Siegfried Lipiner

Siegfried Salomo Lipiner (24 October 1856 – 30 December 1911) was an Austrian writer and poet whose works made an impression on Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche, but who published nothing after 1880 and lived out his life as Librarian of Parliament in Vienna. A poet and dramatist of highly individual character, he is today remembered in German-speaking literary circles mainly for his translations of the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz; he is also known to music history as having been a close friend of Gustav Mahler.

Life

Lipiner was born in Jarosław. A prodigious talent, he produced a well-regarded treatment of 'Prometheus Unbound' at the age of seventeen, He attended the University of Leipzig as a student of philosophy, literature and natural science; one of his teachers was Gustav Fechner. By his early twenties, he had produced an important work on the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and become a personal acquaintance of Nietzsche — who had called him 'a veritable genius'.