The Colour of His Eyes
Michael Hofmann: Hugo vonHofmannsthal, 12 March 2009
The Whole Difference: Selected Writings of Hugo vonHofmannsthal
edited by J.D. McClatchy.
Princeton, 502 pp., £24.95, October 2008,978 0 691 12909 9 Show More
edited by J.D. McClatchy.
Princeton, 502 pp., £24.95, October 2008,
“... 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 ... ”