Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In 1840, the British painter and scholar Charles Lock Eastlake published an English translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1810 Theory of Colours, adding his own extensive notes for the benefit of British artists. One painter took the invitation further than any other. J.M.W. Turner acquired a copy, read it closely enough to annotate it throughout, and then went further still: he painted his engagement with it directly onto canvas. Goethe's theory rejected Newton's account of color as light mathematically decomposed by a prism, arguing instead that color arises from the interplay, the polarity, of light and darkness as a human eye actually perceives them. For a painter, this reframing had an obvious appeal that a physicist's account did not: it treated color as something inseparable from looking, from mood, from the emotional charge a scene carries, rather than as a fixed physical property waiting to be measured. Turner absorbed the emotional half of Goethe's argument in particular, the association Goethe drew between warm, plus colors and feelings of vitality and hope, and between cooler tones and their opposite. The clearest evidence is a single 1843 canvas, Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory), the Morning after the Deluge, Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, its unwieldy title itself a kind of citation. Turner built the painting around Goethe's account of how the eye resolves light filtered through moisture and atmosphere into gradations running from yellow through red, using exactly the warm, uplifting plus colors Goethe had described to carry a biblical narrative of renewal after catastrophe. Turner was not alone in reading Goethe; Philipp Otto Runge, the Pre-Raphaelites, and later Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint all drew on the same book in different ways. But Turner is the artist whose engagement can be traced most directly from the annotated page to the finished canvas, which is why his name, more than any other painter's, has become attached to the afterlife of a book Goethe wrote to settle an argument with a physicist and ended up settling something else entirely with a generation of painters instead.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

On 19 October 1814, a seventeen year old composer in Vienna sat down with a scene from the first part of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, not yet finished as a published drama, and set Gretchen's spinning wheel monologue to music. Franz Schubert's Gretchen am Spinnrade tracks a young woman's mind as it drifts helplessly toward the man she has just met, the piano's rocking sixteenth notes carrying the literal motion of the spinning wheel until the thought of his kiss overwhelms her and the wheel, and the music, stumbles to a halt before starting again. It is often described as the piece that invented the German lied, the art song, as a form in its own right, a single sustained musical idea built out of a poem rather than a melody with a poem attached to it. Goethe remained a well of material for Schubert for the rest of his short life. Over more than eighty songs, Schubert returned again and again to Goethe's verse, including, the following year, 1815, his setting of Erlkonig, the ballad of a father riding through the night with his fevered son while the boy alone hears and sees the supernatural Erl-king pursuing them. Goethe himself was reportedly unmoved by Schubert's musical settings during his own lifetime, preferring the plain, strophic settings of his friend Carl Friedrich Zelter, with whom he corresponded for thirty six years; Goethe and Schubert never met or corresponded at all, a working relationship of a different order than the one Goethe had with Beethoven, whose 1809 to 1810 incidental music for Goethe's drama Egmont led the two men to spend a week walking and talking together at Teplitz in July 1812, though even that meeting, by most accounts, left the two temperaments too far apart to become friends. But posterity settled the question of the poems differently than the poet did. Goethe's texts became some of the most set poetry in the history of Western art song, not only by Schubert but by generations of composers after him, precisely because they gave a composer exactly what Gretchen am Spinnrade found in 1814: not decoration for a melody, but a psychological situation dense enough to be worth setting to music in the first place.