The Goethe Summer: How Aspen Became a Festival Town
Near Aspen, Colorado
In the summer of nineteen forty-nine, Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke invited the intellectual and artistic world to Aspen to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The event they organized was called the Goethe Bicentennial Convocation, running from late June through mid-July, drawing to a barely recovered mining town some of the most significant figures in Western culture.
Albert Schweitzer made his only visit to the United States to attend. The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset came from Spain. The author Thornton Wilder spoke. The pianist Artur Rubinstein performed. The convocation paired lectures on ideas with musical performances, on the belief that a fully realized human life required both the life of the mind and the experience of great music.
The musicians who came that summer were struck by the setting. The students who followed them in subsequent years were struck by the quality of instruction. From those early summers grew what became the Aspen Music Festival and School, one of the most prestigious summer music programs in the world. The festival now draws hundreds of young musicians each summer to study with professional performers and faculty, and the season has grown into an eight-week program that fills outdoor tents and venues across town. What began as a single summer celebration of a German poet's two hundredth birthday became the institution that, more than any other, confirmed Aspen as a place that took ideas and culture seriously alongside the skiing.
