Chapter 8 offers an overview of Goethe’s development as a lyric poet, from his earliest innovations to his mature work, and highlights the diversity of his poetic oeuvre. It demonstrates the variety of forms which he adopted, often shaping them decisively in turn. The chapter also positions him in relation to his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, emphasising the influence of Klopstock, and examining Goethe’s participation in certain literary trends, including classical metres and the sonnet form. Finally, it considers Goethe’s relationship to the German Romantics.

Mahler’s “lifelong romance with death” (Stuart Feder) was one of his central preoccupations, both in his creative work and in his day-to-day existence. Death is ubiquitous in Mahler’s music, from his first major work, Das klagende Lied, which concerns fratricide and its consequences, to the unfinished Tenth Symphony, in which the final movement reproduces the sound of funeral drums. Privately, it was not only something to be feared but an experience to be desired; the lines “sterben werd’ ich, um zu leben” (I will die, in order to live), the first line of the final strophe of Mahler’s Second Symphony, encapsulate a worldview that he renewed wholeheartedly in the Eighth. The various influences on this orientation are surveyed here, with special attention to poets (Goethe, Klopstock, Rückert) and philosophers (Fechner, Hartmann) who intensified what seems to have been a natural predilection.