Friedrich Hölderlin
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| Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin | |
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| Born | 20 March 1770 Lauffen am Neckar, Duchy of Württemberg 1 |
| Died | 6 June 1843 (aged 73) Tübingen, Germany |
| Occupation | Lyric poet |
| Literary movement | Classicism, Romanticism |
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (pronounced [ˈjoːhan ˈkrɪsti.aːn ˈfriːdrɪç 'hœldərliːn] in German; March 20, 1770 – June 6, 1843) was a major German lyric poet. His work bridges the Classical and Romantic schools.
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[edit] Life
Hölderlin was born in Lauffen am Neckar in the Duchy of Württemberg. He studied Theology at the Tübinger Stift (seminary of the Protestant Church in Württemberg), where he was friends and roommates with the future philosophers Georg Hegel and Friedrich Schelling.
In 1807, having become largely insane, he was brought into the home of Ernst Zimmer, a Tübingen carpenter with literary leanings, who was an admirer of his Hyperion. For the next 36 years, Hölderlin would live in Zimmer's house, in a tower room overlooking the beautiful Neckar valley, being cared for by the Zimmer family until his death in 1843.
[edit] Work
The poetry of Hölderlin, widely recognized today as one of the highest points of German literature, slipped into obscurity shortly after his death; his illness and reclusion made him fade from his contemporaries' consciousness – and, even though selections of his work were being published by his friends already during his lifetime.
In fact, Hölderlin was a man of his time, an early supporter of the French Revolution – in his youth at the Seminary of Tübingen, he and some colleagues from a "republican club" planted a "Tree of Freedom" in the market square, prompting the Grand-Duke himself to admonish the students at the seminary. He was at first carried away by Napoleon, whom he honors in one of his couplets (it should be noted that his exact contemporary Beethoven also initially dedicated his Eroica to the Corsican general).
Like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Schiller, his older contemporaries, Hölderlin was a fervent admirer of ancient Greek culture, but had a very personal understanding of it. In the great poems of his maturity, Hölderlin would generally adopt a large-scale, expansive and unrhymed style. Together with these long hymns and elegies – which included Der Archipelagus ("The Archipelago"), Brot und Wein ("Bread and Wine") and Patmos – he also cultivated a crisper, more concise manner in epigrams and couplets, and in short poems like the famous Hälfte des Lebens ("The Middle of Life"). In his years of madness, he would occasionally pen ingenuous rhymed quatrains, sometimes of a childlike beauty, which he would sign with fantastic names (such as "Scardanelli").
[edit] Influence
Hölderlin was a poet-thinker who wrote, fragmentarily, on poetic theory and philosophical matters. His theoretical works, such as the essays Das Werden im Vergehen ("Becoming in Dissolution") and Urteil und Sein ("Judgement and Being") are insightful and important if somewhat tortuous and difficult to parse. They raise many of the key problems also addressed by his Tübingen roommates Hegel and Schelling.
[edit] Music
Hölderlin's poetry has inspired many composers, perhaps the most famous example being the Schicksalslied by Brahms, a setting of Hyperions Schicksalslied. Other composers to have made settings of his poems include Peter Cornelius, Hans Pfitzner, Richard Strauss (Drei Hymnen), Max Reger (An die Hoffnung), Richard Wetz (Hyperion), Josef Matthias Hauer, Stefan Wolpe, Paul Hindemith (whose First Piano Sonata is inspired by Hölderlin's poem 'Der Main'), Benjamin Britten, Hans Werner Henze (whose Seventh Symphony is also partly inspired by Hölderlin), Bruno Maderna (Hyperion, Stele an Diotima), Heinz Holliger (the Scardanelli-Zyklus), Hans Zender (Hölderlin lesen I-IV), György Kurtág (who planned an opera on Hölderlin), György Ligeti (Hölderlin-Phantasien), Hanns Eisler (Hollywood Liederbuch), Viktor Ullmann (who wrote settings in Terezin concentration camp), Hans Zender, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Walter Zimmermann (Hyperion, an epistolary opera) and Wolfgang Rihm. Robert Schumann's late piano suite Gesänge der Fruhe was inspired by Hölderlin, as was Luigi Nono's string quartet Stille, an Diotima.
[edit] Cinema
A 2004 film, The Ister, is based on Martin Heidegger's 1942 lecture course (published as Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister"). The film features Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Bernard Stiegler, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg.
A 1981-82 television drama, "Untertänigst Scardanelli" (The Loyal Scardanelli), directed by Jonatan Briel in Berlin.
[edit] External links
- Hölderlin Gesellschaft (in German, links to English, French, Spanish, and Italian)
- Selected Poems of Hölderlin - English translations
- Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin - English translations
- Complete list of Hölderlin's poems in German
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| Persondata | |
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| NAME | Hölderlin, Friedrich |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Hoelderlin, Friedrich |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | German poet |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 20, 1770 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Lauffen am Neckar, Württemberg |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 6, 1843 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Tübingen |
