Goethe and Marriage

 

As usual, I am caught up in many things, including an article on Goethe's 1774 play Clavigo, which I am completing (the footnotes took ages) for publication. It is not a play that we in the U.S. hear much about, and at the time of its publication there were people in Germany who didn't believe it was by Goethe. It appeared in the same year as The Sorrows of Young Werther while Götz von Berlichingen had also drawn much attention to Goethe's talent the year before. Goethe got the idea for Clavigo from an account by the French writer Pierre Beaumarchais, who is well known today for the plays The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro. Before he wrote those plays, however, before Rossini and Mozart turned them into world-famous operas, Beaumarchais had caught Goethe's attention and indeed that of many people in the year 1774 with an account entitled Mémoires contre Goezman. It concerned a trip Beaumarchais had made to Spain in 1764, during which he sought, on behalf of a French financier, to "obtain for him and thus for France the much coveted license to sell slaves to the Spanish empire, which at that time was open for purchase," in addition to seeking to establish a monopoly for a French company to trade for twenty years in Louisiana. Such was the age of the Enlightenment in France.

But there was a side purpose to his trip, namely, the attempt to rescue the honor of his younger sister Marie-Louise. This sister had been engaged to the Canary Islands native José Clavijo y Fajardo, who, having arrived with no previous reputation in Madrid, was befriended by Beaumarchais's sisters who lived there. Clavijo began publishing a weekly paper in the style of the English Spectator entitled El Pensador, and by 1763 came to be regarded as an "enlightened journalist of Madrid," and also to have succeeded in rising to the position of keeper of one of the archives of the king of Spain, which would allow him to marry the younger sister. According to Beaumarchais, "He was promised the first honourable employment at court which became vacant. He outmanoeuvred all other claimants to my sister’s hand.  . . . The wedding was held back only by the need to wait for the employment which had been promised to this author of pamphlets. At the end of a delay of six years on one side and many cares and kindnesses on the other side, the job appeared and the man vanished."

Goethe read the memoir after its publication and spent the spring of 1774 writing the play Clavigo. Clavigo in his play is not the outright scoundrel that Beaumarchais portrays in his memoir, and Goethe himself did not write a revenge tragedy. Instead, he wrote a play about an ambitious man who abandoned his promise to marry Marie because marriage stood in the way of his freedom to pursue his literary career and rise in the esteem of the world. I imagine Clavigo to have looked like the figure above in Goya's 1820 painting of Tiburcio Pérez Cuervo (1785–1841), a Spanish architect who (according to the wall label at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) was responsible for several of the institutional buildings in Madrid.

Goethe's Clavigo appears to possess charisma and good looks. He never appears in public, according to his friend Carlos, without on his arm "eine stattliche, herrliche, hochäugige Spanierin ... deren volle Brust, ihr glühenden Wangen, ihre heißen Augen die Welt ringsumher zu fragen schienen: bin ich nicht meines Begleiters wert?" The magazine Clavigo edits is well loved by women.  In the fourth act of the play Carlos tells him how astonished women in Madrid would be were he to marry Marie, who is a nobody.

This is a long way to getting around to the subject of this post: "Goethe and Marriage." It was a subject that was on Goethe's mind in 1774. He was twenty-five, had finished his legal studies in Strassburg, which was followed by an apprenticeship at the imperial court in Wetzlar (where he fell in love with Lotte Buff), and was living in the parental home in Frankfurt and taking part, if without enthusiasm, in legal work. In Book 15 of his autobiography, which concerns the year 1774, Goethe claims that his parents already had their eyes on a local girl for him to marry. The scholar H. J. Meessen has drawn attention to the number of marriages taking place around Goethe. In 1773, for instance, Lotte Buff finally became Lotte Kestner, his sister Cornelia had married. Maximiliane von la Roche was about to approach the altar. Marriage, however, must have been a vexing topic for ambitious, bourgeois men. Even Herder, after two years of writing what would be called love letters to Caroline Flachsland, took a long time wedding her, until he found a position to his liking.

 In 1775, Goethe fell in love with a young woman (she was sixteen) named Lili Schönemann. (Be careful of the Wikipedia entry: lots of errors.) The poems and letters Goethe wrote at the time reveal that his passion for her was very real, which led, according to Dichtung und Wahrheit, to their engagement. Marriage, however was ultimately doomed because of status incompatibilities between him and Lili: he was Lutheran, she Reformed. She was also from a wealthy mercantile family, with a patrician way of life, unlike inhabitants of the Goethe household. Back then, those differences did matter, and in part 4 of the autobiography, he claims it was those differences that ended the engagement. Book 4, however, also concerns his decision to accept the invitation of Duke Carl August to visit Weimar. In the article I just finished on the play Clavigo, I have drawn attention to the parallels Goethe created in his account of the relationship with Lili in the autobiography and the relationship between Clavigo and Marie Beaumarchais in Goethe's early play, in which Clavigo faces the dilemma between marriage and a courtly career. As always with Goethe's autobiography: poetry or truth?

By the way, I do not know if the above quote, attributed to Goethe, is the real thing. If anyone knows the source, please write.