Lenau, Nikolaus, is the pseudonym invariably used by Nicolaus Franz Niembsch, Edler von Strehlenau (Csatád, Hungary, 1802-50, Oberdöbling nr. Vienna), who was the child of an unhappy marriage between a dissipated Austrian cavalry officer and a Hungarian girl of good family. His father died when he was 5, and in his youth he was the subject of an emotional tug-of-war between his impoverished mother and his paternal grandparents. He developed into an impulsive, depressive, deeply disturbed personality. He studied at various universities, switching from faculty to faculty, and though he remained longest with medicine, he never qualified. In Vienna he was friendly with Bauernfeld and Grillparzer, and was especially close to Graf Auersperg (see Grün, Anastasius). After receiving a substantial inheritance in 1830, he moved in 1831 to Stuttgart where he had regular contact with Uhland, Schwab, and K. Mayer and was especially befriended by J. Kerner. For a time he was deeply attached to Lotte Gmelin, a niece of Schwab. Under the impulse of a romantic idealization he emigrated in 1832 to the United States, but was quickly disillusioned and returned in 1833 to Stuttgart.
In 1834 Lenau fell in love with Baroness Sophie von Löwenthal in Vienna, to whom he remained attached for the rest of his life. He conducted a dual correspondence with her, ‘official’ literary letters on the one hand, passionate private notes on the other. Her letters have been destroyed; Lenau's were published in 1906 and 1968 (ed. P. Härtling). He became increasingly subject to moods of despair from which neither the persisting link with Sophie von Löwenthal nor a betrothal to the actress Caroline Unger could distract him. A second engagement to Marie Behrends, the daughter of a Frankfurt patrician, preceded a complete mental breakdown in 1844. Lenau did not recover his sanity and eventually became almost totally paralysed. He was taken to the asylum at Winnental in Württemberg and was later transferred to Döbling (near Vienna), where he died.
Lenau's first published work was a collection of poems (Gedichte, 1832), and these were supplemented in 1838 by Neuere Gedichte. In 1844 he published a further volume entitled Gedichte, which contained new poems as well as reprinting those which had appeared in the earlier collections. Lenau's Faust. Ein Gedicht, of some 3, 000 lines, is partly indebted to Goethe's work and was published in 1836; Savonarola, a religious epic in the form of a cycle of verse romances, followed in 1837; and a second epic, Die Albigenser, in the form of a collection of longer poems described as ‘Freie Dichtungen’, was published in 1842. Lenau's last work of importance, the epic Don Juan, was published posthumously in 1851 by his friend Anastasius Grün, together with other shorter poems (Nachlaß). Of the longer works this is the best, but none of them has a vigour of imagination proportionate to its length.
Lenau's reputation rests chiefly on the lyric poetry, with its haunting rhythms, its pantheistic vision of nature, and its range of feeling from sadness to despair. Lenau was a violinist of merit, and was one of the first to appreciate the Beethoven of the Ninth Symphony and the late quartets. Under the name of Dr Moorfeld he is the central figure in the novel Der Amerika-Müde (1855) by F. Kürnberger. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe (6 vols.), ed. E. Castle, appeared 1910-23 and (based on this edition) Sämtliche Werke und Briefe (2 vols.) in 1970. Briefwechsel. Unveröffentlichtes und Unbekanntes, ed. J. Buchowiecki, appeared in 1969, the historisch-kritische Ausgabe,
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