Friedrich Rückert

German poet, translator, and professor of Oriental languages known for his facility with many different verse forms.

A gifted linguist, Rückert was master of 44 languages and made his mark chiefly as a translator of Oriental poetry and as a writer of poems conceived in the spirit of Oriental masters. He was self-educated in Oriental languages and, through translations and imitations of Eastern literature, introduced his German readers to Arabic, Persian, Indian, and Chinese mythology and verse. He taught Oriental philology from 1826 at Erlangen and Berlin universities before moving in 1848 to Neuses to devote his life to scholarship and writing. He published several epic poems and historical plays but achieved greater success and repute with his lyric verse, particularly "Liebesfrühling" (1844; “Dawn of Love”), poems written during his courtship of Luise Wiethaus, whom he married in 1821.

Rückert's poetry was a powerful inspiration to composers and there are about 121 settings of his work. Among the composers who set his poetry to music are Schubert, Robert and Clara Schumann, Brahms, Mahler (song cycles Kindertotenlieder,“Songs on the Deaths of Children” written in 1834 on the death of his two children), Max Reger, Richard Strauss, Zemlinsky, Hindemith, Bartók, Berg, Hugo Wolf and Heinrich aspar Schmid.

Rückert had a splendour of imagination which made Oriental poetry congenial to him, and he has seldom been surpassed in rhythmic skill and metrical ingenuity. There are hardly any lyrical forms which are not represented among his vast works, and in all of them he wrote with equal ease and grace.

He died on 31 January 1866 at age 77 in Neuses, near Coburg.