Nowadays people have huge glass walls between history and them. One such glass wall was erected as the postmodern condition set in, back in the late '70s / early to mid '80s. Since 1990 another round of secession took place. But where we are now, post-2020, is even more cut off of the so called historical age (or the age of history, or the modern age).

Reading Goethe? Reading his "masterpiece"? Is it even possible?
My guess is that it isn't. I read him, and I love it -- love reading him. But this is personal.
It's like being sort of a "mutant".... My cultural code-combination, DNA differs from most people's. That happens. Goethe is not mainstream anymore. He's cherished by small minorities.

If someone wants to read Goethe's Faust in the same manner as wanting to watch Munch's Scream, my advice is don't.
It'd be like drinking warm beer. Then complaining that it tastes like shoot.
Comparing Goethe, especially in competition, to Shakespeare is twofold wrong, at least. Once again, don't drink warm beer, please.

Goethe is a "system". Like Marx. An organic system of thoughts, IMAGES, experiences, approaches and more.
Just picking his masterpiece (which is a wrong expression anyway, I'd call it his most cherished or chief or most complex work) and reading it is wrong. Warm beer. It takes much more. But I don't mean pre-studies. It takes much more in terms of interest and understanding complexity, including understanding history, and cool and great artists along history's timeline.

Either you have that or you just don't. In the latter case, reading Goethe is wrong. Waste of time. It's like you've never read it.
Nowadays we consume art and culture. Take in doses and enjoy what they do to us. A 3D movie does a lot of things while requires very-very little effort on our part. Reading Goethe is the absolute opposite.

Most people only do it because the don't want to miss out something that others might be talking about.
I suggest, you forget it. Do something else.

But if you can write an email to one of your friends about why you're looking forward to read the Faust, you're
on a good track, in terms of understanding art and history, and Goethe. Why is it good for you? It's not :)

But it adds a new level of freedom to your viewing the world and reality. It's not useful or anything. It's just an experience...

-- Peter Josvai

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PS:
If you're mutant enough, I'd suggest reading part I. It's totally different from part II. It's based off on his first version, well, excluding the proto-Faust / arch-FAust / UrFaust / age 20 Faust, that came out as "details from Faust", and was brewed in the midst of the Sturm und Drung movement, and Schiller loved it, too.
Part I. reads incredibly well. It's like a Godard movie. It has social empathy -- empathy with a fallen young woman who killed her newborn child and was executed. That story needs no "vocabulary" of history. It could be staged as a very modern play, too, except that it has middle age conditions for young women.
Anyway, I'll always remember one of the last sentences -- it grows prose at the end -- when his (then) friend, M, is waiting with the horses, waiting for Faust and the girl to finally come to terms and leave the damn jail (prison). And he, M, says "my horses are shivering".. and that's absolutely incredibly. Like Out of Breath by Godard, ca. 2 hundred years ago...
(that trial of that young woman happened back in the 1770's, when Goethe was 20/21) (the numbers I gave are not exact).

Hugely disappointing, which was a great surprise to me as I have always found the Faust legend appealing and had loved Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe's earlier interpretation of the story. Hearing Goethe described as Germany's Shakespeare, and the Two Parts of Faust as his unimpeachable masterwork, I was expecting to experience a great classic, a Germanic Paradise Lost. Unfortunately, it's a dull, rambling mess of bawd, conceptual noodling and dramatic puppetry, with none of the depth, lyricism or cohesion that the afore-mentioned Shakespeare, Marlowe or Milton would have brought to the story (Marlowe, of course, did.)

It's hard to describe the experience of reading Goethe's stewed pulp; perhaps it should be of note to prospective readers that even the glowing reviews you might find still comment on Faust's confusion and incoherence, only they try to make a virtue of it. Its muddle is seen as representative of the chaos of life, particularly for one like Faust who has sold his soul to the devil, and its haphazard switching between metrical forms is seen as evidence of Goethe's virtuosity. But it only adds further chaos to what is already a swamp of linguistic gibberish, moral wittering and Catholic rhapsodising. Goethe's Faust doesn't even know whether it wants to be a play or an epic poem, and it slips through the yawning cracks it creates in trying to be both.

The plot is wafer-thin, and if not for my foreknowledge of the wider Faust legend, I would have been completely at a loss as to why Faust was selling his soul, what role Mephistopheles was playing in his corruption, or what the hell was happening with anything in Part Two. Part One at least has the tenuous thread of Faust's temptation, even if it is loose, sprawling and lacking in narrative drive or character insight. Part Two has no plot at all, just whim, and after Helen of Troy has drifted around for a bit soliloquising and some Lord High Marshal has found an army and is leading it into some random battle, I was at a loss to explain what any of this has to do with Faust's bargain. And then some angels render Faust's diabolical contract void, for some reason, and there are some empty hosannas of the 'Glory to the All High' variety.

The contrast to Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, a taut, dramatic tiger of a play, with iconic lines, a clear moral lesson and a terrifying scene of Faust being dragged by the demons into Hell, is marked. And the only thing Goethe's Faust has in common with Shakespeare is in its nonsense; it's like a play made up entirely of those irrelevant interludes in Shakespeare where Fools, Clowns and Greek Choruses appear on stage to sing, hector and then leave. Only in Faust they don't leave. Shakespeare balanced out such things with dramatic clarity and dialogue and character depth, which made them forgivable; Goethe's Faust is just a dirge.

I rarely speak so ill of classics – and certainly didn't expect I would be doing so of Goethe's Faust, a book I was really looking forward to reading – but this was not a work of fine drama or poetry, and could not even approach Shakespeare in his potency, or Milton in his epic framing of Christian themes. There's no plot or drive, and when the reader gets lost in the weeds, it's not misfortune but simply a reminder that there was only marshland here to begin with. Goethe's inert creation is a disorganised fugue state of a play, a poem that unspools, and prospective readers should avoid this misadventure and open Marlowe's fantastic version of the story instead. ( )

Goethe's Faust, which took the most of his life to complete, has been translated by John R. Williams in this edition, that contains the First part of the Tragedy,unpublished scenarios for the Walpurgis Night and the Urfaust -the proto Faust that was discovered after Goethe's death. Williams claims that he has tried to keep the rhymes and metres close to the original. However, some more notes to aid the reader .

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1488893.html

It really took me ages to grind through this, and I'm not sure that it was worth it. Rather ambitiously I got hold of the Wordsworth edition which includes not only Part I and Part II of Faust, but also an earlier draft of Part I (the Urfaust) just in case you are sufficiently interested to know what the original version might have looked like.

Part I is the more digestible version (and the Urfaust even more so). Heinrich Faust, a scholar who is trying to reconcile the life of the mind with the lusts of the flesh, signs a deal with Mephistopheles (who9 first appears, and I am not making this up, in the shape of a poodle) to get whatever he wants, notably the pretty girl Gretchen. There are various rustic and studenty comic interludes, but it all goes wrong and she is executed for infanticide (I think; it's a bit obscure).

Part II, in five tedious acts, is more a pageant of Goethe's knowledge (and adaptation) of German and classical mythology than anything resembling an actual plot. Faust sets up a kingdom which seems to be co-located between medieval Germany and ancient Greece in order to seduce Helen of Troy (after the end of the Trojan war). There are complicated bits with emperors battling each other (one of whom may be Napoleon, who was around at the time of composition) and I really didn't follow much of it.

I think that either part would be pretty much impossible to stage. The characters do very little but wander up and down declaiming verse, and some of the directions are surely unimplementable (the well-trained poodle, as noted above; various stunts required in Part II). I assume that Goethe wrote it for intellectual house parties to recite to each other while lounging around the formal gardens sipping white wine.

Despite the fact that I really didn't enjoy Faust much, I did have some fun spotting themes that have carried through to later literature. Quite a lot of Part I reminded me of Buffy, with the students, young lurve, supernatural powers and diabolical figures tempting our lead character. That may be my imagination; I'm quite sure, however, that Roger Zelazny drew on Faust's construction of his magical castle to seduce Helen when writing the latter part of Jack of Shadows - he was a fan of German literature.

I suppose I should read (or, better, somehow watch) the Marlowe version to get another perspective on the story. (And then reread Michael Swanwick's take on it.) ( )