Sturm und Drang
Sturm und Drang translates directly as storm and stress. German writers and composers wore that phrase as a badge between the late 1760s and early 1780s.
Why would a whole generation of Germany's most gifted writers spend their early years trying to overturn calm reason itself? Where did such an emotionally charged label even come from, and who carried it far enough to name an entire era? Why, within a couple of decades, did some of the very people who started the movement walk away and build something calmer in its place?
Friedrich Maximilian Klinger wrote a play called Sturm und Drang for Abel Seyler's touring company, the Seylersche Schauspiel-Gesellschaft, and saw it published in 1776. Seyler's actors first staged it a year later, in 1777. Klinger set the action inside the unfolding American Revolution, giving loud voice to raw emotion and prizing individuality over the rule of rationalism. Literature and music that felt the same way had already existed before Klinger's script. His play still marks the moment German artists became self-conscious about the new aesthetic. It soon lent its name to a wide circle of authors and composers across the mid-to-late Classical period.
French neoclassical theatre, born in the early Baroque and built on rational restraint, was the target adherents most wanted to topple. Sentimentality and emotional turbulence pushed out any interest in an objective, orderly view of life. Enlightenment ideals of rationalism, empiricism, and universalism no longer felt equal to capturing the human condition. Emotional extremes and unguarded subjectivity became fashionable across Germany in the late 1700s. The movement soon fed into Weimar Classicism and an early strain of Romanticism. That shift carried a political concern for freedom from despotism, alongside a near-religious regard for anything natural.
One camp of scholars would limit Sturm und Drang strictly to Goethe, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. Their closest circle counts too. That group worked in fiction and philosophy between 1770 and the early 1780s. Others describe a broader literary current running through prose, poetry, and drama across the German-speaking lands until the century's end. Even the people who started it eventually saw it as a burst of premature exuberance. They abandoned it for other, often conflicting artistic pursuits.
Long before the name Sturm und Drang existed, dramatists starting with F. M. Klinger were already writing the Kraftmensch, a literary figure who answered to no authority but himself. That figure needed no outside rules and refused to be tempered by rationalism. Its ideals matched the later movement so closely that scholars argue the new name just catalogued parallel currents already running through German literature.
Johann Georg Hamann supplied one of the movement's deepest philosophical roots. His 1762 text, Aesthetica in nuce. Eine Rhapsodie in kabbalistischer Prose, shaped the thinking of writers who came after him. Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder both came from Königsberg, and both had once been in contact with the philosopher Immanuel Kant. The dramatists themselves wrote their own theoretical statements: Lenz produced Anmerkungen übers Theater, and Goethe wrote Von deutscher Baukunst and Zum Schäkespears Tag. The single most important document of the period was the 1773 volume Von deutscher Art und Kunst. Einige fliegende Blätter. That collection carried Herder's commentary on Ossian and Shakespeare, plus contributions from Goethe, the Italian writer Paolo Frisi in translation, and Justus Möser.
Goethe's unfinished poem Prometheus captures the typical Sturm und Drang protagonist. That figure is driven to action, often violent action, by revenge and greed rather than noble motives. That same work juxtaposes humanistic platitudes against sudden outbursts of irrationality, a contrast the movement returned to again and again. Its literature carried an anti-aristocratic edge, and it tried to elevate whatever felt humble, natural, or intensely real, especially anything painful, tormenting, or frightening.
Goethe's 1774 novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers tells a story of hopeless love ending in suicide. The book drew on the author's own introspection about love and torment. Friedrich Schiller's 1781 drama Die Räuber pushed melodrama toward becoming a recognized dramatic form in its own right. Its plot pits two aristocratic brothers, Franz and Karl Moor, against each other. Franz plays the villain, trying to cheat Karl out of his inheritance. His motives run deep enough to open a full investigation of good and evil.
Marianne Ehrmann is a rare named exception in a period whose women writers are largely missing from standard accounts of Sturm und Drang. That gap can be read as a symptom of the movement's own masculinist ethos. It might equally reflect a failure of more recent criticism to engage with the women who wrote at the time.
According to Betty Waterhouse, the movement began in 1771 and ended in 1778. The rise of the middle class in the eighteenth century was reshaping how society judged rank and standing. Dramatists began treating the stage as a place to argue about social problems. The French writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier had already proposed using drama to push political ideas, an idea that would take many years to fully take hold.
The Seven Years' War ended in 1763, leaving German national pride running high and a new sense that Germany deserved a bigger stage. The aristocracy tightened its grip as the ruling class, widening the gap between social classes. Writers wanted a new kind of art that could dethrone the still-popular French neoclassicism. Johann Georg Hamann argued for defending the native culture of the Volk. He insisted that language, the root of all human experience, had been richer in images before the abstract eighteenth century took hold. Germany itself had no single state to rally around. It was splintered into hundreds of small states. The movement answered that lack of political unity with stories about wanting to belong to something larger.
Shakespeare became the model these writers reached for. They prized his command of language, his tangled original plots, and characters drawn from every social class. Many Sturm und Drang writers saw themselves as challengers of the Enlightenment, even though the movement grew out of it rather than against it. Its distinctive contribution was to spotlight the power of environment and the contradictory, self-defeating attitudes present in every part of society. It explored depression and violence through an open plot structure well before other movements dared to. Sturm und Drang was the first to call Shakespeare a genius of dramaturgy, and it laid groundwork later claimed by nineteenth-century Romanticism. Heinrich Leopold Wagner, Goethe, Lenz, Klinger, and Schiller each used episodic structure, violence, and mixed genres to question social rules. All of them doubted anything would truly change.
Six playwrights defined and spread the movement: Leisewitz, Wagner, Goethe, Lenz, Klinger, and Schiller. Abel Seyler, who owned the Seylersche Schauspiel-Gesellschaft, played a key role in promoting all of them.
Johann Anton Leisewitz was born in Hanover in 1752 and trained as a lawyer. He left behind a single complete play, Julius of Taranto, written in 1776 and later seen as a forerunner of Schiller's The Robbers. Leisewitz married Sophie Seyler, daughter of the theatre director Abel Seyler.
Heinrich Leopold Wagner was born in Strasbourg on the 19th of February, 1747. He trained in law and joined the literary circle around Johann Daniel Salzmann. He also worked as a dramatist, producer, translator, and lawyer for Abel Seyler's traveling company. His two best-known plays were Die Reue nach der Tat in 1775 and Die Kindermorderin in 1776. Both were built around child murder, a subject nearly every major Sturm und Drang writer explored. Die Kindermorderin kept a fairly simple plot and few changes of setting, close to neoclassical habits. It broke, though, with the rule that a protagonist had to be nobly born. Instead it showed the aristocracy disrupting the lives of middle class characters. The play used a wide range of colorful language to mark out each character's social station. Inside it, a lieutenant named Groningseck seems ready to look past social divisions, only to be betrayed by a fellow officer, Hasenpoth.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in Frankfurt in August 1749. His first major play, Götz von Berlichingen, appeared in 1773, written in a Shakespearean style that became a hallmark of the movement. Goethe was also known for his staging work and for his long dramatic poem Faust. He directed theatre at the Weimar Theatre and eventually ran the entire company. A two-year trip to Italy introduced him to the Greek and Roman ruins there, and he came home with a new interest in classical form.
Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz was born in Sesswegen, in what is now Latvia, on the 23rd of January, 1751. He studied theology and philosophy at the University of Königsberg. His first poem, Die Landplagen, appeared in 1769. He followed it with Anmerkungen über das Theater, The New Menoza, and Der Hofmeister, all in 1774. Pandemonium Germanicum came in 1775, and Die Soldaten in 1776. Lenz took Aristotle's idea that plot matters more than character and turned it upside down, redrawing the line between comedy and tragedy. In his tragedies, characters make decisions that cause events; in his comedies, circumstance pushes and pulls the character instead. Die Soldaten, his clearest Sturm und Drang work, centers on soldiers degrading civilians, particularly the seduction and abuse of young women. Its influence reached forward to later writers such as Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Bertolt Brecht.
Friedrich Maximilian Klinger was born in Frankfurt on the 17th of February, 1752, into a family that struggled financially after his father's death. Goethe's family helped fund his law studies at Giessen, and he later spent a year and a half working with Seyler's troupe. Many of his earliest plays were classical in style. He then turned toward Die Zwillinge, Die neue Arria, and Simsone Grisaldo, all in 1776, and Stilpo und seine Kinder in 1780. His most famous work, a play from 1776, is set, oddly, in revolutionary America rather than Germany. It echoes Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in its feuding households and borrows character names from All's Well That Ends Well. Klinger himself described the mixture of tones at its core, writing that "the deepest tragic emotion continually alternates with laughter and joviality."
Friedrich Schiller was born in Marbach on the 10th of November, 1759. He studied medicine at the Karlsschule Stuttgart, a military academy founded by the Duke of Württemberg. There he formed a close bond with Goethe. The two shared a deep interest in questions of aesthetics. That friendship eventually led to Weimar Classicism, a style blending classical, romantic, and Enlightenment ideals. After his plays Die Räuber and Kabale und Liebe, Schiller became a major poet. He went on to write influential essays and Weimar Classical drama. One critical assessment held that the play's fifth act broke new ground in German literature, largely through the younger brother's attack on religious belief. The same assessment praised the play as a sharp study of the era's social bonds and German sensibility.
Composers writing between 1750 and 1800 reached for minor keys whenever they wanted to convey something difficult or depressing. That habit became a hallmark of musical Sturm und Drang. Their themes turned angular, full of large leaps and unpredictable melodic turns. Tempos and dynamics could shift rapidly and without warning, tracking sudden swings of feeling. Pulsing rhythms, syncopation, and racing lines high in the soprano or alto register became common, while string writing leaned on tremolo and sharp, dramatic accents.
Christoph Willibald Gluck's 1761 ballet Don Juan is often credited with announcing musical Sturm und Drang. Its program notes stated outright that the D minor finale was meant to frighten the audience. Musical theater is where the literary and musical strands of the movement actually met, both aiming to deepen emotional expression inside opera. The obligato recitative shows this best, using orchestral accompaniment to paint an intense emotional undercurrent beneath a solo singer's line. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1762 play Pygmalion, first staged in 1770, built a similar bridge by using instrumental music underneath spoken drama to carry its mood. It stands as an early example of melodrama and left a mark on Goethe and other German writers.
Vienna, the hub of German and Austrian music, was a cosmopolitan city plugged into wider European currents. Minor-key experiments by Haydn or Mozart usually belong first to that broader continental story. Even so, music's connection to the movement stayed thinner than literature's. Many attempts to file a piece under Sturm und Drang are shaky at best. The clearest musical ties surface in opera and in early ancestors of program music, such as Haydn's Farewell Symphony. Traces of the same spirit turn up later in Beethoven, Weber, and even Schubert.
Joseph Haydn's own Sturm und Drang period is usually placed in the late 1760s and early 1770s. During those years his music took on a newly agitated, impassioned edge. Haydn never once credited Sturm und Drang as his inspiration, and his music kept its grip on classical form and motivic unity throughout. Even so, the pull of contemporary musical theatre on his instrumental works from that period is hard to miss. Symphonies from the period even carry names that hint at their mood, among them La Passione, Lamentatione, and Trauer.
Mozart's Symphony No. 25, the so-called Little G minor symphony from 1773, is one of only two minor-key symphonies he ever wrote. Beyond its unusual key, it carries rhythmic syncopation and the jagged themes typical of the style. It also features an unusual emancipation of the winds, letting the oboe and flute burst through where the violins would normally lead. That symphony likely owes more to the minor-key works of Johann Baptist Wanhal, a Viennese contemporary and acquaintance of Mozart. It owes less to any deliberate embrace of a German literary movement.
Paintings of storms and shipwrecks became fashionable across Germany from the 1760s through the 1780s, showing nature's terror and irrational destruction. Those pre-romantic works proved that ordinary audiences wanted art that provoked strong feeling, not just calm scenery. Nightmarish, unsettling visions found their own audience too.
Joseph Vernet, Caspar Wolf, Philip James de Loutherbourg, and Henry Fuseli were the artists most closely associated with this fascination with nature's terror. Goethe owned and admired several of Fuseli's paintings, prizing their power to give a viewer, in his words, "a good fright."
Common questions
What does the term Sturm und Drang mean?
Sturm und Drang translates as storm and stress. It describes a proto-Romanticist movement in German literature and music that ran between the late 1760s and the early 1780s.
Who named the Sturm und Drang movement?
The movement takes its name from a play by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, published in 1776 and first staged by Abel Seyler's theatre company in 1777. Klinger set the play during the American Revolution.
Which writers were central to the Sturm und Drang movement?
Six playwrights are usually credited with defining and spreading the movement: Johann Anton Leisewitz, Heinrich Leopold Wagner, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, and Friedrich Schiller. Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder supplied much of its philosophical grounding.
Why did the Sturm und Drang movement reject the Enlightenment?
Its writers saw French neoclassicism and Enlightenment ideals such as rationalism, empiricism, and universalism as too rigid to capture real human experience. They favored emotional turbulence, individuality, and subjectivity instead.
Which works of literature best represent Sturm und Drang?
Goethe's 1774 novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers and Friedrich Schiller's 1781 drama Die Räuber are both considered seminal examples. Johann Anton Leisewitz's 1776 play Julius of Taranto is regarded as an early, quintessential work of the movement.
How did Sturm und Drang influence classical music?
Composers such as Joseph Haydn wrote minor-key works with agitated, angular themes during a Sturm und Drang period in the late 1760s and early 1770s. Mozart's Symphony No. 25 in G minor, from 1773, is often linked to the same style, though he never claimed the connection himself.
All sources
3 references cited across the entry
- 1BookLongman Pronunciation DictionaryJohn Wells — Pearson Longman — 3 April 2008