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the dangers that lay ahead. Yet, in Act i of Arabella, he let pass a derogatory reference to the Jewish financier who purchased Mandryka’s forests. Was he, himself, motivated by the income he would generate by keeping his works in front of German audiences? Is it plausible that Strauss, then in his seventies, could have left his country to start anew elsewhere? His family would most certainly have been at risk of seizure. Scholars and biographers have commented on all points of view. Officially he was “de-Nazified” after the war, with no clear conclusion on culpability. Still, Strauss’ works were banned on the Israeli airwaves for many years.
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Hugo von Hofmannsthal, literary prodigy Hofmannsthal might have been fortunate to have missed these terrible events. Had he lived beyond 1929, it would have been interesting to see his reaction to the homogenizing of his beloved Austria in the Anschluss and the worsening political conditions of his former intellectual circle. He had always been a world apart as a member of Vienna’s aesthetic guild. Born on February 1, 1874, into a cosmopolitan, cultured banking family, his precocious talents matured quickly. His first lyric poems, published under the name Loris, drew the attention of the Viennese intelligentsia, Jung Wien, which included Arthur Schnitzler and Hermann Bahr. Other connections were made with Gerhart Hauptmann, Maurice Maeterlinck, Auguste Rodin and Stefan George, from whom (along with Bahr) he made early contact with the work of French symbolists Baudelaire, Verlaine and Mallarmé. Hofmannsthal’s affinity to the Holy Roman Empire (over which the Austrian Habsburgs had held power for centuries) and Central Europe’s relation to antiquity informed many of his later works.
He witnessed the devastation brought by World War i and the end of Austria as he knew it but tried to keep the old metaphors of grandeur alive as well as cultural and linguistic traditions. Efforts to establish the Salzburg Festival are linked to his desire to salvage what he could from the former empire. In addition to programming Goethe’s Faust, he envisioned dramas by Shakespeare, Calderón and Molière as well as musical pieces by Mozart. Produced by Max Reinhardt, the first work to be performed was Hofmannsthal’s play Jedermann in 1920. Back in 1900, the gifted 26-year-old approached the now-celebrated Strauss with a scenario for a ballet, Der Triumph der Zeit, but the composer declined to set it. Six years later, Strauss was drawn to Hofmannsthal’s adaptation of Sophocles’ Electra, and a fruitful 23-year partnership was born. The librettist was attracted to the operatic genre because his chosen métier, writing eloquent verse, had become inadequate for expressing his vision of the true human experience. Hofmannsthal considered the text for Arabella to be his finest literary achievement, the one most accessible and free of pretention. His death ended one of the greatest librettistcomposer teams, rivaling Metastasio-Caldara, Da Ponte-Mozart, Scribe-Meyerbeer and Boito-Verdi. In the opera, Arabella may have found “Der Richtige,” who would “accept her as she is,” but in real life, as the uneven quality of his later works attest, Strauss certainly had discovered his professional “Right One” in Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Tragically, fate intervened.