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This chapter considers the work of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. It examines how his poetry and his theorizing of language—most notably in “Von der Nachahmung des griechischen Silbenmaβes im Deutschen” (1755)—sounded the authoritative voice in German letters in the 1760s and 1770s. The epic Messias was the magisterial work that established his eminence. However, it was the publication of the odes, many written in strophic forms inspired by prototypes of ancient Greece and by the odes of Horace, that drew even wider attention among his contemporary poets, together with those composers who recognized the challenge of setting such things to music.

This chapter examines the works of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock that were set to music by Bach and Gluck. In particular, Bach's setting of Lyda and Gluck's settings of Der Jüngling and Die frü hen Gräber. These settings were published in Poetische Blumenlese of 1775, edited by Johann Heinrich Voss. In a letter dated 30 March 1774 to his colleagues Voss reports from Hamburg on a visit to Klopstock: “Afterward we spoke about the rhythm and the music of prosody. Gluck's Willkommen [o silberne Mond] and the Schlachtgesang pleased him thoroughly. The others, such as das deutsche Mädchen, less so, and yet more than Bach's composition. Bach is otherwise said to speak with esteem of Gluck”.

This chapter examines Beethoven's engagement with poetry. Never a willing co-conspirator in matters of genre, Beethoven plants himself against its shifting currents. Further, his engagement with the poem is often an encounter with the poet, enmeshed in those webs of culture and psyche that we are continually disentangling in his other music. As a young composer, Beethoven seemed to have kept his distance from Klopstock. However, in the midst of nearly 200 pages of drafts for the immense expanses of the first movement of the Eroica Symphony, for the Waldstein Sonata, and among extensive plottings for the opening scene of Vestas Feuer, there is a modest turn inward, to Klopstock's Das Rosenband, its syntactical inflections and enjambments appropriate more to ode than to lied.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, continental writing was more available to British readers than ever, in large part because of the translations and reviews made available in the periodical press. Moreover, as Alessa Johns argues, Revolutionary furore meant an increased openness to German literary work as opposed to French. With particular attention to the work of Anna Karsch, Sophie von La Roche, Benedikte Naubert, Johanna Schopenhauer and Margarete Klopstock this chapter tracks the presence of a dozen German women authors through popular and influential periodicals such as the Annual Register (1758–present), the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922), the Scots Magazine (1739–1826), and the Court Miscellany; or, Gentleman’s and Lady’s New Magazine (1766–71). Far from what one might expect, German women writers were less associated with sensibility or the Gothic; rather they are held up as exemplary, and used to stress transnational identification, especially along gendered lines.