Duchess Anna Amalia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel

Education

Anna Amalia was well-educated as befitted a princess. She studied music with Friedrich Gottlob Fleischer and Ernst Wilhelm Wolf.

Marriage

In Brunswick, on 16 March 1756, sixteen-year-old Anna Amalia married eighteen-year-old Ernst August II Konstantin, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach and they had two sons. Ernst August died in 1758 leaving her regent for their infant son, Karl August.

Regency

During Karl August's minority she administered the affairs of the duchy with notable prudence, strengthening its resources and improving its position in spite of the troubles of the Seven Years' War. Despite her heavy official responsibilities, she cultivated intellectual interests, especially music. She continued to take lessons in composition and keyboard playing from the leading musician in Weimar. Amalia von Helvig, a German-Swedish artist and writer, later became part of her court. She hired Christoph Martin Wieland, a poet and translator of William Shakespeare, to educate her son. [2] . On 3 September 1775, her son reached his majority, and she retired.

Cultural role

As a patron of the arts, Anna Amalia drew many of the most eminent people in Germany to Weimar. She gathered a group of scholars, poets and musicians, professional and amateur, for lively discussion and music-making at the Wittum palace. In this ‘court of the muses’, as Wilhelm Bode called it, the members included Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller. She succeeded in engaging Abel Seyler's theatrical company, considered the best theatre company in Germany at that time."

Anna Amalia herself played a significant part in bringing together the poetry of 'Weimar Classicism'. Johann Adam Hiller's most successful Singspiel, Die Jagd (the score of which is dedicated to the duchess), received its first performance in Weimar in 1770, and Weimar was also the scene of the notable première on 28 May 1773 of the ‘first German opera’, Wieland's Alceste in the setting by Anton Schweitzer. Anna Amalia continued the tradition of the Singspiel in later years with performances in the amateur court theatre of her own compositions to texts by Goethe.

She also established the Duchess Anna Amalia Library, which is now home to some 1,000,000 volumes. The duchess was honored in Goethe's work under the title Zum Andenken der Fürstin Anna-Amalia.

Music

Anna Amalia was a notable composer. The majority of her works belong stylistically to the Empfindsamkeit, in the manner of Hiller and Schweitzer, combining features of song and of arioso. In 2021-2023, further works of Anna Amalia were discovered by the academic Stephen Husarik in the collection of Archduke Rudolf of Austria.

Her compositions include:

Chamber

• Divertimento (clarinet, viola, violoncello, and piano) c. 1780

Harpsichord

• sonatas

Opera

• Das Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilern (text by Goethe)
• Erwin und Elmire (text by Goethe) 1776

Orchestra

• Oratorio (1768)
• Sacred Choruses (four voices and orchestra)
• Symphony (2 oboes, 2 flutes, 2 violins and double bass) 1765

Vocal

• songs

Ancestry