Christoph Martin Wieland

Christoph Martin Wieland was born in 1733 near Biberach in Swabia, the son of a Pietist pastor, and spent most of his working life as a poet, translator, editor and teacher. His early poems were devout and Klopstockian; in the 1760s he turned to a lighter, ironic, Rococo manner, and in Biberach he began his German translation of Shakespeare's plays, the first of its kind.

In 1772 he went to Weimar as tutor to the young Duke Karl August, and there edited the Teutscher Merkur. His verse romance Oberon, in twelve cantos, appeared in 1780 and was widely admired, among others by Goethe. It was translated into English by William Sotheby (1798), and later gave Weber the subject for his opera. Wieland died at Weimar in 1813. His other principal works include the novel Geschichte des Agathon, often called the first German Bildungsroman.