German · 1759–1805
Friedrich Schiller was a German playwright, poet, historian and philosopher. Born in Marbach in Württemberg, he trained as a military doctor and made his name at twenty-two with the play The Robbers. He went on to write Intrigue and Love, Don Carlos, and the Wallenstein trilogy, and finished with Mary Stuart, The Maid of Orleans and William Tell. From 1789 he held a chair of history at Jena, where he wrote on the Thirty Years' War. After reading Kant he turned to aesthetics and produced Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man and On Naive and Sentimental Poetry. His friendship with Goethe, begun in 1794, shaped Weimar Classicism. His poem Ode to Joy was set by Beethoven in the Ninth Symphony. Schiller suffered from poor health for years and died of illness in Weimar at the age of 45.