Ludwig Tieck
1773–1853 · German writer, translator and critic, a founding figure of Romanticism
Johann Ludwig Tieck (Berlin, 1773-1853) was a German writer who worked across fiction, drama, translation and criticism. He is counted among the founding figures of the Romantic movement in German literature, and his career links the Enlightenment's habits of mind with the new interest in the fantastic, the medieval and irony that emerged around 1800.
The son of a rope-maker in Berlin, he studied history, philology and literature at Halle, Göttingen and Erlangen. At Göttingen he developed a lasting interest in Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama. Back in Berlin in the mid-1790s, he tried to earn a living by writing, contributing short stories to a popular series and publishing the epistolary novel William Lovell (1795-1796).
His turn towards Romanticism is visible in the tales of Volksmärchen von Peter Lebrecht (1797), which include Puss in Boots and The Fair-Haired Eckbert, a story where an obsessive mind slides into the supernatural. He married in 1798 and settled in Jena the following year, where he mixed with the Schlegel brothers and Novalis. With his old friend Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder he planned Franz Sternbald's Wanderings, which, together with Wackenroder's writings, was among the first expressions of the Romantic enthusiasm for old German art.
His plays of this period combine satire with a playful self-awareness about theatre. Comedies such as Puss in Boots (1797), The Topsy-Turvy World (1798) and Prinz Zerbino (1799) mock the literary taste of Berlin, while dramas such as The Life and Death of Saint Genevieve (1800) and Emperor Octavian (1804) celebrate the Middle Ages. Critics often find these works more interesting for their irony than for their dramatic control.
Between 1801 and 1817 he lived in Dresden, travelled in Italy, where he searched the Vatican Library for medieval German manuscripts, and spent time in London studying Shakespeare. He produced a four-volume translation of Cervantes's Don Quixote (Berlin, 1799-1801) and helped August Wilhelm von Schlegel with the Shakespeare translations. For roughly two decades he devoted himself largely to the theatre in Dresden. In his last years the King of Prussia brought him to Berlin, where he died in 1853.
His most lasting contribution lies in his tales and in his retellings of popular stories. His historical novels, such as Vittoria Accoramboni (1840), show a manner more distant from Romanticism. Richard Wagner drew on Phantasus for his opera Tannhäuser. After the 1820s he worked chiefly as a critic, editor and adviser to other writers, but it is his early poetry and fiction that still attract the most attention.
Key works
- The Fair-Haired Eckbert (1796): an unsettling tale in which a couple's buried past returns in supernatural form.
- Puss in Boots (1797): a satirical comedy that parodies the fairy tale and the literary fashions of its day.
- Franz Sternbald's Wanderings (1798): a novel of artistic development, written with Wackenroder, that reflects early Romantic admiration for old German art.
- Vittoria Accoramboni (1840): a historical novel set in Renaissance Italy.
Curiosities
A Don Quixote in German
Between 1799 and 1801 he published in Berlin a four-volume translation of Cervantes's Don Quixote, one of the best-known German versions of the novel in its time.
An echo in opera
It has been noted that Richard Wagner took from *Phantasus* the idea of Tannhäuser visiting the Pope and of Elisabeth dying during the song contest.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.