1789–1860 · Romantic
Friedrich Silcher lived from 1789 to 1860. He was a German composer and music teacher who became music director of the University of Tübingen in 1817. He wrote about a thousand works, mostly choral and vocal, and many arrangements of folk songs. The site offers his sheet music for choir and for voice with piano.
Friedrich Silcher was born on 27 June 1789 into the family of a schoolteacher. In 1806 he became an assistant to the schoolteacher and musician Nikolaus Ferdinand Auberleben in Fellbach. In 1807–1808 Silcher worked as a private tutor in Schorndorf, and from 1809 to 1814 he taught at a girls' school in Ludwigsburg.
Silcher's first performances as a singer and pianist took place under the patronage of the school director Jonathan Friedrich Bahnmaier. He also pursued the visual arts and took lessons from Ludovika Simanowiz, among others. To publish his first work, the piano variations Gib mir die Blumen, he made a lithographed cover himself.
In 1815 Silcher went to Stuttgart as a private music tutor. One of his pupils was Julius Benedict. Alongside his work he took private lessons in composition and piano from Conradin Kreutzer and later from Johann Nepomuk Hummel.
In 1817, at the invitation of Bahnmaier, by then a professor at the University of Tübingen, Silcher received the newly created post of university music director and held it until 1859. In 1829 he founded the university's Liedertafel, the Akademische Liedertafel, and led it until the end of his life. In 1852 the university awarded him an honorary doctorate.
Silcher campaigned for the development of school and church music and of music education in Württemberg. His teaching ideas were shaped by his acquaintance with the educational doctrine of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and by a personal meeting with Hans Georg Nägeli in 1819. He tried to introduce a system of part-singing in Württemberg schools. In 1851 he published a textbook of harmony and composition (Harmonie- und Kompositionslehre).
Silcher married Luise Rosine Ensslin (1804–1871) in 1822. The couple's children were two daughters and a son. He died in Tübingen in August 1860.
Silcher wrote about a thousand works, mostly choral and vocal. In 1826–1860 a series of his collections of arrangements of German and foreign folk songs appeared, about 320 in all, and they met with considerable success. Another successful project was three collections of Ludwig van Beethoven's instrumental melodies arranged as songs, partly to words by Silcher himself. He also wrote the Singspiel Die kleine Lautenspielerin.
Among his original songs, Der gute Kamerad (The Good Comrade), written in 1825 to words by Ludwig Uhland, had a special fate. It is still used today as a funeral march at the funerals of German and Austrian soldiers. Schubert also set "Am Brunnen vor dem Tore", but it is popular in Silcher's version. The melody of "So nimm denn meine Hände" was originally written for a different song.
The site has four editions. They are the choral pieces Die Soldatenbraut, Ännchen von Tharau and Anke van Tharaw for mixed choir (SATB), at the Intermediate level, and The Loreley for voice with piano, at the Upper intermediate level. You can start with the choral pieces and move on to The Loreley.