Goethe's letters to Zelter - v. 13 Author:Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 1801. 3.—Goethe To Zeltee. Weimar, 29th May, 1801. You have accomplished a very meritorious piece of work by the monument you have raised to Fasch, besi... more »des giving me great pleasure by what you have done. The remembrance of a human life that has passed away is so contracted, that affection is obliged, as it were, to reanimate the ashes, and present the glorified Phoenix to our eyes. Every honest fellow may hope some day or other to be represented thus by his friend, his pupil, his brother artist. When compared with an individuality thus lovingly resuscitated, what a poor figure is made by those necrologists, who, immediately after a man's death, sedulously balance the good and bad that has been believed in and applauded by the multitude, during the life of an eminent person, bolster up his so-called virtues and faults with hypocritical righteousness, and thereby are worse than death in destroying a personality, which can be imagined only in the living union of those opposite qualities. I was specially delighted with your account of the origin of the Mass in sixteen parts, and the Vocal Society f to which it gave rise ; how pleased I was that worthy Fasch should be so fortunate as to have lived to see such an idea realized. In one of your last letters—for which, alas ! I still owe you an answer—you ask whether there is anything among my papers in the shape of an opera ? You will find in the next number of "Wilman's Tasehenbv,ch the first scenes of the Second Part of the Zaulerflote. Some years ago I sketched a plan for a serious cantata, Die Danaiden, in which, after the fashion of the ancient Greek tragedy, the Chorus was to appear as the principal subject; but neither of the two pieces will, I expect, ever be finished. One ought to live with the composer, a...« less