Titian, Verdi and Goethe all excelled in their eighties
The older I grow, the more aware I become of those writers who did not die fashionably young, like Keats or Novalis, nor retire, like lazy old E M Forster. Instead, they continued to work into their old age, raging against the dying of the light, and refusing to enter the President Biden Twilight Home of the Faded Imagination. Slight jitters assail me, as the day approaches when my book on Goethe will be published. On 20th September, there will be a concert to celebrate it – and Goethe – at the Wigmore Hall, and there will be a presentation at the British Library. The great German is not much read in England now, but he is worth celebrating: a scientist, a politician, the greatest of poets, a disturbingly brilliant novelist – what could he not turn his hand to? I feel emboldened to mention him in these pages since...
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