Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart

Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart (Obersontheim, Swabia, 1739 – Stuttgart, 1791) was a German poet, journalist and music critic, known above all for his songs and his aesthetic writings on the music of his time. His family directed his studies towards theology, although he received music lessons from his father and from G. W. Gruber. He entered the University of Erlangen in 1758, but his conflicts with the academic authorities sent him back to Aalen in 1760.

Between 1763 and 1769 he was organist and tutor in Geislingen. That year he obtained a post in Ludwigsburg, the residence of the Duke of Württemberg, where he also served as harpsichordist at the opera. His disorderly lifestyle led to his banishment in 1773. In Augsburg he founded the Deutsche Chronik, a publication covering politics, literature and music, which he moved to Ulm and sustained successfully for three years. His criticisms of the Catholic Church and of various courts earned him the enmity of the nobility, and in 1777 Duke Charles Eugene had him imprisoned in the fortress of Hohenasperg. According to some accounts, he had insulted the duke's mistress.

His confinement lasted ten years, during which he wrote much of his work. He dictated his autobiography, Leben und Gesinnungen, to a fellow prisoner, and around 1784–1785 he drafted his Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst, published posthumously in Vienna in 1806. Many of his surviving compositions date from these years. After his release in 1787 he was appointed court poet in Stuttgart, but his broken health prevented him from completing an edition of his poetry and his writings on music.

As a performer he excelled on the organ, harpsichord and clavichord, and his contemporaries, Burney among them, praised his virtuosity. His songs, strophic in form with melodies of a popular flavour, enjoyed considerable success, although their harmonies are often clumsy. His historical importance lies in his writings on German musical life in the second half of the eighteenth century and in his pre-Romantic aesthetics, which gave a central place to expression. Schubert, Schumann and Beethoven read his ideas.

Schubert set four of his songs, among them Die Forelle and An mein Klavier, which form part of the permanent repertoire of the lied.