In 1983, the German sculptor Angela Laich created a sculpture named Hyperion, after the main character of the Hölderlin novel. The Italian composer Luigi Nono included passages from Hyperion in his work Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima for string quartet as part of the score to be 'sung' silently by the performers while playing the piece. In Arnold Fanck's 1926 film Der Heilige Berg, Leni Riefenstahl's character Diotima is named after Hyperion's love.īetween 1960-1969 the Italian composer and conductor Bruno Maderna composed the opera Hyperion after Hölderlin's novel. The work contains Hyperions Schicksalslied ('Hyperion's Song of Fate'), an interpolated poem on which Johannes Brahms composed the Schicksalslied, Op. An impossibility to travel becomes the essence of his travel. In the same time Hyperion after all these losses understands the limits of his idealized concept of Greece. It recounts Hyperion's attempts to overthrow the Turkish rule in Greece (in one of the footnotes Hölderlin specifically ties events in the novel with the Russians 'bringing a fleet into the Archipelago' in 1770, framing the novel's events into the Orlov Revolt), his disillusionment with the rebellion, survival in the deadly Battle of Chesma, his devastation when Diotima dies of a broken heart before they can be reunited and his subsequent life as a hermit in the Greek wilderness, where he embraces the beauty of nature and overcomes the tragedy of his solitude.

Hyperion is set in Greece and deals with invisible forces, conflicts, beauty, and hope. He further developed it while serving as a Hofmeister on the estate of Charlotte von Kalb, and put finishing touches to the novel while receiving lectures from Johann Gottlieb Fichte at the University of Jena. Hölderlin began working on Hyperion in 1792, as a 22-year-old student at the Tübinger Stift.

Hyperion novel