portrait of Goethe
by Karl Joseph Stieler

Laatste liefde is a reflection on late loves, on parting, and on the tensions between art and life.
It is the first stage play by Johan Reyniers, specially written for the De Parade company.

The scene is 1820s Germany. Johann Wolfgang Goethe is in his early seventies, and has already been a widower for some time. The author of, among others, The Sufferings of the Young Werner, is generally considered the greatest artist of his time.

In the spa town of Marienbad, he meets the seventeen year-old Ulrike von Levetzow, who is holidaying there with her mother and sisters. Goethe is seduced by the young girl’s charm. They go on walks together and have many long conversations.

The old poet falls in love and asks Ulrike for her hand. But to her, he is more like a grandfather. Gently rejected, Goethe writes his Marienbad Elegy, one of the most heart-rending poems of world literature.

Ulrike von Levetzow

The traditional view of Goethe is of a kind of monolithic figure, an untouchable Olympian, which has often led him to be presented as a cold and calculating character. In reality, he was of course a man like any other, made of feelings and passions, who could lose his head when things didn’t work out as he’d hoped. The unhappy episode with Ulrike von Levetzow is clear proof of this.

These events, like the rest of Goethe’s life, are widely documented and have been preserved for posterity. Many writers have taken them as their inspiration, among them the eighty year old Martin Walser who recently published his novel A Loving Man (Een liefhebbende man).

Premiére: the 15th of march, 2011, Beursschouwburg, Brussels