Friedrich Schiller
Friedrich Schiller is considered second only to Shakespeare in the pantheon of European playwrights, and he may have surpassed the earlier master had he lived longer than a young 45 years. Schiller was prolific and precocious – he wrote his first play – Die Räuber – while still studying medicine under the auspices of the Duke of Württemberg, Karl Eugen, at the Karlsschule Stuttgart, a military academy founded by the Duke.
Schiller’s father was a surgeon and was employed in the Duke’s garrison. Schiller’s parents had wished him to become a clergyman, and arranged for the village pastor at their earlier residence of Lorch to teach the young Schiller Greek and Latin, and Schiller himself had relished the idea. However, the Duke was set on the young boy becoming a doctor in the ranks of the Prussian army, as his father before him. Schiller still managed to let his creativity remain unshackled during his years at the Karlsschule. When Die Räuber was published and performed a year after his graduation from the academy, it was astoundingly successful for its deep social insight and expression of the then nascent republican ideals to be played out in full during the French Revolution only years later. Such a revolutionary message hardly appealed to the authoritarian Duke, understandably, and Schiller’s creative powers, which the Duke attempted to suppress, eventually led him to the cosmopolitan Mecca of Weimar. There, Schiller produced his most celebrated works, Wallenstein, Maria Stuart, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, and Wilhelm Tell, powerful extensions of Schiller’s republican ideals into historical drama. Schiller’s friendship with Goethe reinforced his turn into history plays and drew him further into aesthetics and moral philosophy. In addition to his dramatic and philosophical works, Schiller also produced poetry in prolificacy – the Ode to Joy, or An der Freude, being only the most famous in the sphere of the English language due to Beethoven’s setting of it in his 9th Symphony. Sadly, Schiller died of tuberculosis before he could go on to further acclaim and creation, at only 45, with a new drama inspired by Russian sources unfinished. Schiller is among the greatest playwrights of the German language, if not its one greatest.
OTHER SITES
Need more information about Schiller? Here's where you can find it:
Written by .
By using this Site, you agree to be bound by it's Terms of Service.