ABSTRACT
The great marvel of Goethe’s closing years is the completion of his Faust. There are many examples of great creative activity continuing into extreme old age. Sophocles wrote Oedipus Coloneus, the last of his one hundred and twenty-five plays, at the age of almost 90; at 80 Verdi wrote his first comic opera. Goethe liked to quote the case of Titian, who according to legend lived to nearly a hundred, saying that at the end he painted velvet only symbolically, ‘the idea of velvet’, a remark that has its significance for Goethe’s own work on Faust.
