I've been reading Volume 5 of Charlote Mason where she's talking about how Goethe's education shaped the man he later became. I'm very interested in Goethe - he was interested in everything - acoustics, music, light/color, botany, rocks and minerals, politics, literature.
I've just started reading a book that Goethe wrote when he toured Italy as a young man. The Book is called Italian Journey, and it's pretty good so far - he writes about everything - the people, the plant life, even what the gravel on the road is made of! Reviewers say that it's good introduction to Goethe, although I've read Faust and Elective Affinities (and enjoyed both), so it's not my first introduction to him. I tried to read his work on color, but it was over my head.
Mendelssohn is one of my favorite composers, so I bought a book about him a few years ago and started reading it, but never finished it - I think I got side-tracked when it went on and on about Goethe, so I read a book by Goethe and never got back to the Mendelssohn book (but I will one day soon!)
They first met in 1821, when Mendelssohn was 12 years old and Goethe was 73. The Mendelssohn family greatly admired Goethe at a time when Goethe was 'little read and a rather unpopular author.' (Probably relating to Goethe's refusal to involve himself in Germany's troubles at a time when Germany could have used his help; Charlotte Mason refers to it, but I don't know the specific details). Goethe compared their friendship to young David playing soothing music to calm old King Saul. When they first met, Goethe put him to a number of tests, including setting some unknown music in front of him all smudged, to see if he could do anything with it. It was actually an original Beethoven composition (!), and Mendelssohn not only recognized it as Beethoven because of the style, but played it on the piano, when even his music teacher, who was also there, couldn't make any sense of it! At twelve years old! Goethe, who had also met Mozart as a child, said that this meeting was similar - apparently suggesting that Mendelssohn was another Mozart.
They met a number of times. Mendelssohn once described Goethe as the 'gracious imperial sun of my life' and put two of Goethe's poems to music. Here's a quote from the Mendelssohn biography that shows how versatile Goethe was, and how varied his interests:
"What attached [Mendolssohn] to Goethe--not just Goethe's works, but to Goethe's personality--was the many-sidedness of Goethe's nature, the variety of his interests, any one of which might suddenly come to the fore in conversation. Posterity, Mendelssohn wrote, would some day assert that Goethe had not been a single person, but had consisted of a number of small Goethides: satellites revolving around a central sun, as it were. But what exactly was this central sun? At this question, Felix would fall silent, for there was something staggering about Goethe's craving for knowledge. Logical enough the talk should turn to Scotland and Spontini--these were topics on which Felix could be informative. But pretty soon Goethe had moved from these to questions of theology. What did people in Berlin think of the dispute that had just broken out between the orthodox party of Geheimrat Hengstenberg's Protestant church newspaper and the anti-Pietists Wegscheider and Gesenius? Was there serious danger of secession? No sooner had Felix replied--his own tastes were not particularly Pietistic--he tended to follow Schleiermacher who pointed out the existence of certain Greek-Pantheistic roots of Christianity--than the old man shifted to Hegel, under whom his guest had studied, after all. What, he wanted to know, did sceptical Berlin think of a man who considered himself the messianic absolute, who believed that there would be no more philosophers after him? This question was difficult to answer, and called for the utmost diplomacy. For who did not know that Goethe, with utter naivete, considered himself the 'last poet'? And none the less was astounded by Hegel's hubris...
The versatility of this mind became even more impressive when Goethe started holding forth himself. His thoughts would range from La Muette de Portici--Auber's masterpiece, which later in that year of 1830 was to stir up a revolution in Brussels--to Walter Scott, whom Felix had visited at his home in Scotland; from Scott to the pretty girls in Weimar; from the girls to the students, then to 'The Robbers,' and to Schiller. 'And now he gaily talked on for a good hour or more without interruption about Schiller's life, his writings, his position in Weimar; by way of that he came to the late Grand Duke and to the year 1775, which he called Germany's intellectual spring. Nobody would ever be able to describe all that as finely as he himself, he said. He had planned to reserve the second volume of his autobiography for that, but what with the botany and meteorolgy and all the other stuff that no one would thank him for, he never got round to it. Then he told stories about the time he was directing the theatre in Weimar, and when I tried to thank him for these reminiscences, he said: 'It's just chance, you know; all that comes to mind by the way, summoned up by your dear presence.' Those words sounded wonderfully sweet to me; it was one of those talks you don't forget for the rest of your life.'" (That last long quote, by the way, is from a letter Mendelssohn wrote about their last meeting.)
[Felix Mendelssohn and His Times by Heinrich Eduard Jacob, 1963]
