Chapter 24 offers an overview of Goethe’s geological output, a vast but somewhat understudied area of his work. It focuses in particular on Ilmenau, where between 1776 and 1796 Goethe supervised a mining project, and it argues that, despite the ultimate failure of the enterprise, the Ilmenau period was crucial in developing Goethe’s understanding of geological issues. The chapter also charts the course of Goethe’s geological work after the Ilmenau period, and it brings to light the geological references which pervade his literary work – including Faust and some of his best-loved poems.

Chapter 34 surveys Goethe’s extensive influence on the musical world. It considers his own musical background, his relations with contemporary composers, notably Carl Friedrich Zelter, and focuses especially on Goethe’s reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century, his influence was most evident in the Lied (art-song), most famously those of Franz Schubert, and in opera, where Faust proved especially powerful. Twentieth-century composers were less likely to set Goethe’s literary texts, but both Richard Strauss and Anton Webern engaged intensively with his thought in their own creative activity.

Chapter 32 considers the question of modernity as explored in Goethe’s Faust. In his hands, the cast of mind of the restless central character constitutes an analogy of modernity. The chapter argues that the duo of Faust and Mephistopheles epitomises the mood of Goethe’s own time, which paved the way for the modern industrial era. It demonstrates that Part I radicalises the revolt against tradition which is an essential part of the original Faust legend, while Part II thematises incipient capitalist economics and the manipulation of nature through technology.

Chapter 11 traces the development of Goethe’s Faust, from the first scenes drafted in the 1770s, when Goethe was in his twenties, to the end of Part Two, completed shortly before his death in 1832. The chapter highlights the at times uneasy combination of antiquated material and modern intention within the work, and the contradictions that resulted from its protracted genesis. At the same time, attention is drawn to the sheer power of Goethe’s language, to its rhythms and the characters that it creates. Goethe’s Faust, the chapter argues, is a masterpiece with flaws.

Chapter 14 traces the development of Romanticism and positions Goethe within it. It addresses the factors that shaped Romanticism, such as the rise of the prose novel and the revival of interest in folklore, and positions the movement in relation to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Above all, the chapter demonstrates that – despite his well-known ambivalence about aspects of Romanticism – Goethe contributed to it throughout his life, paving the way for it with his early works, and embodying many of its tendencies later on, above all in Faust.

Some of the major influences on Berlioz were the new experiences that he likened to a thunderbolt. Literary influences came from Britain and Ireland (Thomas Moore, Walter Scott, and especially Shakespeare); from Germany (Goethe); and from France (Victor Hugo). The coup de foudre were performances of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, with Harriet Smithson (1827). He was mainly brought up on French music – songs and extracts from operas. Once in Paris, he came to admire the French operas of Gluck, and Weber’s Der Freischütz affected him strongly. However, the musical coup de foudre was Beethoven, whose example led him to cast his ideas in symphonic form. Once completed, the work must be performed; and when Berlioz took to conducting his own music and promoting it outside France, Symphonie fantastique, or selections from it, featured in many of his concerts.

The chapter analyses Faust‘s work, situating their sound within the diverse Krautrock trend and outlining their history to explain their political and artistic aims as a German music group. Faust‘s music celebrates a disruptive, avant-garde approach to rock music, influenced by dada and fluxus artists to create musical cut-ups and sound collages that blur the difference between noise and music. This methodology positions the band outside the structures of civilization, as per the framework of the Romantic hero, and reflects their conflicted disruption of German identity through the coincident political, phenomenological, and spiritual anxieties present in their music, lyrics, and performances. Faust‘s experimentation and aesthetics have influenced the ways noise has been incorporated into popular music, anticipating the development of industrial music.

When Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) translated the ancient Corpus Hermeticum in 1460 and unlocked the secrets of the mysterious figure known as Hermes Trismegistus, he discovered a wellspring of knowledge that promised to transform humanity’s understanding of both the world and its Creator. He and many others believed that the writings of Hermes conveyed the prisca sapientia, or ancient wisdom, once vouchsafed to Adam in the Garden but then lost after humanity’s fall from divine grace. The philosophical tradition known as hermeticism quickly spread across Renaissance Europe, alongside renewed interest in the mystical Judaic practice of the Kabbalah, another source of wisdom that sought to reveal the hidden traces of God in the universe. These traditions of learned magic inspired the archetypal Renaissance magus, the English philosopher John Dee (1527-608), in his quest for knowledge. He conversed with angels and advised some of Europe’s most powerful monarchs, but like the fictional figure of Faustus, who dabbled in dark arts and damned himself for eternity, Dee had to contend with the distrust and fear of contemporaries who believed that magic was the work of demons.

After tracing the debasement of the Faust legend in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the Faust story was dramatized in truncated revivals of Marlowe’s play and in puppet shows throughout Europe, Chapter III focuses on Goethe’s recuperation of Faust in his monumental two-part drama, a phantasmagoric epic that defies all genric classification. Chapter III compares Goethe’s masterpiece to Marlowe’s tragedy and demonstrates how each play mirrors the Zeitgeist of its own historical period as well as the vision of its creator. However, no matter how different the ethos animating these two versions of the Faust story, Goethe’s drama continues the innovations introduced by Marlowe, creating one of the great interrogative dramas of all times. As with Marlowe’s tragedy, Goethe offers two contrary readings of his hero and his quest, one celebratory, one ironic. After seeking to guide the reader through the mountain of scholarship on the drama, I conclude that, as with Marlowe’s play, Goethe’s masterpiece validates both the celebratory and ironic readings, balancing both interpretations with stunning equipoise as it convincingly argues on both sides of the question.