Hans Bethge (poet)

Hans Bethge (9 January 1876 – 1 February 1946) was a German poet whose reputation abroad rests above all on the versions of the Tang dynasty poetry set in Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde.

In 1943, at the height of the air campaign, he moved to the Swabian countryside where he spent his last years.

The Jugendstil painter Heinrich Vogeler illustrated three of his books, and the sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck, whose genius Bethge had recognized early on, made several portraits of him.

Bethge published several volumes of poems (chiefly on love and nature), diaries, travelogues, short stories, essays and plays.

The fresh, musical rhythm of Bethge's language and his free versification inspired settings by more than 180 other composers, among them Richard Strauss, Karol Szymanowski, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Hanns Eisler, Anna Teichmüller, Viktor Ullmann, Gottfried von Einem, Ernst Krenek, Artur Immisch, Ludvig Irgens-Jensen[1], Paul Graener, Bohuslav Martinů, Ernst Toch, Fartein Valen, Krzysztof Penderecki and Egon Wellesz.