For reasons that will be touched on in a moment, the relationship between the Faust figure and music has often been as intimate as it has been problematic. At the risk of seeming wayward, I want to begin by invoking not Goethe's Faust, but another treatment of the Faust legend – Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus. I do so because Mann is as centrally concerned to understand the Faust/music nexus as is Goethe – and because there is an all-important difference between the two works. Mann's narrative of the life of the fictitious composer Adrian Leverkühn invites us time and again to reflect on both the ontology and the history of music. The ontological argument highlights the complex dialectic of music: it is both abstract and visceral. And the historical argument shows us music as deeply implicated in the broad currents and counter-currents of cultural and historical change in the first three decades of the twentieth century. In these terms, then, and in a great many others, Mann's Doktor Faustus is about music. But it is not – despite all its stunning coherence of structure and formal patterning – a work sustained by musicology. Whereas its greatest antecedent in the German tradition, Goethe's Faust, is precisely that.

In what sense, then, is Goethe's Faust a musical work? It is so in at least three ways. Firstly, it is a work that contains a great many musical numbers. Hans Joachim Kreutzer estimates that almost nineteen per cent of Part I and some twenty-four per cent of Part II are conceived as involving music in one form or another. And Tina Hartmann pushes the analogy with music even further, likening Part I to a Singspiel, and suggesting that the seemingly modern form of Part II, with its major scenic blocks, is best understood in the context of the fondness of early music theatre for masques, processions, and so on. Secondly, the musical sections that figure in the Faust text are integral rather than incidental; they are implicated in the very fabric of the work, which is, by that token, a musical drama rather than a drama with music.

Hermann Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf (1927) belongs to a group of some six novels, all written and/or published within the period 1920 to 1933, which, by common consent, represent the canonical contribution of the German novel to High Modernism. The others are Kafka’s Das Schloss, Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg, Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Broch’s Die Schlafwandler, and Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. All of these works have at least three features in common. One is that they register an urgent sense of cultural transition, a crisis that expresses itself as a virulent collision of old and new values. Another is their need to find — or at least to gesture towards — a conclusion that holds out the promise of some kind of consoling, perhaps even redemptive, solution. The third feature they share is an acute form of novelistic self-consciousness: that is to say, they are novels that thematize their own narrative performance as part of the cultural analysis that they are concerned to offer. All of them are, by any standards, challenging works. Part of the challenge they pose is that they work simultaneously on a number of interpretative levels.

The event sequence of Der Steppenwolf is as follows. The novel consists of three different, but overlapping, narrative texts. It opens with a brief statement by an unnamed and unspecified bourgeois narrator. He lives in a large house belonging to his aunt. A new tenant arrives: one Harry Haller, the “Steppenwolf” of the novel’s title, a man who feels himself to be a radically fractured self, part decent, respectable human being, part violent, instinctual wolf. The bourgeois narrator registers the strangeness and reclusiveness of Haller, and is both alienated by and attracted to him. While he finds it difficult to form a clear picture of the strange lodger’s way of life, he feels with great urgency that this enigmatic figure is symptomatic of contemporary Europe’s troubles. When Haller disappears as mysteriously as he has arrived, he leaves behind a mass of papers. And the bourgeois narrator decides to pass those papers on to us, the readers, by publishing them. They consist for the most part of Harry’s own account of his recent experiences — and, by this token, they have a certain confessional force. We learn that he has private means; while he disapproves of capitalism, he lives off the interest from certain funds and investments.

When We Explore Literary Texts that manage to be both masterpieces and bestsellers, we should endeavor to abstain from critical fastidiousness in respect of their literary popularity. I have spent much of my professional life in seeking to bring German literature close to an Anglo-Saxon readership. One of the problems that inevitably besets that enterprise is the fact that, in contrast to (say) English literature, German literature of the last two hundred years or so does not abound in masterpieces that have overwhelming page-turning appeal. Much of my own research has concerned German prose fiction from the late eighteenth century to the present, and I would have been not just pleased but elated if the texts in question had had the popular appeal of Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, or George Eliot. One of the key inmates of my German pantheon—none other than Goethe, himself the author of the first great bestseller to come out of the German-speaking lands, Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774)—was troubled by the lack of easy commerce in Germany between high culture and popular literacy, between reflectivity and spontaneity:

In 1774, a slim volume called Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) appeared anonymously from the Leipzig publisher Weygand. It was the first work of German literature to achieve European best-seller status. Within Germany, it created an absolute furore – not least because the anonymous work did not remain so for long. The text was – and this was public knowledge at the time – embarrassingly close to real-life events.

Goethe, the charismatic angry young man of German letters in the early 1770s, worked for a time in Wetzlar, at the judicial centre of the Holy Roman Empire. There he fell in love with a young woman, Charlotte Buff, engaged to a man called Johann Christian Kestner. The ‘eternal triangle’ of the novel was uncomfortably close to the less-than-eternal triangle in Wetzlar. And while Goethe – who for the rest of his life could not escape being the author of that amazing best-seller – always resented being asked about the relationship between art and real life, he himself, in writing the work, exploited its umbilical linkage to extra-literary events. For the ferocious description of Werther's suicide at the end of the novel, he drew on a case of suicide at Wetzlar; a young man called Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem took his own life – and the event was much talked about both within and beyond Wetzlar.

In this chapter I want to stress two matters in particular. One is that there is an omnipresence of abundant, kaleidoscopic theatricality in Goethe's Faust project. The other is that that theatricality is not simply decoration, not simply (as it were) icing on the cake, but is, rather, germane to the central concerns of the drama. Whether we read Faust as a philosophical drama, as a drama of desire or as the historical drama of modernity (and it is to this aspect that I wish to pay particular attention), at every turn we find that the theatrical statement is the correlative of the theme.

Let me begin with somewhat personal and anecdotal rather than scholarly concerns. On two occasions I have been involved in directing students of German at University College, London in theatre productions of Goethe's Faust. We performed an acting version of both parts. What resulted was a three-act drama. At its centre was the so-called Gretchentragödie, the love story of Faust and Margarete. This was our Act 2. It was preceded by the material that is often referred to as the Gelehrtentragödie – the tragedy of the despairing scholar – which extends, in Goethe's Part i, from the opening monologue of Faust's lacerating despair, through the wager with Mephisto, to Faust's rejuvenation in the ‘Witch's Kitchen’. This constituted our Act 1.

In many ways Goethe does not strike one as a born storyteller. There is little in his prose fiction of that teeming materiality we have come to expect from the great European novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet the narrative mode evidently meant a great deal to him because he wrote prose fiction throughout his long creative life. And he was a remarkably sophisticated witness to the emergence of the various forms of modern narrativity, particularly the novel.

Admittedly the tradition of German novel writing of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which he helps to inaugurate does not figure in the pantheon of established European ‘classics’. Within the broad compass of narrative realism, with its wholehearted acknowledgement of the omnipresence of social life, German fiction tends to figure as at best a marginal presence. But all the same it has valuable insights to offer; most particularly, German writing of this period sustains and is sustained by an urgent dimension of reflectivity, one which invests the narrative process with an unmistakable intensity of theoretical self-commentary. Three of Goethe’s theoretical comments on fiction can serve to focus the particular contribution he makes to this tradition.

THIS BOOK IS MODEST IN SCOPE, size, and intention. Its aim is to offer English-speaking readers a short, critical, and by that token lively introduction to Goethe's literary achievement. We firmly believe that, for all the interest of his autobiographical, scientific, and journalistic writing, of his letters and indeed of his life, it is through the literary work that Goethe most richly and urgently speaks to us today. This is not to say that every item of his oeuvre is worthy of reverent attention. On the contrary: Many of his literary productions are flawed. But equally we are convinced that his finest works truly repay detailed study. And it is a measure of his creativity that they occur in all three major literary genres — poetry, drama, and prose narrative.

It may be helpful to highlight three interrelated aspects of that literary output at the outset: they are factors that explain why Goethe's works “travel” well, so to speak. One aspect has to do with his mastery of the German language. As we know, for English speakers, the German language poses particular difficulties. It is an inflected language, and it makes weighty demands in terms of structure and word order. But it is precisely these structures which, as we shall see, Goethe exploits to unforgettable expressive effect. This capacity is one all-important part of the revelation that he can offer us: what, on occasion, can seem an irritating linguistic property of German becomes experientially immediate in his hands. This is generally true, of course, of all the great writers of the German literary tradition. But it is particularly true of Goethe: On the one hand, he constantly draws on the ability of the German language to sustain a flexible and sophisticated discourse of philosophical abstraction and speculation; on the other hand, he capitalizes on colloquial registers, and stays close, even in written from, to the language in its everyday condition. This aspect points back to the legacy left by Luther's great Bible translation. Goethe can make the vernacular sing in a way that few other German or indeed European poets can. He puts us immediately in touch with the expressive force and range of the German language.

The second strand derives from the first, and it concerns his feel for the specifically lyrical potential of the German language.

THIS BOOK IS ENTITLED Reading Goethe, and it is our hope that, whatever it may not have achieved, it will have served to encourage the reading of Goethe's works, not as an adulatory act, but as an exercise in critical reflection. Surveying that oeuvre and our attempts to assist in the reading of it, we inevitably find ourselves looking for some summary definition of why Goethe still has urgent claims to make on us today. Three reflections suggest themselves.

One has to do with his ability to address and express what one might describe as a central philosophical concern in human living, namely the issue of self-consciousness, of the relationship between mind and body. Faust is a central text in this respect, of course; but throughout the oeuvre one senses Goethe reflecting on the human ability, and need, to reflect. Time and time again he conveys the ways in which, and the extent to which, consciousness both problematizes and intensifies human experience. Goethe is one of the greatest philosophical writers of modern Europe, not in the sense that he has a preordained philosophy that he wishes to put across, but rather in the multiple ways in which he anchors the process of thinking, of philosophizing, in the dynamic of living.

Our second consideration in respect of Goethe's immediacy derives from his ability to interrogate and thereby define modern culture. As we have seen, Faust is again a key text in this regard. And it is worth reminding ourselves that all the central projects which claimed Goethe's attention more or less throughout his creative life — Faust, Wilhelm Meister, and the scientific work — are germane to the understanding of the modern world with its secular, individualist, scientific mindset.

The third aspect of Goethe's art that brings him close to us is somewhat more difficult to define: it has to do with what one can perhaps best describe as his tone. On frequent occasions, and especially in respect of the poetry, we have sought to draw attention to the intimate connection between Goethe's diction and colloquial speech. And, strikingly, such moments are not just throw-away remarks, not just fleeting concessions to everyday, even banal, experience. Rather, they seem to come from the very heart of his literary and spiritual concerns. A line from the end of Faust II will illustrate what we mean.

IN ORDER TO HAVE SOME MEASURE of structure, this chapter will address Goethe's poetry under various thematic headings: nature, divinity, love, reflectivity. However, we must stress at the outset that these thematic categories are anything but watertight divisions: more often than not, the nature poetry, for example, is inseparable from the love poetry and the love poetry is implicated in the philosophical poetry. This interrelation lies at the very heart of Goethe's poetic oeuvre and makes him perhaps the greatest lyric poet of modern Europe. For him, feeling and mood modulate into thought and concept, and vice versa. For this reason his poetry, taken as a whole, gives us powerful access to his experiential and imaginative world.

As far as his worldview is concerned, even the early poetry prefigures what was to become his mature philosophical stance. The Sesenheim and Frankfurt poems largely bespeak a sense of being at home in the world, being at one with nature. There are somber moments, but more often than not, affirmation gains the upper hand. Thus a poem's conclusion may typically turn its back on troubling reflectivity and assert a conciliatory “und doch” — “and yet.” In “Willkommen und Abschied” (1771, revised 1789), sorrow yields in the last two lines

A similar example is “Warum gabst du uns die tiefen Blicke” (1776), a love poem to Charlotte von Stein. The text abounds in motifs of suffering, yet it ends on a note of reconciliation:

Such structures of affirmation are often accompanied by themes and images of oneness. In “Mahomets Gesang” (1772–73), we find the ever-recurrent image of water, the river merging with countless other rivers, seeking fulfillment in the sea. “Ganymed” (1774) is another famous example: Ganymed, beloved of the god Zeus, seeks union with divine nature. Like Werther, he is cradled by “Blumen” and “Gras,” but his spirit, driven by yearning, strives upwards: “hinauf, hinauf strebt’s.” And the spirit of the divine father responds:

COMPARED WITH HIS great contemporaries Schiller and Kleist, Goethe does not strike one as a born dramatist. That is to say: he does not resolutely seek to define worldly experience in terms of endlessly proliferating moments of conflict. Indeed, many commentators have suggested that his was a primarily lyrical talent, one that found its finest expressivity in eavesdropping on the flux of mood and thought that constitutes the inwardness of the individual self. In this sense, there is something monologic about his voice. Yet the range and variety of his achievement in the dramatic mode is impressive. In a revealing remark of March 1775, he commented that he would perish if he did not write plays. Later he became involved in both the institutional and artistic management of the theatre in Weimar. In the original performance of his Iphigenie auf Tauris he played the part of Orestes, and in 1827, he described Torquato Tasso as bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. In other words, there can be no doubt that he needed the theatre as an imaginative space in which he could work at the problems that troubled him. And, looking at his dramatic oeuvre as a whole, one can discern certain recurring preoccupations. One is the need to body forth in language and action the dynamic of the human self. His comprehension of that bodying forth is anything but solipsistic; in his dramas he richly and circumstantially depicts the context — historical, political, cultural, personal — within which his protagonist has to live. In that process, Goethe worries at an issue which is, no doubt, at one level a perennial debate within human experience, but which, at another level, is a particularly urgent dilemma raised by modern culture: how to negotiate the clashing imperatives of order, containment, morality on the one hand, and of vitality, energy, freedom on the other. It is admittedly true to say that Goethe's vision is not as uncompromisingly tragic as that of many of his contemporaries, mainly because he saw polarity, the dynamic interaction of opposed principles not as a destructive force, but as the creative heartbeat within human experience. Yet, by definition, that tenet of polarity was also generative of dramatic configurations and confrontations.