Friedrich Schiller

Friedrich Schiller was a regimental surgeon who fled the Duke of Württemberg after his first play, The Robbers, made him famous, and spent his short life as dramatist, historian, philosopher and Goethe’s friend and collaborator at Weimar. The Aesthetic Education of Man argues that beauty is the road to freedom and that man is only fully human when he plays; William Tell, his last play, is the drama of a people’s liberation. The Ode to Joy is his, and Beethoven’s Ninth its setting. He died of tuberculosis at forty-five.