Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)

German poet. With Goethe and Schiller, one of the triumvirate of German Romanticism. His fame was established with a Buch der Lieder (Book of Song [texts]) in 1827; thereafter his poems were used for hundreds of nineteenth-century German art songs by composers including Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Brahms, and Hugo Wolf. His style combined lyrical beauty with pointed wit and, toward the end of his life, some degree of bitterness. Like Chopin, Heine made Paris his home after the 1830 revolutions, there chronicling the Romantic fever for readers of the German-language press. A setting of his poem "Die Loreley" has become what amounts to the most beloved folksong of the Rhineland.

Back to Timeline