By Lida Prypchan
We look on Goethe as an enviable figure, privileged, majestic, Olympian, spoiled by the gods from his birth on August 28, 1749. The son of a wealthy Frankfurt family, Wolfgang Von Goethe never knew the difficulties of life. He traveled and studied as and how he wished; in love and literature he achieved triumph after triumph. He surrounded his youth with a garland of beautiful women. His amorous victories like his literary ones were infinite. The glowing success that in full youth bestowed popularity upon him was the novel – in a certain sense autobiographical – Werther, written in epistolary form, romantic and sentimental, which ends with the protagonist killing himself for love. A universal spirit, simultaneously a philosopher, critic, physicist, geologist, and biologist while at the same time a poet, Goethe tried to present a unified and original philosophical view of the world in his poem “Faust.” The same philosophical ambition appears in the great novel Wilhelm Meister. In The Divan, he renewed his poetry under the inspiration of oriental models.
It is impossible to imagine a more complete human antithesis than the poets Goethe and Schiller; however, it is rare for two intelligences to complete and understand each other as theirs did. The influence that these two different spirits exercised on each other is incalculable. Goethe agreed to collaborate in the poetry journal “The Hours,” founded by Schiller. He, in turn, promised to give the Weimar Theater his work “Wallenstein Trilogy.” Other works by Schiller, such as Mary Stuart, Joan of Arc, and William Tell, of universal fame, were also performed in the Weimar Theater.
Schiller (1759-1805) was a great friend of Goethe and the most illustrious of his contemporaries. Less Olympian than Goethe but endowed with greater emotion, he owed his formation as an apostle of the ideals of justice, tolerance and humanity to Rousseau and the French eighteenth century.
At 46 years of age, at the height of his glory, Schiller died, for which reason the Weimar Theater closed on the day of his death. Goethe was not informed of the sad news since he was ill and it would have caused him great pain.
After the death of his friend, Goethe continued to run the theater that was in his charge for a few years more. According to a critic ” the refined sense of the purity and beauty of language awoke in the school of Goethe. This school that had done so much for Germany gradually fell into mannerism, which caused a reaction in favor of naturalism.”
The duke ordered that the Weimar Theater be rebuilt. Goethe was called to this arduous undertaking, and it is worthwhile seeing how he performed it. The young poet formed a company whose actors and actresses would be the main personalities of the Court and men of Letters. The new company eclipsed those of Berlin, Frankfurt, and Dresden in all respects. Among the works they performed were: The Bohemians by Einsiedel, The Confederates and Iphigenia in Tauris, both by Goethe.
In 1779 Duke Karl August appointed him his personal counselor and took him on his trip to Switzerland. From this trip he brought the work Hermann and Dorothea. After a trip he made to Italy he brought the works: Torquato Tasso, Egmont, and a reworking of Iphigenia in Tauris, in which he tried to adapt the magnificent simplicity of Greek theater.
By 1794 he had reached his maturity as a playwright. He was, at that time, the personal counselor and chief minister of the Duke, the supreme arbiter of the Institute, the Botanical Gardens, and the museums and theater. One day, in Jena, when leaving a session of the Academy, he met Schiller. From that memorable date, German theater became a glorious reality.
Goethe died in 1832 at the age of 83. He was buried in Weimar, between the poet Schiller and Prince Karl Augustus. He ordered before his death that the windows of his bedroom be opened and he expired asking for, “Light, more light!”
