Goethe and Zelter

The 900 or so letters exchanged over more than three decades between Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758–1832) command the attention of cultural historians for any number of reasons, and yet they are surprisingly little known, less read, and almost universally underrated. This circumstance prompted Lorraine Byrne Bodley, a musicologist at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, to undertake the enormous task of a new translation and annotation of the letters (or more specifically, portions of 595 of them). Her work provides us with by far the largest edition of these letters in English translation. Her only predecessor was the Victorian lawyer and amateur tenor Arthur Duke Coleridge, who in 1887 published a volume of excerpts from about 250 of the Goethe–Zelter letters. Coleridge (a collateral descendant of the poet) had studied music in Leipzig, then helped to found the London Bach Choir in 1875. As a musician, amateur though he was, he stood in direct descent from Zelter the teacher, by way of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and the Leipzig Conservatory, and from Zelter the long-time director of the Berlin Singakademie, on which so many serious amateur choruses, including the London Bach Choir, were modelled.

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