If anyone wanted to know what it was like to blow your mind with a piece of music, they could do worse than listen to the closing movement of Gustav Mahler’s Eighth Symphony – and its great chorus of human voices proclaiming that the Eternal Feminine will lead us on upwards. The closing passage of Goethe’s Faust.

In Mahler’s own words: “Try to imagine the whole universe beginning to ring and resound. There are no longer human voices, but planets and suns revolving.” It was his “gift to the nation … a great joy-bringer”.

Mahler was a Catholic. Goethe was a sort of pagan, but a distinctly Protestant pagan. His drama led up to an explosion of emotion as the 100-year-old Faust, after decades of being in league with the Devil, is nonetheless redeemed by a heavenly choir of women, including the teenager he seduced and ruined in the first part of the play. Since most of the women in the choir are Catholic saints, it seems fair that Mahler should have made his chorus an unashamedly Catholic affair.

The Eighth Symphony premiered in Munich on 12 September 1910, some 80 years after the second part of Goethe’s great work was published. This extraordinary explosion of emotion and sound was by no means the only musical response to the greatest work of German literature.

Goethe spent more than 60 years writing his masterpiece. He began when he was a student in Strasbourg, and he was only able to finish it after his 81st birthday. What started as a reconstruction of the old Faust legend – the Renaissance man who, in exchange for knowledge and youth sold his soul to the Devil – developed into something very different. This was partly because Goethe introduced an entirely new element into the legend – Faust’s seduction of the teenager Gretchen, her unwanted pregnancy, the murder of her child, and her redemption. German law was especially strict in its treatment of women who either aborted their babies or killed them after birth. Gretchen’s pathetic case was an extreme example of a “sin” which might be thought to be beyond redemption. The Devil, at the end of Faust Part One, thinks he can take her soul too but he is frustrated at the very last minute. She calls on God to redeem her, and he does.

But some of us first became aware of the musical legacy of Faust as children. In the Tintin story Les Bijoux de La Castafiore (The Castafiore Emerald) the opera diva Bianca Castafiore loves singing the Jewel Song from Charles Gounod’s opera based on Faust Part One – in which the amazed teenage girl finds the cupboard in her little bedroom garret stuffed with priceless jewels – implanted by the Devil’s magic to seduce her.

Gounod’s 1859 opera is the most accessible operatic version of the Faust story and, perhaps for the very reason, that is the one that seems furthest from Goethe’s original conception. Gounod’s librettist, Jules Barbier, excised all Faust’s metaphysical angst, and made Marguerite, as Gretchen became, a soprano’s dream role, with some absolutely stunning solos, including the famous Jewel Song. Seduction, pregnancy, multiple murders, howling sorrow follows – what is there not to like, when set to lilting bel canto music?

It’s marvellous stuff, but a long way from Goethe. In Gounod, Faust is little more than a strutting cad, whereas in Goethe he personifies complicated modern humanity, searching for scientific truth and for an understanding of the universe, but aware of his own divided nature and his need for his Devil companion. In Gounod, the story becomes a simple Catholic tale of a bad man getting his comeuppance and being sent to hell, like Don Giovanni in Mozart’s opera, while his wronged girl is saved by the angels.

The bombast of Berlioz’s 1845 Damnation of Faust is magnificent in its depiction of a human soul cascading towards perdition, but it also lacks any of the ambiguity of Goethe – who anticipated one of his keenest readers, Nietzsche, in realising that human beings reach a point in crisis where they are “beyond good and evil”. That’s a challenge which readers can mull over in their armchairs, perhaps, more easily than audiences can take in at a night at the opera.

Goethe’s Faust does not sell his soul to the Devil. He has a bet that the Devil can only possess him if he has tried to make time stand still, or has failed (to use William Blake’s phrase) to kiss the joy as it flies. By the time the story is done, and Faust is 100 years old, he has sort-of experienced not only the long 18th century – with its revolutions in science and politics, but the times which followed. He has foreseen the Industrial Revolution, the wreckage of the planet, and the green movement; he has foreseen the end of Christianity, but reworked its images – a fact which was not lost on Richard Wagner, whose giants in the Ring of the Nibelungs are really the industrial technocrats who will destroy the natural order with their smoke and chimneys, and whose Rhine Maidens, raw nature, will reclaim their world when humanity has done its worst. Nature will win – not us.

Seventy years before Charles Darwin, Goethe expounded a theory of evolution. What interested him as a scientist was not so much the mechanics of it – how we evolve – as the fact that impersonal nature could create the life-forms which eventually evolve in human consciousness.

Goethe described his great drama as “incommensurable” and to my mind the greatest musical expositions of Faust are the all-but incommensurable works of Franz Liszt, both in his Faust Symphony in three character pictures, and, most deeply and mysteriously, in the B-Minor Piano Sonata.

It was, in fact, Berlioz who turned Liszt’s attention to Faust as a suitable subject for composition, and it was the Hungarian composer who most fully understood the mind of Goethe, and the point of Faust. Liszt, like most thinking people in Europe in the decades after Goethe’s death in 1832, had been reading Faust. It is the book which defines the 19th century, because it is about intellectual and technological progress against spiritual loss; it is about love, damaged by men exploiting and damaging women; it is about how to have a new Europe, post Napoleon. It is about doubt and living with doubt, the archetypal 19th-century emotional theme. Liszt understood this all utterly.

His symphony depicts the three central characters of the drama – Faust himself, Gretchen and Mephistopheles. But I believe it is the B-Minor Piano Sonata which contains the greatest commentary on Faust.

Some have seen this as Liszt’s self-portrait; there is probably some truth in this. Liszt, like Faust, like Goethe, and like us – that is the point – is a divided soul. Mephistopheles is not the demon of medieval legend waiting to stick a pitchfork up our backsides. He is the darker, and more cynical, and more carnal side of our own nature. In one of the most unforgettable monologues of Goethe’s play, Faust realises that humanity is not just the observer of nature; we are part of nature. We are not like Kant’s so-reasonable Enlightenment Human looking on appearances. We are part of what we behold. We see, not only nature, but into our own psyche. (Not for nothing were Freud and Jung ardent Goetheans).

In the last year or so of a long endeavour – writing a book about Goethe and his Faustian Life – I played the Liszt B-Minor Sonata (interpreted by Stephen Hough, for me the greatest player of Liszt today) over and over again. Every time I hear the work it says something – infinitely poignant, exciting, heart-wrenching – which could not be said in words. That – so mysteriously – is also what happens every time you read Faust; since, as the aged Goethe reminded Eckermann (who noted down his immortal conversations) we walk in mysteries.

Sweaty, unhinged and with one of them frequently naked, few underground rock bands remain as revered as the Jesus Lizard. The US band’s early 90s albums Goat and Liar inspired awe in American alt-rock royalty such as Kurt Cobain, Steve Albini and Henry Rollins, and the band’s live sets cemented their status: guitarist Duane Denison, bassist David Wm Sims and drummer Mac McNeilly locked into near-ritualistic rock’n’roll while frontman David Yow, his genitals flapping, careened into the audience, surfacing like a pink dolphin fighting against a net of hairy arms and plaid shirts.

Hatched in Texas before relocating to Chicago, the band’s initial run lasted from 1987 to 1999. Since 2008 they have periodically reconvened for live “re-enactments” (Yow’s term), but their new album, Rack, is their first fresh music in 26 years: a tense, teeth-bared sewer rat of a record. “We had to be brutal and blunt with our assessment every step of the way so nothing came off flat or dull,” says Denison – dapper, charming, occasionally distracted by the whims of his cat – from his Nashville home. “I checked out other people’s old-guy reunion albums and made mental notes about what was good and what wasn’t. One thing I noticed is that they seem overly mature: really trying to show how wise they are and how they’ve grown. But that’s not fun. We want mindless mayhem along with an element of sophistication – that was always our thing.”

Indeed, the band have long combined the primal, horny honk of Led Zeppelin with elements of post-punk and minimalist composition; on those 90s classics Yow is utterly uninhibited, delivering caterwauled character studies and the breathy obscenities of a late-night crank caller. “To me, David’s voice was almost like a free jazz saxophone,” says Denison. “There was always the dichotomy between being this very organised working unit and the more free-range kind of thing.”

Like the band itself, Yow’s lyrics were weird, threatening and darkly comedic. Some, such as those featuring amputees or glum pygmies, were pure flights of fantasy, while others immortalised real-life figures such as a scumbag landlord or the drug-addled festivalgoer who once stole Sims’ clothes. The band’s gigs were equally unpredictable, with a naked Yow delivering parlour tricks involving his scrotum before vanishing into the crowd for multiple songs at a time.

“I love it when things get out of hand,” Yow admits. Speaking from his home in LA – his day job is retouching movie posters, with a sideline acting in films by the likes of Macon Blair and David Robert Mitchell – he’s almost the antithesis of his stage persona: quiet, thoughtful and drily, subtly funny. “I like the chaos and the confrontation, but it’s not testosterone-driven and it’s not malevolent,” he says. “It’s just fun to get right in people’s faces.”

His bandmates would try to keep out of his orbit and ensure the mayhem was somewhat contained. “He’d get hurt so often that our rule was we’d finish the song before we checked up on him,” says Denison. “More often than not he’d get up when we’d pour beer on him, though a couple times he didn’t.” Yow is matter-of-fact about the injuries he sustained, no matter how grievous. “I’ve been hospitalised several times,” he says. “I think the worst time was in Zurich. I jumped into the audience and they just sort of parted, so I hit the cement floor. They picked me up and dumped me back on stage and I was like a rag-doll – I’ve seen the video and it nearly made me puke. David Sims said he only quit playing when he noticed that my eyes were open but I wasn’t moving and that the puddle of blood under my head was getting bigger.”

We are talking the day before the singer’s 64th birthday, and while he is well aware of the toll the years have taken – he’s been working with a personal trainer to build strength and endurance in advance of the gigs the band have booked – he maintains that being part of the crowd is still part of the show. “It’s fun and I think it’s relatively entertaining,” he says wryly. “And, especially now that I’m pretty fucking old, supporting my own weight after a few songs gets difficult. If I jump out there I get to lay around.”

This knack for goading a reaction out of the audience predates the Jesus Lizard. “He was always theatrical in a weird way,” Denison says of seeing Yow perform in pre-Jesus Lizard act Scratch Acid. “Even when he wasn’t playing, he’d crash people’s gigs. Like when he went on stage with Butthole Surfers dressed as a redneck and broke a fake bottle over their singer’s head. It looked so real that people in the audience attacked him – someone broke his nose.”

Despite the bloodshed, insanity and temptations of life on the road, the Jesus Lizard were otherwise surprisingly sensible. They lived, toured and recorded frugally, the four of them sharing a three-bedroom house, driving their own tour buses and sleeping top-to-toe in cheap motels or on people’s floors. “I don’t think we ever lost money on tour,” says Denison. “Early on we never really made money, but we didn’t go broke. One year, I think 1990, my net income was $800. What did I live on?! If you look at photos from those days I just look skinny and insane.”

This self-sustaining lifestyle bonded the band like family, and beyond their DIY decision-making they also fostered relationships with people who could help them navigate the industry: entertainment attorney Elizabeth Gregory ensured the band were paid not to write a third album to see out their contract with Capitol Records.

For a band so legendarily unpredictable, the Jesus Lizard’s 1999 demise came with a whimper rather than a bang. “We just kind of fizzled out,” says Denison. “There was no feud, no fighting, no unresolved conflicts or legal problems. We just kind of said, ‘OK, it’s been a good run’ and shook hands.” But from Yow’s perspective, the wheels began to fall off as early as 1996 when drummer McNeilly left the band to spend more time with his family. McNeilly’s replacement, Jim Kimball, proved less than ideal. “I hate his guts,” says Yow bluntly. “He’s such a dipshit. The time we spent with him as a hired hand was drudgery. It was like a job.”

Post-Lizard, members immersed themselves in family life, worked as accountants and librarians, embarked on solo projects and collaborated with everyone from Mike Patton (Faith No More), Flipper and Hank Williams III. Denison played on Jack White’s Fear of the Dawn LP and alongside the likes of Ronnie Wood on Beverley Knight’s album Music City Soul. Yow had been hesitant to embark on the “re-enactments” that began in 2008: “When we got back together and toured, I loved every minute of it,” he says. “But I don’t think that I’d missed it … to me it seemed like fucking an old girlfriend”.

Concerted efforts were required to woo him back to record the new material that the band had been surreptitiously working on without him. “He was apprehensive about it,” says Denison. “So the rest of us said: ‘Let’s start working on stuff. Once the train starts to leave the station he’ll want to get on board.’ And that’s exactly how it worked out.”

While Yow seems laissez-faire about the band’s legacy or the role music plays in his life (“I love doing it, but it’s just not necessary for me the way it is for them – I wish I paid my bills through acting”), he is visibly excited when talking about new tracks such as Hide & Seek or Armistice Day: he describes the former as his favourite thing that Denison has ever done while raving about how “over-the-top” McNeilly’s drumming is on Grind.

Indeed, both men seem giddily energised by the music they are about to unleash. “It was definitely not like the old days,” says Denison of making new music together after so long. “But it seems like as soon as we start playing, things just happen – you find the parts fitting together. Obviously we’re older, wiser and more experienced, but in some ways I think we’re sounding better than before. Probably because we’re not getting wasted as much.”