Biography
Johann Daniel Müller (born February 10, 1716 in Wissenbach , Nassau (today part of Eschenburg ); died not before 1786 probably in Riga ), also: Daniel Müller , Daniel, Elias, Elias Artista, Messias, DS, p. [1] was violinist , violist and concert director , then a radical pietist author and “ prophet ” of the unification church “Revelation of Christ”.
In 1726 he came to the Nassau court in Dillenburg , where he learned to play the violin. At the Wittgenstein court in Berleburg (from 1733) he got to know the radical Pietist literature.
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Around 1735 he met Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig, who recommended him to the court conductor Johann Theodor Roemhildt in Merseburg . From 1737 to 1739 he was the violinist and violist court musician in Darmstadt ; then he devoted himself to reading Jakob Boehmes, among others . In 1744 he was appointed court musician, cantor and school clerk in Hachenburg and married Maria Ursula, widowed Schott, née Windecker (1705–1759), a relative of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's mother, Catharina Elisabeth Goethe , née. Textor.
In 1746 he moved to Frankfurt am Main . As concert director (since 1747) he published the Complete Hessen-Hanauische Choral- Buch (2 parts, 1754) there. Johann Daniel Müller has been mentioned as the first violinist of the Frankfurt Chapel since 1755.
The young Goethe may have met him during performances in the Sankt-Katharinen-Kirche in Frankfurt , where Goethe's family had their pews. Müller's book Elias with the Alcoran of Mahomeds, which is open to the Koran . In the revelation of Jesus Christ. […] (1772) was in the library of Goethe's father, the Imperial Councilor Johann Caspar Goethe ; Goethe's orientalist advisor Heinrich Friedrich von Diez owned two copies.
After the death of his wife (1759), the visionary enlightened Müller, who felt called to the recurring prophet Elias (Elias Artista) and founded a church unifying paganism ( paganism ), Judaism, Christianity and Islam, left Frankfurt am Main and traveled through northern and eastern Germany, Scandinavia, the Baltic States and Russia.
After Müller's visit to Dillenburg, attested to in 1786 - the judiciary there, Karl von Knoblauch zu Hatzbach, mentions him in a letter to Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - his trace is lost. He is said to have died in the vicinity of Russian late rose cruisers in Riga.
His at least 27 books, some of them very extensive, ensured him, who had deferred his high musical virtuosity in favor of his religious vocation, international reputation. Of the theosophically oriented Illuminati in Avignon [2] , a conservative, Swedenborg-friendly secret society around Abbé de Brumore ( Philibert Guyton de Morveau ) and Dom Antoine-Joseph Pernety, to be distinguished from the radical Enlightenment "Illuminati" around Johann Adam Weishaupt [3] , became Müller, a critical sympathizer of Emanuel Swedenborg, revered as "Élie Artiste" (Elias Artista). Reinhard Breymayer first pointed out the identity of this mysterious "Élie Artiste" with Johann Daniel Müller in research in 1981.
Müller pleaded for a dogma-critical universalism, but claimed for himself the authority to interpret the documents of revelation, the Bible , Talmud and Koran . Although he himself often proceeds allegorically and rejects the exegesis of Lutheran clergymen such as Friedrich Christoph Oetinger , who are committed to the letter, - in the writing Elias with the teaching of the Talmud and the rabbis in their true sense and understanding (1772), he describes Oetinger as a “priest of Satan “- he remains a free spirit like Hermann Samuel Reimarusintolerant of them because they completely reject the scriptural basis. With Reimarus whose the fragments dispute leading "fragments" Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had published, it sets Lessing unconcerned same. For him, Moses Mendelssohn is “a runaway from the synagogue of the fathers”.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.