‘The Poet and the Princes: Eichendorff and the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha’

This article looks the ways in which the poetry of the German Romantic writer Eichendorff(1788-1857) has been translated and set to music, often being exploited by translators andmusicians for their own purposes. It studies in particular Prince Albert's setting of Eichendorff's ‘Morgengebet’ around 1840, at the time of his marriage to Queen Victoria, together with English translations of Albert's version of the text, and suggests reasons for Albert’s modifications of the original text. The different versions of the work of this iconicGerman writer are interpreted as important examples of intercultural exchange betweenGermany and England in the nineteenth century.