He has been called “the last renaissance man”, the last who was, or even could be, proficient in all fields of human knowledge. When Johann Wolfgang Goethe was born on August 28, 1747, there was no Germany or Italy. The Holy Roman Empire, governed from Vienna, ruled a loose confederation of independent cities. The American colonies were loyal to the British, Louis XV was on the throne of France, and champagne had just been invented. When the ennobled Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died on March 22, 1832, it was another world. The United States of America had been formed and was on its seventh president; Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and Napoleon had come and gone; and the Holy Roman Empire had disappeared. (Goethe’s birth and death years were the same as those of George Washington.) His long life spanned that of Mozart, Salieri, and Beethoven; of Burns, Shelley, Keats, Jane Austen and Pushkin; of Jenner, Lavoisier, Malthus and Volta; as well as the reigns of Catherine the Great of Russia and George III of Britain. He knew, or at least met, most of the famous men of his day. Goethe dominated the cultural scene of late eighteenth century Germany and was the most remarkable man of a remarkable, historic and exciting age.

Although now best known as a poet and the author of Faust, Goethe actually spent the greater part of his life in the study of science. Trained as a lawyer, he never really practiced but served as a diplomat at the Court of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach in Weimar. Among other things, he wrote treatises on botany, meteorology, paleontology, geology, optics, mineralogy, anatomy and philosophy. The complete edition of his works runs to 138 volumes. Nearly 3,000 of his drawings survive, he experimented with composing music, and he designed and built a villa and a park. He ran a duchy for three years, a theatre for twenty-five, and a university (Jena) for even longer. He was such a dominant figure in the intellectual life of his age that it is sometimes called Die Goethezeit (The Age of Goethe). It was also “The Age of Enlightenment”.

Goethe was born in Frankfurt-am-Main, an independent city of some 36,000 inhabitants at the junction of twenty-six major roads, and the site of the coronation of the King of the Romans (heir to the Holy Roman Empire). When Joseph II, the Emperor in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, was crowned there in 1764, the young Goethe was in the crowd. The year before, he had heard one of the four concerts the seven-year-old Mozart gave in Frankfurt. Years afterward, Goethe remembered “the little man with wig and sword”. Mozart later set some of Goethe’s poems to music.

In many ways Frankfurt was still a medieval city. It was famous for its awful smell, class distinctions were rigidly observed, there was a Jewish ghetto, and the clothing people were allowed to wear was strictly prescribed by their social rank. Johann’s grandfather was of peasant stock who amassed such a fortune that Johann’s father could spend his time managing his money, collecting books, and educating his children. (He changed the family name, Göthe to Goethe as more elegant.) The young Goethe was very spoiled, insisting that his mother lay out three separate sets of clothes every morning to give him a choice. She built him a marionette theater, the start of his love of drama. Goethe learned the story of the man who sold his soul to the devil in childhood, when he saw the puppet version of the Faust story. Later he would write: “The…puppet show resounded and vibrated, many-toned, within me. I too had wandered about in all sorts of science, and had early enough been led to see its vanity. I had, moreover, tried all sorts of ways in real life, and had always returned unsatisfied and troubled. Now these things, as well as many others, I carried about with me,…but without writing anything down”.

Goethe was educated at home by his father and tutors until he was eighteen, when he went to the University of Leipzig. He spoke French and Italian as well as German, and could read Latin, Greek, English and Hebrew. While in Leipzig, Goethe dabbled in magic and alchemy, aspects of which were later used in Faust. He studied medicine and physics, tried wood cutting and etching, and composed poetry almost every day. Before his first year at University was out, Goethe became very ill and returned home to Frankfurt. When he recovered, he went to the University of Strasbourg to study law and, when he left there in 1771 at the age of twenty-four, it was as Doctor Goethe. He joined the Freemasons when he was twenty-two. After a few months at home, he went to Wetzlar, a small city of about 5,000 and the seat of the Imperial Court of Justice. At the time of Goethe’s arrival, the legal system there was in a terrible mess; there were 20,000 cases still undecided and 17 lawyers to handle them! They only managed to resolve about sixty cases per year so the backlog kept increasing.

Young lawyers went to Wetzlar for a short time to get experience with legal practice, and Goethe was supposed to do the same. He planned to take advantage of small town life and its slower pace to pursue his reading of Homer and other ancient writers, but he met and fell in love at first sight with Charlotte Buff (Lotte); he was twenty-three, she eighteen. This was not the first time this had happened to him. He had been in love as a boy of fourteen in Frankfurt with a waitress, Marguerite (Gretchen) whose name would be used in Faust. He also fell in love as a student at Leipzig and as a young man in Strasbourg. Each time, when things began to get serious, he left, usually without a word, and the girls usually married someone else soon after. But his love of Charlotte was to have a lasting memorial, the novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of the Young Werther), incorporating his experiences in Wetzlar. He dashed it off in four weeks and later was to say, “I fed [Werther] with my own blood”. To the end of his days Goethe could not bring himself to reread it yet, when Charlotte visited him in 1816, he no longer felt any emotion for her. The book was a sensation, the first “modern” novel, about real people rather than heroes and adventurers. Published in 1774, within two years there were two French translations and a French play based on it. It was translated into English in 1779 and, by 1800, was available in most European languages. Napoleon took it to Egypt with him and read it seven times. Mary Shelley’s fictional Dr. Frankenstein, the inventor of the monster, loved it. On the hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s birth, a monument was erected in the Wertherplatz in Wetzlar, at one of the places where the poet often sat.

It took Goethe fifty-eight years to complete Faust. He started writing in 1775 and printed his first draft in 1790. After eighteen more years of revision, what we now know as Faust, Part 1 was printed. Goethe’s Faust does not sell his soul cheaply. He agrees to go to hell only if the devil can show him absolute pleasure. At the end of Part 1, Faust had not been shown any pleasure that was completely fulfilling, and so had not yet lost his wager with the devil. For years Goethe pondered what the ending should be and, in 1827, at the age of seventy-eight he started Part 2 in which Faust was saved. Critics compared Goethe with Dante and Shakespeare.

In 1775, Duke Karl August enticed Goethe to Weimar, a little town of 6,200 people which soon became the cultural capital of Europe. The Duke brought him as a poet, but recognized his other talents and soon assigned him to the Bureau of Works where he checked into the operation of mines. He was made a privy counselor and became president of the Council. He was soon so busy that, for a while, he had no time for the ladies. In 1782 Emperor Joseph II conferred nobility on him, and he became von Goethe. Goethe was one of the leading members of the German Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement in German literature, which replaced rationalism and the Enlightenment with nature and genius. It took the medieval legend of Faust as a symbol of burning ambition and intellectual hunger.

Tired of the cold weather in Weimar, Goethe took a two-year leave of absence in Italy, indulging his love of the classics. On his return to Weimar, he met and fell in love with Christiane Vulpius, an uneducated maker of artificial flowers. She became his housekeeper, mistress, and mother of his only child, August. After the birth of the baby she lived in Goethe’s house but, as they did not marry until 1806, she was shunned by Weimar society. (True to his age, Goethe’s anti-feminism is notorious. “If she wants to read, surely she can choose a cookbook.” was his answer to a question on female education.)

On September 29, 1808 Goethe met Napoleon, whom he greatly admired, and spent over an hour talking to him about Werther. As Goethe left, Napoleon said, “Voilà un homme!” (Behold a man!) and soon conferred the Cross of the Legion of Honor on the author. Goethe’s contemporaries in Germany never forgave him for his admiration of the emperor who, he said, had the greatest mind the world had ever seen.

Goethe toyed with the idea of setting Faust to music himself but soon dismissed the idea and regretted that Mozart had not lived to make an opera of it. Years later, the French composers Gounod and Berlioz, and the Italian Boito, set it to music and Massenet composed the opera Werther. Ironically, the poetic works of Goethe achieved musical immortality through foreign composers, especially French.

Goethe died in 1832, in his eighty-third year. An age had ended.