Goethe saw Mozart just once in his life, at a concert in Frankfurt-am-Main. He was fourteen and Mozart was seven. The child prodigy played the most difficult compositions on the piano and the violin and then, without looking, gave a musical definition of the pealing of bells and the chiming of clocks. He made such an impression that Goethe couldn’t get him out of his mind; he is said to have mentioned him even on his deathbed. ‘I see him, I see him clearly,’ he is supposed to have whispered through withered lips. ‘Little man with the sword . . . don’t go! . . . More light!’ And when he was younger he listened constantly to Mozart’s music, with wonder and adoration. When he became director of Weimar’s famous theatre, Mozart’s operas were the main ones staged there. He was so taken with the beauty of The Magic Flute that he spent many years trying to write a sequel. He also couldn’t get over his disappointment that Mozart hadn’t set Faust to music. ‘Only he could have done it,’ he is supposed to have remarked in his old age. ‘He could have done it, and he should have done it! The music to my Faust should be like the music to Don Giovanni!’
Then there is the story of Goethe and Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn appeared fairly late in Goethe’s life, when the latter was seventy-two and the former eleven – barely older than Mozart. And the result of this first meeting? Within an hour the cocky little imp had the mighty Jove at his feet, ecstatic with admiration, devouring him with his eyes and ears, utterly captivated.
But what role was the child playing? What was it, exactly, that little Felix was doing when he performed before the Master? Why, yes, of course – he was teaching him! Opening his eyes and ears, playing Beethoven and Bach, whose music Goethe had never heard, initiating him into the mysteries of harmony and technique. Educating, instructing, enlightening. In short, the child was teaching the old man. Extraordinary! Unbelievable!
Unbelievable? It might have been if the child hadn’t been an Aquarius. But Felix, too, like the divine Mozart, was born under that sign (on the third of February). He was thus a female element, older by definition.
And so we come, finally, to the story of Goethe and Schubert: not quite like the others, but equally significant.
This time it is Goethe who is the object of fascination. Schubert falls in love with his poetry. He reads it, he recites it, he is overwhelmed with admiration. And one passage in Faust affects him so strongly that he is moved to tears. Which passage is it? Of course: it is Margaret’s monologue, spoken as she sits at her loom. Those unforgettable first four lines:
My peace is gone
And my heart is sore;
My soul is heavy,
There’s no calm any more.
They resound in Schubert’s head, they obsess him. He cannot sleep. Finally he understands that he will get no rest until he sets them to music. And thus is born the most famous of his songs, Gretchen at the Spinning-Wheel. It is the beginning of a new chapter – a new era! – in musical history. Gretchen is followed by one masterpiece after another; all in all, Schubert sets about sixty of Goethe’s poems to music.
Need one add when Schubert was born? Could this passionate lover of the inspired verses of a Virgo have been anything other than an Aquarius? The thirty-first of January was the date he came into the world.
This last example is perhaps the most significant of the three. It is a kind of archetype.
When Goethe, greatest of the Virgos, wrote that extraordinary poem, the song of a virgin in love, he was giving expression to his deepest self, to what he was because of the stars. I am Margaret, he might well have said (anticipating Flaubert, who many years later was to say the same of his Madame Bovary). For indeed, is this a woman’s experience of love? Does a woman in love lose her mind, give way to madness, long for death? Of course not. A woman who loves is calm and controlled, for love is her realm and her natural state. A woman in love knows perfectly well what she wants, and she strides boldly towards her goal. She wants to conceive and give birth; she wants life, not death.
But the male element, when pierced by Love’s arrows, behaves just like Goethe’s Margaret. Let us listen to his lament:
My thoughts spin round,
My poor head aches;
My poor mind reels
Till I think it will break.
His face alone
From my window I seek;
It’s him alone
I run to greet.
O to embrace him,
To clasp him at last!
To touch and enfold him
And hold him fast!
And kiss him till
I’ve no more breath,
And kissing brings
A blissful death.
And what does the Watercarrier do, moved by the desperate cry of the wounded Virgin? What does a mature woman (in the person of Franz Schubert) do when she hears the lament of a young man (the eternally young Goethe)? She goes towards him; she stretches out her hand to him. She swallows her ambition and pride, forgets her fear of humiliation and speaks to him. She lends him her voice: she composes music and transforms words into song. She turns the savage cry into sweet melody.
For song brings harmony and reconciliation. It is through song that opposites are united and dissonances resolved; it is through song that the ultimate synthesis is reached, and the spirit reconciled with the flesh.
In the song of Virgo and Aquarius, the Stellar Victoria is realised.
I long for that victory with my Aquarius!
It was well after midnight when I put down my pen. I had written almost twenty pages. Feeling strangely dazed, I closed my notebook and went to bed.
The next day I paid another visit to the university, this time to the departmental library, to find a French translation of the passages I had quoted from Faust and look up a few words and phrases I wasn’t sure of in Larousse, Robert and various other dictionaries. This done, I made the appropriate corrections and then read the essay through from the beginning, marking all the liaisons with a pencil and underlining the words to stress when reading it out loud.
As soon as I got home, I took advantage of my parents’ absence to have a sort of dress rehearsal: I read the whole thing out loud. And while up to that point I’d been rather pleased with it, I now began to have serious misgivings. It wasn’t that I read badly; I stumbled over the occasional word, but not so often, and this could easily be corrected with practice. The problem lay elsewhere: the thing was just too long. I couldn’t possibly hope to get through it all in one lesson. Knowing Madame, I could be sure she would stop me after the first few minutes, whether or not I had made any mistakes. If she didn’t find anything wrong with it, she might let me read on for about six paragraphs, say, before cutting me off with that soulless ‘bien’ and entering
