Work
Gotter was the chief representative of French taste in the German literary life of his time. His poetry is elegant and polished, and largely free from the trivialities of the Anacreontic lyric of the earlier generation of imitators of French literature; but he lacked imaginative depth.
His plays, of which Merope (1774), an adaptation in blank verse of the tragedies of Maffei and Voltaire, and Medea (1775), a melodrama, are best known, were mostly based on French originals and had considerable influence in counteracting the formlessness and irregularity of the Sturm und Drang drama. Medea served as a libretto for an opera by Jiří Antonín Benda (1778).
Gotter's collected Gedichte appeared in 2 vols. in 1787 and 1788; a third volume (1802) contains his Literarischer Nachlass. See B. Litzmann, Schröder und Gotter (1887), and R. Schlösser, F. W. Gotter, sein Leben und seine Werke (1894).
His best known work is the lyrics to the well known lullaby Schlafe, mein Prinzchen, Schlaf ein.
Read more about this topic: Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter
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