Goethe: His Life and Times Book

Richard Friedenthal's "Goethe: His Life and Times" is an unalloyed joy for any reader like me who has nine Goethe titles in his GR database. Friedenthal barely Goethe's poetry. To enjoy this work one needs to be familiar with Goethe's leading novels ("Werther", "Wilhelm Meister 1", "Wilhelm Meister 2") and drama ("Faust 1", "Faust 2", "Tasso", "Iphigenia in Tauris").
Although, Friedenthal makes it very clear that he is a biographer not as a critic, he still managed to answer all the questions that I had about the works of Goethe that I read. In some cases (e.g. "Iphigenia") Friedenthal convinced me that I had misunderstood the work. In other cases, his views concurred with mine. In both situations, I felt that I had come away with a better understanding of the various works.
Friedenthal presents a very unflattering portrait of Goethe the man. Goethe spent his entire life in flirtations and was consistently insincere. He was an unfaithful lover and a dreadful father. He took advantage of his patrons and abused his secretaries. He was delusional believing that his "Zur Farbenlehre" (Theory of Colours) had overthrown Newton's optics and came to regard Newton as a personal enemy.
Friedenthal is perhaps at his best in describing the lifestyles of the artists and aristocrats that lived in the small German principalities that existed at the time of French Revolution and which survive until Bismarck's unification of Germany. Goethe was the personal favorite of Karl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. A skilful hanger-on, Goethe occupied a serious of highly paid posts in the administration of Karl August with-out ever doing much work or undertaking any project of significance. Friedenthal's descriptions of the benign incompetence with which Karl August military waged war and his courtiers administered his duchy
Goethe indeed enjoyed to the full Talleyrand's "sweetness of life" that existed before the revolution. He had no understanding of the conditions of the urban masses that overthrew the Ancien Régime and instinctively disliked them. He firmly believed that human progress would come from artists and scientists working under aristocratic patronage. He saw nothing positive coming from either the middle classes. He died less than two years after the July Revolution of 1830 that overthrew the Restoration government of Charles X in dreadful fear that the demise of the old aristocratic order was imminent.
In the final chapter of Friedenthal's book he answered the biggest question that I had had about Goethe at the beginning. I had first met Goethe through the lieder of Schubert and had read nine novels and plays hoping to find the same Goethe but never succeeding. In Friedenthal's view, the Goethe in Schubert's compositions was a creation of Schubert and that Goethe would have disliked Schubert's lieder for being "far too difficult and full-bodied" (p 517). On a personal note, it is time for me to stop reading Goethe and to simply play my CDs.