface, the God of Thomas Mann is a defeated God: the most poignant expression in the whole of Doktor Faustus are the words ascribed to Him - “I did not want it so”. He has no answer - no final, conclusive response - to the dominance of spiritual evil and physical destruction in this world. This clearly follows on from Goethe’s horrendously, overwhelmingly powerful diabolical presence in the world, a presence that ruins and corrupts everything in sight and leaves behind a string of corpses.

But if Goethe’s world offers, unlike Mann’s, a certain path to salvation, in the next world if not in this, shown on stage and in detail, on the other hand one feature of it is even more radically pessimistic. The idea of salvation is in doubt with Mann to the very end, but in so far as it is possible at all, he is speaking of the Christian, indeed of the Catholic, idea. If there is any religious polemic in the novel, it is against Lutheranism, some of whose features - the distinction between attritio and contritio, and the historicistic attitude to theology according to which certain ideas can be “outdated” - are used by the Devil to seduce Leverkuehn. On the other hand, the process of salvation as described in the final scene of Faust practically begins with a denial of central Christian doctrine: the first step of Faust’s soul on its way to the Inconceivable is to rid it of the terrestrial remain. Goodbye, resurrection of the flesh.

The whole final scene is eminently personal, woven through with Goethe’s own obsessions: some bewildering, such as his use of imagery from Catholic paintings - elderly saints in rocky deserted landscapes, the Blessed Virgin surrounded by angels and redeemed souls - others affecting, such as the swarm of souls of children who died shortly after birth, who will now draw strength from Faust’s own great spiritual strength and follow him on his upward journey. The former, of course, is to do with Goethe’s passion for the visual arts and his failure to become a painter as he had wished; the latter, all too clearly, with that unspoken tragedy of his youth - the way he grew up, healthy, wealthy, and strong, as little brothers and sisters died one after the other; a tragedy that can be felt, as I said, in so many places in his masterpiece.

Goethe’s rejection of the material element, which places his doctrine, however we define it, outside Christianity, is clearly a result of his pessimism. If the world is as Goethe describes it - woven through with the diabolical from top to bottom, beyond control or manipulation except by the Devil - then salvation begins with placing it well behind one’s soul; it consists in leaving behind all that is corrupt - not just corruptible, but corrupt - for a world of inexpressible perfection. But it is also immensely typical of the age he lived in. As I said, Goethe grew up at the height of the “Enlightenment”, and there can be no doubt that he was profoundly affected by all those attitudes and ideas that are usually summed up in the popular picture - if not necessarily in the historical figure - of Voltaire. But if there was an “enlightenment” intellectual project, a central philosophical and indeed religious position, it was that which had been pursued with remarkable vigour by Hume and Kant: the destruction of metaphysics. Kant had said in so many words that he would be well pleased if his work led to the end of “the accursed fertility” of writers on metaphysics. Are we, then, surprised to find that the greatest heir of German and French “enlightenment” should end not just his great poem but, practically, his life, with as limpid and unashamed a statement of transcendental religion and idealist philosophy as anyone ever made? Not if we understand anything about the human race, we aren’t.

Indeed, the generations that followed the high wave of “enlightenment” was responsible for probably the most powerful wave of idealism in philosophy since at least the Renaissance, if not indeed Plotinus. Even Beethoven was ascribed a decidedly idealistic philosoph of art, by a brilliant if not always truthful common friend of his and Goethe’s, Bettina Brentano; and while he was bewildered when shown her account of what he had said (“Did I say that? Well, if I did, I must have had a raptus!”), he did not reject it. Idealism and transcendence were in the air. Napoleon, a Voltairian rationalist all his life, experienced a conversion to Catholicism in St.Helena. It’s not even a matter of that romanticism we discussed in connection with Caspar David Friedrich; Italy had no Romantic movement worth the name, but the greatest Italian philosopher of the age was the idealist, Father Rosmini. From Transcendentalist America to Hegelian Prussia, virtually every European nation developped some sort of idealist and metaphysical form of thought. When contemporaries finally had the chance to read the Second Part right through to the Chorus Mysticus, they were greatly impressed, but certainly not bewildered.

Hegelism is of particular interest when discussing Goethe, not only because the two men knew each other vaguely (Goethe had been involved as Weimar Minister when Hegel was fighting for a place at the University of Jena), but because they were contemporaries, dealing with the same events, the same culture, the same ideas. And that goes to show that, just because certain ideas and certain questions are common to a given age and place, it does not mean that the answers have to be. Whatever else may be said for and against Hegel’s systems, at their heart lies an unforgivable sin against logic and reason: the belief that denial as such can be integrated into a positive and constructive progression - thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Now there is a colossal difference between opposition and contradiction - between being the two opposite and necessary terms in a system, man and woman, high and low, left and right, north and south - and being contradictory terms, one of which cannot exist it the other does - yes or no. And Hegel explicitly says that contradictory, not opposite terms, can and will, by a law of spiritual development, be reconciled in a synthesis. Having said that, what can be the problem with saying that good can come out of evil, or (the lie with which the Devil wins over Adrian Leverkuhn) health out of destruction? The results of this poison we see everywhere around us.

Faust solemnly and unanswerably contradicts Hegel’s bizarre and brutal optimism. It is important to say this, because some sort of watered-down or disguised Hegelism is very widely found in modern attitudes. The idea that even very negative developments may have ultimately positive results is all but universal in the way history is taught and analyzed; and so is that the end justifies the means. That is not the message of Goethe’s great poem. The means pollute and destroy the end. The Devil procures Faust’s great romances with Margaret and with Helen; but Margaret kills her own child, Helen’s child with Faust is splendid but unnatural and sterile. (Goethe wanted us to identify him with his great colleague Byron.) The Devil brings about the victory of the Emperor against the rebels, makes Faust a feudal lord, and works to enlarge and prosper his realm; but in doing so, he murders a harmless old couple and their guest, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Finally, when Faust, old and blind, prophesies the coming of a glorious time of free, industrious, self-respecting, law-abiding citizens, the Devil is preparing to kill him and steal his soul; and it is only by a gratuitous act of divine grace (or is it?) that he is prevented.

Now Goethe insisted that philosophy was the one discipline he would not touch; he knew Hegel only vaguely, and at any rate he could never have imagined that the obscure Swabian logician would become the most influential philosopher since Descartes. And yet, in spite of that, Goethe’s poem is the perfect antidote to Hegel’s toxines. No wonder that another great poet spoke of Goethe in these terms:

When Goethe's death was told, we said:
Sunk, then, is Europe's sagest head.
Physician of the iron age,
Goethe has done his pilgrimage.
He took the suffering human race,
He read each wound, each weakness clear;
And struck his finger on the place,
And said: Thou ailest here, and here!

…He said: The end is everywhere,
Art still has truth, take refuge there!
And he was happy, if to know
Causes of things, and far below
His feet to see the lurid flow
Of terror, and insane distress,
And headlong fate, be happiness.

But although Goethe contradicts Hegel even before Hegel had properly spoken, nonetheless there can be no doubt that his philosophy is idealistic. And yet he cannot even close his mighty poem with eight verses of what starts as undoubted idealism, without ending them with an unanswered and possibly unanswerable question. The first two lines of the Chorus Mysticus are as perfect a statement of idealistic philosophy as poetic genius could achieve, and Plato and Plotinus would have accepted them: All things that pass and go/ are merely a likeness. A likeness, that is, a mere image or suggestion, of what Plotinus called the Intelligible Realm. He would not be displeased, either, with the following four: The Indescribable/ Here becomes experience; / The Unachievable/ Here it is done. Here in Plotinus’ Intelligible Realm. But then the Platonist would screech to a stop in sheer disbelief: what on Earth, what in the name of all the Gods, could the poet mean by: The Everlasting-Feminine/ Draws us above? Certainly no variant of classical idealism gave such weight to the feminine as such, nor, so far as I know, Hegel’s version, or any other contemporary one known to me. To understand it, we have to go - one last time - to the imagery of the Catholic faith.

Goethe was not, and could never, to the end of his life, be a Catholic. And another thing he could not be - but consciously wished he were - is a painter. And until the nineteenth century, with the exception of the Dutch masters, Catholicism absolutely dominated the pictorial arts. Goethe grew up in a part of Germany where the Church had not been driven out, and spent formative years in French Alsace and in Italy. He probably never paid any attention to popular religion, but it is more than clear that he was blown over and lastingly influenced by religious painting. The Catholic imagery that dominates his poem comes to him not through theology or personal knowledge, but from the impact of ten centuries of pictorial art. His great poem is not just full of, but dominated by, images from pictures: from the medieval scholar studying the Gospels in his chamber to the hermits living on nothing but faith on precipitous rocks. And especially at the ending, there is an evident dislocation, an usage of imagery out of context, which is clearly due to the great poet coming to the tradition of Catholic painting without any knowledge of the culture it arises from.

I am thinking of the fact, which puzzled me from the moment I first read the drama, that the hermits are placed on the other side of death, already on the path to the Virgin and the Chorus Mysticus. Any Catholic child knows that those haunting pictures of St.Jerome with his lion, St.Anthony in the desert, St.Francis receiving the stigmata, are images of what such men did and suffered in the here and now, in this world, in places that can be located on the map and can be visited. The phantasmagoria of literally otherworldly asceticism into which they were converted by Goethe’s pen puzzled me then and still strikes me as somewhat arbitrary now - one of the many ways in which the otherwise incomparable poem deserves Wordsworth’s rebuke: it is not inevitable enough.

But in the matter of the everlasting-feminine, Catholic heritage and imagery are both mecessary to understanding, and yet strangely dislocated, in an even deeper manner. Of course, there is no expression in poetry which has been more sickeningly abused. In French and in Italian, l’eternel feminin - l’eterno femminino has come to mean nothing but the female attraction and capacity for seduction, which is nothing to do with anything Goethe could have meant. (Remember that anything mortal and fleshy has been burned before Faust could enter the Intelligible Realm, let alone pass into that final state of being?) But in all that I know of religions and philosophies, there is only one that seems relevant: the Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary. The main function of the Virgin is to show us Jesus; nearly every icon and image has her with the little incarnate God on her knee, being shown to the faithful. In the famous prayer Salve Regina, she is also asked to show us the celestial fatherland, Paradise. Showing the inconceivable, that of which the whole universe is only a representation - God Himself - as visible, as a real experience that humans can experience: that is what the Virgin does, that is the result of her parturition of God. The Indescribable/ Here becomes experience;/ The Unachievable / Here it is done - here and now, in the arms of a mother: and so it is the everlasting-feminine - the specifically female thing, that is maternity in a cosmic sense, maternity applied to God - that draws us above. That is something that Plato never thought, though a Christian Platonist might have.

And yet, once again, there is a dislocation. The manifestation of the inconceivable on Earth, through the everlasting feminine element of maternity, is in Catholic doctrine a historical event that took place in a certain year of the Emperor Augustus in a certain town in Palestine. Goethe shifted it to the last and most abstract stage of his poem, beyond death and purgation, beyond the shedding of any mortal element, beyond the ascesis of the saints and even the triumphant apparition of the individual Virgin Mary. Somehow, Mary’s act of showing us Jesus has become detached, abstract; still the centre and end of an individual path of salvation, but no longer tied to anything as concrete and individual as the earthly Jesus son of Mary.

END OF THE ESSAY