Biography
Born in Weimar, he was the eldest son of Charles Augustus, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach and Luise Auguste of Hesse-Darmstadt.
Charles Frederick succeeded his famous father as Grand Duke when he died, in 1828. His capital, Weimar, continued to be a cultural center of Central Europe, even after the death of Goethe, in 1832. Johann Nepomuk Hummel made his career in Weimar as Kapellmeister until his death in 1837. Franz Liszt settled in Weimar in 1848 as Kapellmeister and gathered about him a circle that kept the Weimar court a major musical centre. Due to the intervention of Liszt, the composer Richard Wagner found refuge in Weimar after he was forced to flee Saxony for his role in the revolutionary disturbances there in 1848-49. Wagner's opera Lohengrin was first performed in Weimar in August 1850.
Charles Frederick died at Schloss Belvedere, Weimar, in 1853 and was buried in the Weimarer Fürstengruft.
Read more about this topic: Charles Frederick, Grand Duke Of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)