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Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) - pseudonym Loris | |
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Austrian poet, dramatist, essayist, and librettist, who became internationally famous for his collaboration with the German composer Richard Strauss. Hofmannsthal entered the literary scene very young, at the age of 16. After World War I Hofmannsthal founded with Max Reinhardt the Salzburg Festival, which have given regularly performances of his plays. REISELIED Aber unten liegt ein Land, Marmorstirn und Brunnenrand Hugo von Hofmannsthal was born in Vienna into an old Spanish-Jewish family. His father, Dr. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, was a bank director, whose fortunes had dwindled during the depression of 1873. However, he had been awarded the noble 'von', and had converted to Catholicism. Hofmannsthal's father noted his son's literary talents early. At the Café Griensteidl he introduced the young Hugo to the group of young bohemians around the newspaper editor Hermann Bahr and the dramatist and novelist Arthur Schnitzler. There Hofmannsthal started his aesthetic education. In the circle of young poets, known as Jung Wien, Hofmannsthal and Stefan Zweig were the most distinguished stars. His first poems and essays Hofmannsthal published at the age of 16 under the pseudonym Loris. In 1892 Hofmannsthal became a student of law at the University of Vienna, but he abandoned law in favor of Romance philology, and obtained his doctorate in 1898. After this he devoted himself entirely to writing. Between 1891 and 1899 Hofmannstahl wrote a number of short verse and plays, among them GESTERN (1891), DER TOR UND DER TOD (1893), which focused on an egocentric aesthete, DAS KLEINE WELTTHEATER (1897), and DIE HOCHZEIT DER SOBEIDE (1899). At the age of seventeen Hofmannsthal met the German poet Stefan George, from whom he adopted the idea of 'art-for-art's sake' for a period. During their fifteen-year friendship many of Hofmannsthal's poems appeared in George's journal Blätter für die Kunst. However, in the question of involvement, Hofmannstahl parted with the elite circle of George. In Gestern the hero realizes that reality doesn't circle around his ego. Hofmansthal saw that while art can be the most important thing in the life of a creative person, it doesn't have such meaning for the people who are unable to create: "Our present is all void and dreariness, / If consecration comes not from without." Eventually in DAS MÄRCHEN DER 672. NACHT (1905) Hofmannsthal expressed his fear that the world may deceive the aesthete. In his poetry Hofmannsthal used three major metaphors for life: the dream, the game, the drama. He viewed the poet as a synthesis of man the dreamer, man the actor, and man the gameplayer. Among Hofmannsthal's life-is-theater dramas is The Salzburg Great Theater of the World, which borrowed its central metaphor from Calderón's The Great Theater of the World. Hofmannsthal's tragedy DER TURM (1925) was based on Calderón's Life Is a Dream. Hofmansthal wrote two versions of the play, in which the hero, Sigismund reacts differently to chaos and corruption of power. DER ABENTEURER UND DIE SÄNGERIN (1899) and CHRISTINAS HEIMREISE (1910) were based on episodes in Casanova's Mémoires; he is called Baron Weidenstamm and Florindo in the respective plays. Hofmannsthal's most famous essay was EIN BRIEF (1905), a fictive letter of Philip, Lord Chandos, the younger son of the Earl of Bath, to Lord Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the English statesman, historian, and philosopher. Chandos confesses a major philosophical crisis. "I found it impossible to express an opinion on the affairs at Court, the events in Parliament, or whatever you wish." He has lost completely the ability to understand the meaning of the words and to think or to speak of anything coherently. Subsequently all social and cultural constructs are called into doubt. "The nature of our epoch," he wrote, "is multiplicity and indeterminacy." What other generations believed to be firm, he considered das Gleitende (the slipping, the sliding). Hoffmannstahl's approach to Chandos's crisis is Wittgensteinian: the limits of language are the limits of thought. During his journey to France in 1900, Hofmannsthal met among others Auguste Rodin and the poet Maeterlinck. The next year he married Gertrud Schlesinger, a banker's daughter. The couple settled in a country house at Rodaun, near Vienna, where they lived for the rest of their lives. At the age of twenty-six Hofmannsthal abandoned poetry, feeling that the theatre offered a better change to influence on political developments. The growth of anti-Semitism worried him, and several of his plays and librettos were about political leadership – the duty of rulers is to preserve arts which control irrationality. Because some of his earlier plays had received lukewarm reviews, Hoffmannsthal wanted to stage his works more successfully. In 1903 Hoffmannsthal formed friendship with Max Reinhardt in Berlin. Fascinated by spectacular effects, Reinhardt and Hofmannsthal turned plays into spectacles, which fused poetry, arts, drama, and music in a total work, as in Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk. For the Salzburg Festival Plays Hofmannsthal reworked the morality play JEDERMANN (1911, Everyman), which dealt with faith and salvation. The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius wrote music for the play in 1916, combining expressionistic and archaic motifs. During two decades, Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss cooperated in six operas, in spite of their contrasting temperaments and different backgrounds, Hofmannstahl's aestheticism and Strauss's down-to-earth attitude. Max Reinhardt was often in charge of the staging. Hofmannsthal's first libretto for Strauss was based on Sophocles's ELEKTRA (1906). He had started the work already in 1901, but the opera did not premiere until on 25 January 1909. Hoffmannsthal's "demonic, ecstatic" image of the ancient Greece inspired Strauss to "set mania to music", use over one hundred players, and create his famous "blood chord", "E-major and D-major mingled in pain". Elektra also reflected elements that were familiar from the writings of Freud – father fixation, recurring hallucinations, and disturbed sexuality. Hofmannsthal himself considered Strauss's Salome (1906), which was inspired by Oscar Wilde's poem, the "most beautiful and distinctive work". DER ROSENKAVALIER (The Knight of the Rose), which premiered in Dresden in January 1911, became highly popular. It has been played perhaps more often than any other twentieth-century German opera. Hofmannsthal's last major opera project was ARABELLA, performed in 1933. From its founding the central piece of the annual Salzburg Festival has been Hofmannsthal's Everyman, based on a famous medieval mystery play about the meaning of life and death. In the story, God sends Death as an administrator of justice to Everyman's soul, poisoned by egoism. When Death appears amid a feast, Everyman is left alone, his friends, Mammon, Fellowship, and others do not follow with him. Only the Record of His Deeds, a cripple, remains loyal and helped by Faith, Everyman finds his way back to his Christian youth. During World War I Hofmannsthal wrote several political essays. He served briefly in the Austrian army and then in the Austrian War Ministry. After the collapse of the monarchy, he became an advocate of the preservation and restoration of German and Austrian culture, hoping that art could save Europe from political turmoil. In the 1920s Hofmannsthal edited collections of writings by earlier German-language authors. Hofmannstahl's stand was also manifested in how he described the Salzburg Festival in 1921: "The introduction of musical/theatrical festivals at Salzburg means breathing new life into that which was once alive, giving encouragement to the original life-impetus of this Bavarian-Austrian race, and helping its people to find their way back to a true spiritual expression." Hofmannsthal died of a heart attack on July 15, 1929 – two days after his eldest son Franz had committed suicide. His collected works appeared between 1945 and 1959, after the Nazi ban on him was lifted. Hofmannsthal's hopes, which he had expressed in numerous writings, that "a true German and absolute man," "a prophet", would appear, came true in a way he never could foretell. For further reading: Hugo von Hofmansthal by H. Hammelmann (1957); Hofmannsthal, ed. F. Norman (1963); Hofmansthal's Festival Dramas by B. Coughlin (1964); Hofmannsthal and the French Symbolist Tradition by S.P. Sondrup (1976); Hugo von Hofmannsthal by L.A. Bangerter (1977); Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time: The European Imagination, 1860-1920 by Hermann Broch (1984); Hugo von Hofmannsthal: The Theater of Consciousness by B. Bennett (1988); The Challenge of Belatedness by J. Wilson (1991); Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, and the Austrian Theater by W.E. Yeats (1992); Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Poets and the Language of Life by A. Del Caro (1993); Hugo von Hofmannsthal by J. LeRider (1997); A Companion to the Works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ed. Thomas A. Kovach (2002) - See also: Arthur Schnitzler, Rainer Maria Rilke Selected works:
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