The Colour of His Eyes

Michael Hofmann

  • BuyThe Whole Difference: Selected Writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal edited by J.D. McClatchy
    Princeton, 502 pp, £24.95, October 2008, ISBN 978 0 691 12909 9

Hofmannsthal’s is a reputation in abeyance, and I am content that it should be so. There is a limit to how far it can fall – though in the English Sprachraum it was perhaps never all that high in the first place – because of ‘The Lord Chandos Letter’, the tiny but freakishly important story of 1902, the wonderful-but-never-seen play, Der Schwierige, a swansong of passivity in the drawing-room; and, above all, the opera libretti he wrote for Richard Strauss: Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten and Arabella. These, I would say, constitute half a safety-net, half a ball and chain, meaning that Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) won’t ever go away. All the same, when one thinks of him in English, he’s nothing like the author of a yellow ten-volume set of works that he is in German – five of plays, three of essays and talks, one apiece of poems and stories – and the usual slew of correspondence. Even there he’s not read, and it’s probably just as well.

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[*] The other selections are ‘The Lord Chandos Letter’ and Other Writings, translated by Joel Rotenberg (New York Review, 2005), and Andreas, translated by Marie Hottinger (Pushkin Press, 1997).

[†] Hofmannsthal (Zsolnay Verlag, 2005).