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Christoph Martin Wieland
Christoph Martin Wieland (/ˈviːlənd/; German: [ˈviːlant]; 5 September 1733 – 20 January 1813) was a German poet and writer, representative of literary Rococo. He is best-remembered for having written the first Bildungsroman (Geschichte des Agathon), as well as the epic Oberon, which formed the basis for both Friederike Sophie Seyler's opera of the same name and Carl Maria von Weber's opera of the same name. His thought was representative of the cosmopolitanism of the German Enlightenment, exemplified in his remark: "Only a true cosmopolitan can be a good citizen." He was a key figure of Weimar Classicism and a collaborator of Abel Seyler's theatre company.
Christoph Martin Wieland was born in Oberholzheim (now part of Achstetten), half of which then belonged to the Free Imperial City of Biberach an der Riss and the other half to Gutenzell Abbey in the south-east of the modern-day state of Baden-Württemberg.
His father, who was pastor in Oberholzheim and subsequently in Biberach, took great pains with his son's education. From the town school of Biberach he passed on at the age of twelve to the Kloster Berge gymnasium, near Magdeburg. He was a precocious child, and when he left school in 1749 was widely read in the Latin classics and the leading contemporary French writers; amongst German poets his favourites were Brockes and Klopstock.
During the summer of 1750, he fell in love with a cousin, Sophie Gutermann, and this love affair inspired him to plan his first ambitious work, Die Natur der Dinge (The Nature of Things, 1752), a didactic poem in six books. In 1750 he went to the University of Tübingen as a student of law, but his time was mainly taken up with literary studies. The poems he wrote at the university—Hermann, an epic (published by F. Muncker, 1886), Zwölf moralische Briefe in Versen (Twelve Moral Letters in Verse, 1752), Anti-Ovid (1752)—are pietistic in tone and dominated by the influence of Klopstock.
Wieland's poetry attracted the attention of the Swiss literary reformer, J. J. Bodmer, who invited Wieland to visit him in Zürich in the summer of 1752. After a few months however, he felt little sympathy with Wieland as, two years earlier, he had felt himself with Klopstock, and the friends parted; but Wieland remained in Switzerland until 1760, spending the last year, at Bern where he obtained a position as private tutor. Here he became intimate with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's friend Julie de Bondeli.
Wieland's tastes had changed; the writings of his early Swiss years—Der geprüfte Abraham (The Trial of Abraham's Faith, 1753), Sympathien (1756), Empfindungen eines Christen (1757)—were still in the manner of his earlier writings, but with the tragedies, Lady Johanna Gray (1758), and Clementina von Porretta (1760)—the latter based on Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison—the epic fragment Cyrus (first five cantos, 1759), and the "moral story in dialogues", Araspes und Panthea (1760), Wieland, as Gotthold Lessing said, "forsook the ethereal spheres to wander again among the sons of men." In Cyrus, he had been inspired by the deeds of Frederick the Great to write a poem exhibiting the ideal of a hero. Araspes und Panthea is based on an episode from the Cyropaedia of Xenophon.[citation needed]
Wieland's conversion was completed at Biberach, having returned in 1760 as director of the chancery. The monotony of his life here was relieved by the friendship of a Count Stadion, whose library in the castle of Warthausen, not far from Biberach, was well stocked with French and English literature. Wieland met again his early love Sophie Gutermann, who had become the wife of Hofrat La Roche, then manager of Count Stadion's estates.
In Don Sylvio von Rosalva (1764), a romance in imitation of Don Quixote, he held his earlier faith up to ridicule and in the Comische Erzählungen (1765) he gave his extravagant imagination only too free a rein.
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Christoph Martin Wieland
Christoph Martin Wieland (/ˈviːlənd/; German: [ˈviːlant]; 5 September 1733 – 20 January 1813) was a German poet and writer, representative of literary Rococo. He is best-remembered for having written the first Bildungsroman (Geschichte des Agathon), as well as the epic Oberon, which formed the basis for both Friederike Sophie Seyler's opera of the same name and Carl Maria von Weber's opera of the same name. His thought was representative of the cosmopolitanism of the German Enlightenment, exemplified in his remark: "Only a true cosmopolitan can be a good citizen." He was a key figure of Weimar Classicism and a collaborator of Abel Seyler's theatre company.
Christoph Martin Wieland was born in Oberholzheim (now part of Achstetten), half of which then belonged to the Free Imperial City of Biberach an der Riss and the other half to Gutenzell Abbey in the south-east of the modern-day state of Baden-Württemberg.
His father, who was pastor in Oberholzheim and subsequently in Biberach, took great pains with his son's education. From the town school of Biberach he passed on at the age of twelve to the Kloster Berge gymnasium, near Magdeburg. He was a precocious child, and when he left school in 1749 was widely read in the Latin classics and the leading contemporary French writers; amongst German poets his favourites were Brockes and Klopstock.
During the summer of 1750, he fell in love with a cousin, Sophie Gutermann, and this love affair inspired him to plan his first ambitious work, Die Natur der Dinge (The Nature of Things, 1752), a didactic poem in six books. In 1750 he went to the University of Tübingen as a student of law, but his time was mainly taken up with literary studies. The poems he wrote at the university—Hermann, an epic (published by F. Muncker, 1886), Zwölf moralische Briefe in Versen (Twelve Moral Letters in Verse, 1752), Anti-Ovid (1752)—are pietistic in tone and dominated by the influence of Klopstock.
Wieland's poetry attracted the attention of the Swiss literary reformer, J. J. Bodmer, who invited Wieland to visit him in Zürich in the summer of 1752. After a few months however, he felt little sympathy with Wieland as, two years earlier, he had felt himself with Klopstock, and the friends parted; but Wieland remained in Switzerland until 1760, spending the last year, at Bern where he obtained a position as private tutor. Here he became intimate with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's friend Julie de Bondeli.
Wieland's tastes had changed; the writings of his early Swiss years—Der geprüfte Abraham (The Trial of Abraham's Faith, 1753), Sympathien (1756), Empfindungen eines Christen (1757)—were still in the manner of his earlier writings, but with the tragedies, Lady Johanna Gray (1758), and Clementina von Porretta (1760)—the latter based on Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison—the epic fragment Cyrus (first five cantos, 1759), and the "moral story in dialogues", Araspes und Panthea (1760), Wieland, as Gotthold Lessing said, "forsook the ethereal spheres to wander again among the sons of men." In Cyrus, he had been inspired by the deeds of Frederick the Great to write a poem exhibiting the ideal of a hero. Araspes und Panthea is based on an episode from the Cyropaedia of Xenophon.[citation needed]
Wieland's conversion was completed at Biberach, having returned in 1760 as director of the chancery. The monotony of his life here was relieved by the friendship of a Count Stadion, whose library in the castle of Warthausen, not far from Biberach, was well stocked with French and English literature. Wieland met again his early love Sophie Gutermann, who had become the wife of Hofrat La Roche, then manager of Count Stadion's estates.
In Don Sylvio von Rosalva (1764), a romance in imitation of Don Quixote, he held his earlier faith up to ridicule and in the Comische Erzählungen (1765) he gave his extravagant imagination only too free a rein.