Wilhelm IV, Duke of Saxe-Weimar
Biography
The palace that burned in 1774 had carried his name for a century: the Wilhelmsburg. Wilhelm IV rebuilt Weimar's residence out of what the fire of 1618 had left, supervised the work himself, and headed the first great society for the German language — a duke whose two lasting projects were a building and a vocabulary.
Building through a war
Born in Altenburg on 11 April 1598, he ruled in Weimar from 1 October 1626 — through the worst of the Thirty Years' War and out the other side — and put the residence back up out of a burnt shell. He watched the work himself and had his enthusiasms built into it: mechanical devices, an astronomical observatory, and a good organ in the chapel, an instrument he eventually learned to play.
The room he built for himself, and who used it later
That chapel is the point at which his story turns into somebody else's. Finished in 1630, it was the room the court called the Himmelsburg, and two generations after his death Johann Sebastian Bach played its organ for nine years. The duke who wanted an organ in his palace got, without knowing it, the acoustic that carried a large part of the Weimar cantatas.
Head of the Fruitbearing Society
His other title was literary. He had belonged to the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft since its founding in the Weimar castle on 24 August 1617, under the name the society gave him — "der Schmackhafte", the palatable one — and on 7 May 1651 its leadership was offered to him. For the rest of his life the first great society for the German language was directed from this town. He died in Weimar on 17 May 1662.
Notable Works & Achievements
The rebuilding of the Weimar residence as the Wilhelmsburg
The castle chapel later called the Himmelsburg
Leadership of the Fruitbearing Society from 1651
Connected Places in Weimar
Burgplatz 4, 99423 Weimar
The baroque Wilhelmsburg on this site is his building and his name; its chapel became Bach's Himmelsburg.
Historical Context
He is the period's builder: the residence rebuilt after the fire of 1618, and the Fruitbearing Society in his hands from 1651.
The century and a half between two castle fires is the Weimar nobody puts on a poster, and it is the one that made the town musical. It opens with a burnt-out castle in 1618 and closes with another one in 1774 — and in between, in a chapel that no longer exists, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote most of his organ music.
Read more about this period →Quick Facts
1598
1662
German
In Weimar's history
In Weimar's history
The first great society for the German language was founded here — a year before the castle it met in burned down.
A member from the founding day under the name "der Schmackhafte", and the society's head from 1651.
Fire took the Renaissance castle, and what replaced it gave Weimar a Baroque residence and, eventually, Bach's chapel.
The duke who rebuilt it, and whose name the new palace carried.