Christian Gotthold Schocher (1736-1810) is of some historical interest as the founder of a little known school of German declamation around 1800. For Schocher, a notation system for speech similar to musical notation is crucial to the cultivation of the art. Among Schocher’s followers, Johann Carl Wötzel (1765-1836) takes a special place as his self-proclaimed apostle and a notorious plagiarist, who may have incorporated parts of Schocher’s lost ‘System’ into his own work.