Christian Fürchtegott Gellert
Gellert, Christian Fürchtegott (Hainichen nr. Freiburg, 1715-69, Leipzig), was educated at St Afra's school, Meißen (see Fürstenschulen), 1729-34, and then at Leipzig University, 1734-8. He was a delicate child, and never enjoyed robust health. After various short appointments as a private tutor, he qualified to lecture in 1744. His first volume of poems (Lieder) appeared in 1743. In 1745 his comedy Die Betschwester was published in the Bremer Beiträge. Its exposure of hypocrisy drew criticism upon him. A collection of comedies, including his first play and also Das Los in der Lotterie, Die zärtlichen Schwestern, Das Orakel, and Die kranke Frau, appeared as Lustspiele (2 vols., 1747). Gellert's unexciting but influential novel Leben der schwedischen Gräfin von G … was also published in two volumes in 1747-8. His popular fables were first printed in 1746 ( Fabeln und Erzählungen), and added to in 1748. A volume of model letters came in 1751 (Briefe, nebst einer praktischen Abhandlung von dem guten Geschmacke in Briefen), and in the same year Gellert, who had been lecturing since 1744, was elected to a professorship at Leipzig University. In his inaugural lecture Pro commoedia commovente he supported comédie larmoyante (das weinerliche Lustspiel). His Lehrgedichte und Erzählungen were published in 1754, and Geistliche Oden und Lieder in 1757. Gellert, who never married, was in failing health throughout his tenure of the chair of poetry, rhetoric, and ethics.
He is best known for his verse fables, written with charm and with the moral clearly pointed; his hymns (see Geistliche Oden und Lieder), often combining mellifluousness with an unexpected sense of grandeur, attracted Beethoven's attention, and still survive in church use. As a writer of comedy, Gellert inclined to the sentimental tone popularized by Nivelle de la Chaussée (1692-1754), and rarely succeeded in dispelling an air of insipidity. Die schwedische Gräfin, though a painstakingly flat production, reveals with singular clarity the combination of reason and sentiment (in which the former controls the latter) which was characteristic of the 1740s.
Gellert was, however, if anything more important for his personal influence than for his published works. He lectured to large audiences on moral themes, and maintained a vast punctilious correspondence with strangers as well as friends, always ready, without distinction of rank, to advise those who wrote to him in moral perplexity. His wide-ranging popularity is symbolized by recorded gifts of firewood from a peasant and of a quiet horse from Prince Heinrich of Prussia. He was one of the few German authors approved by Friedrich II, who termed him ‘le plus raisonnable de tous les savants allemands’, and received him in audience in order to listen to his fables in Leipzig in 1760. Gellert himself would probably not have objected to the view that he was even more a moralist than a man of letters. He preaches contentment with one's lot and the subjection of the passions to reason.
Gellert is a principal character in Heinrich Laube's comedy Gottsched und Gellert (1847).
