Mignon und Margarete in Malerei und Musik

Goethe’s „Wilhelm Meister“ and „Faust“ have been classics of German literature since long before the 20th century. For many early 19th-century artists and composers the two female characters of Mignon and Margarete were muses for their own works: innumerable drawings and paintings, and an almost unmanageable corpus of song settings have had an enduring influence on the ‘image’ of Mignon and Margarete – and at times have reduced them to stereotypes. Based on selected visual works by Wilhelm von Schadow, Ferdinand Fellner and Ary Scheffer, and compositions by Carl Friedrich Zelter, Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, the structures of aesthetic effects are revealed in minute detail. The aesthetic potential within each medium is examined, together with the potential of image and music to retroactively affect the text and its reading. The study is an important contribution to the examination from a new perspective of the outstanding significance of image and music in the context of the reception of Goethe as a literary classic. This perspective does more justice than monodisciplinary approaches to the mutual interrelations within artistic production around and after 1800.