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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 September 2012
Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow, 1917) was conceived as Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's ‘chief joint work’, and its central message has been read as an allegory of artistic collaboration and social engagement. This article calls upon Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory to enrich such an interpretation and unravel the opera's positive conclusion as an inadequate cure for the artistic melancholy of the fin de siècle. While Strauss successfully engaged with allegory to portray two of the opera's characters – the infertile Emperor and Empress – he was unable, for his own philosophical reasons expressed in the contemporaneous Eine Alpensinfonie (1915), to ratify Hofmannsthal's hope, rooted in his ‘Chandos Crisis’, of creating an aesthetic totality, of reconstituting the symbol that Benjamin, in his later writings, pits against allegory.
1 Bednall, J. B., ‘From High Language to Dialect – a Study in Hofmannsthal's Change of Medium’, in Hofmannsthal Studies in Commemoration, ed. Norman, F. (London, 1963), 83Google Scholar.
2 As a Gymnasiast, the teenage Hofmannsthal was forbidden from publishing under his own name and did so under the pseudonym Loris [von Melnikov]. The standard narrative of Hofmannsthal's renunciation of poetry has been questioned by recent scholarship. See, for example, Kovach, Thomas A., ‘Hofmannsthal's “Ein Brief”: Chandos and his Crisis’, in A Companion to the Works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ed. Kovach, (Rochester, NY, 2002), 85–96Google Scholar.
3 It was published in consecutive editions of the Berlin-based Der Tag on 18 and 19 October 1902.
4 I refer to it throughout as the Chandos Letter, despite the fact that this inevitably implies agreement with the idea of a ‘Chandos Crisis’. The most recent translation to appear is in Hofmannsthal, , Selected Tales, trans. Davies, J. M. Q. (London, 2007), 85–93Google Scholar. I quote from Davies's version, sometimes with minor modifications, whilst also referencing in brackets the original German as it appears in von Hofmannsthal, Hugo, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Hirsch, Rudolf et al. , 37 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1975– )Google Scholar, hereafter abbreviated to SW. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
5 Recent descriptions of the Chandos Letter include Charles Rosen's of it as ‘a fundamental document of modernism [which] casts light … on the tumultuous history of modern literature, art, and music’; Rosen, ‘Radical, Modern Hofmannsthal’, The New York Review of Books (8 April 2010), 84–5.
6 Michael Hamburger is just one writer to have shown that Hofmannsthal's language scepticism leads back to the early 1890s; Hamburger, , Hofmannsthal: Three Essays (Princeton, 1972), 65–7Google Scholar.
7 24 June 1917 is the date Strauss completed his score (Trenner, Franz, Richard Strauss: Werkverzeichnis (Vienna, 1999), 243Google Scholar). Hofmannsthal had, however, essentially finished his work on the libretto by September 1915, having delivered the first and second acts to Strauss by mid-July 1914. Any characterisation of the opera as a war-time work is therefore misleading, at least in terms of Hofmannsthal's contribution.
8 The word ‘allegory’ can be defined, as here by the Oxford English Dictionary, as the ‘description of a subject under the guise of some other subject of aptly suggestive resemblance’. This definition reflects most closely the straightforward etymology: the Greek words allos (other) and agoria (speaking). The broadness of meaning immanent in both the word's origins and the first definition lead to two further main definitions: ‘an extended or continued metaphor’, and ‘an allegorical representation; an emblem’. Oxford English Dictionary Online, ‘Allegory’, www.oed.com/ (accessed 22 November 2009). See also Tambling, Jeremy, Allegory, The New Critical Idiom (London and New York, 2010), 6Google Scholar.
9 Yates, W. E., Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Theatre (New Haven and London, 1992), 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Le Rider, Jacques, Modernity and Crises of Identity, trans. Morris, Rosemary (New York, 1993), 49Google Scholar.
10 For example, the philosopher Fritz Mauthner wrote to Hofmannsthal at the end of October 1902: ‘I have also read your “Letter”. I read it as if it were the first poetic echo of my [Contributions to a] Critique of Language’, volume 1 of which was published in 1901. Hofmannsthal's reply explained: ‘My thoughts went the same way early on, often more enraptured by the metaphorical aspect of language, often more frightened by it’; SW, XXXI, 286. On the context and influence of Mauthner's Critique of Language, see Janik, Allan and Toulmin, Stephen, Wittgenstein's Vienna (1973; rpt. Chicago, 1996), 124–31Google Scholar.
11 Hofmannsthal, Selected Tales, 91 (50).
12 Ibid., 90 (49).
13 Ibid., 88 (48).
14 Alewyn draws a comparison between the identification of Goethe with the eponymous hero of his novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774); Über Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 4th edn (Göttingen, 1967), 66Google Scholar.
15 Koch, Hans-Albrecht, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Munich, 2004), 15Google Scholar. Hermann Broch has argued that art, moreover, was seen as the only possible route to further assimilation in a culture-obsessed city, the upper echelons of whose society were otherwise all-but impenetrable to Jews (Broch, Hermann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and his Time, trans. and ed. Steinberg, Michael P. (Chicago, 1984), 82–6Google Scholar). It was this shift towards Kultur that led, in Carl Schorske's classic account, to the failure of the Jewish liberal intelligentsia to consolidate their hard-won position of political influence in the early years of the twentieth century. See Schorske, Carl E., Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980; rpt. New York, 1981), especially chap. 3, ‘Politics in a New Key’Google Scholar. For a summary of the cultural and political debates at the fin de siècle and recent critical reactions to Schorske's narrative, see Beller, Steven (ed.), Rethinking Vienna 1900 (New York and Oxford, 2001), IntroductionGoogle Scholar.
16 Hofmannsthal, , ‘Gabriele D'Annunzio’, in Gesammelte Werke in zehn Einzelbänden, ed. Schoeller, Bernd, 10 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1979), VIII, 174Google Scholar (hereafter abbreviated to GW).
17 This concern is a pervasive theme through many of Hofmannsthal's essays, most notably ‘Der Dichter und diese Zeit’ (1906), GW, VIII, 54–81.
18 Kovach, ‘Hofmannsthal's “Ein Brief”’, 85.
19 Ryan, Judith, The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (Chicago, 1991)Google Scholar.
20 Broch, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and his Time, 89.
21 George's attempts to recruit the young Hofmannsthal to his cause came perilously close to inciting Hofmannsthal's father to a duel, an episode recounted with especial relish by Weinzierl, Ulrich in Hofmannsthal: Skizzen zu seinem Bild (2005; rpt Frankfurt am Main, 2007), 111–13Google Scholar.
22 Hofmannsthal, Selected Tales, 95 (54).
23 Smart, Mary Ann, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2004), 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 Benjamin, Walter, The Origin of German Tragedy, trans. Osborne, John (1979; rpt. London, 1985)Google Scholar. As Osborne himself notes, the translation of Trauerspiel, literally ‘Mourning Play’, as ‘Tragedy’ is inadequate; he leaves it untranslated in his text. I follow his example, referring to the book with its German title in my text, with references to page numbers in English translation and, in brackets, the German original as it appears in Benjamin, Walter, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tiedemann, Rolf and Schweppenhäuser, Hermann, 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1980), I/3, 203–409Google Scholar. Despite the book's highly troubled history, recounted, for example, in George Steiner's introduction to the English translation, excerpts of it were published by Hofmannsthal in his role as editor of Neue Deutsche Beiträge (in the August 1927 number), and a brief but enthusiastic correspondence also exists between the two men. For an account of Hofmannsthal's relationship with Benjamin, see Jäger, Lorenz, ‘Hofmannsthal und der “Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels”’, Hofmannsthal-Blätter, 31/32 (1985), 83–106Google Scholar.
25 Many of its ideas leave a trace on Adorno's writing, particularly In Search of Wagner, however, and have begun to exert an influence more broadly on opera studies. See, for example, Deathridge, John, Wagner Beyond Good and Evil (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2008), chap. 8: ‘Don Carlos and Götterdämmerung: Two Operatic Endings and Walter Benjamin's Trauerspiel’CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tomlinson, Gary, ‘Hamlet and Poppea: Musicking Benjamin's Trauerspiel’, The Opera Quarterly, 24/3–4 (2008), 152–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 Benjamin, 60, 62 (240, 243).
27 Ibid., 71 (250).
28 Ibid., 152 (330).
29 Rosen, Charles, ‘The Ruins of Walter Benjamin’, in On Walter Benjamin, ed. Smith, Gary, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1988), 151Google Scholar.
30 Benjamin, 160 (337).
31 Ibid., 166 (343). Here and in the following citation from Benjamin, I borrow modifications to Osborne's translation from Deathridge, Wagner Beyond Good and Evil, 82–3.
32 Benjamin, 188 (364).
33 Deathridge, 83.
34 As Rosen notes, Benjamin also joined several intellectual currents of his time, not least that represented by the work of the art historian Alois Riegl, whose Spätromantische Kunstindustrie (1901) had made the bold step of claiming ‘an expressive value not only for the products of the high arts of painting, architecture, and sculpture, but also for the industrial artefacts and the decorative motifs of the age [the fourth to eighth centuries AD]’; ‘The Ruins of Walter Benjamin’, 134.
35 Rosen seems implicitly to draw this parallel in his recent discussion of Hofmannsthal and his Chandos Letter that is clearly coloured by Benjaminian tropes of ruin and fragmentation; ‘Radical, Modern Hofmannsthal’, 86.
36 Benjamin, 186 (362).
37 For a reliable account of the earliest stages of the collaboration, see Gilliam, Bryan, Richard Strauss's Elektra, Studies in Musical Genesis and Structure (Oxford, 1991), 50–6Google Scholar.
38 Letter to Strauss, 5 March 1913; A Working Friendship: the Correspondence between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ed. Schuh, Willi, trans. Hammelmann, Hanns and Osers, Ewald (London, 1961), 161Google Scholar (hereafter HSC); Richard Strauss-Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Briefwechsel, ed. Schuh, Willi, 5th edn (Zurich, 1978), 221Google Scholar (hereafter BW). Translations from HSC are often modified, so I include references on each occasion to BW.
39 These are listed, for example, in SW, XXV.1, 147–59.
40 Hofmannsthal's attitude to Wagner is too easily summarised through reference to famous (negative) passages from the correspondence with Strauss. His knowledge of the composer, and particularly his admiration for him as a librettist, however, have been explored by Borchmeyer, Dieter in ‘Der Mythos als Oper – Hofmannsthal und Richard Wagner’, Hofmannsthal Forschungen, 7 (1985), 19–65Google Scholar. For a broader re-examination of Wagner's important position in fin-de-siècle Vienna that questions Carl Schorske's dominant account, see Karnes, Kevin C., ‘Wagner, Klimt, and the Metaphysics of Creativity in fin-de-siècle Vienna’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 62/3 (2009), 647–754CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
41 This hierarchy has largely remained in Hofmannsthal studies. ‘Though sometimes overshadowed by the libretto’, writes Kovach, for example, the Erzählung ‘is a literary masterpiece that signals a major milestone in Hofmannsthal's career and in the history of twentieth-century Modernism’. See his ‘Introduction: Hofmannsthal Today’, in Kovach, A Companion, 16. A notable exception in which the libretto is addressed in detail from a literary perspective comes in Hans-Albrecht Koch, ‘“Fast kontrapunktlich streng” Beobachtungen zur Form von Hugo von Hofmannsthals Operndichtung “Die Frau ohne Schatten”’, Jahrbuch des freien deutschen Hochstifts (1971), 456–78. Koch would go on to edit the volume containing the libretto in the SW. See also Pantle, Sherrill Hahn, Die Frau ohne Schatten by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss: an Analysis of Text, Music, and their Relationship, German Studies in America 29 (Bern and Las Vegas, 1979)Google Scholar.
42 Neues Wiener Tagesblatt, 9 October 1919, quoted in Hörr-Szalay, ‘Die Frau ohne Schatten an der Wiener Staatsoper: 80 Jahre im Spiegel der Pressekritik’, Richard Strauss-Blätter, n.s. 41 (June 1999), 8.
43 Bellemare, Pierre Marc, ‘Richard Strauss's Poetic Imagination’, in The Richard Strauss Companion, ed. Schmid, Marc Daniel (Westport, CT, and London, 2003), 320Google Scholar.
44 Gilliam, , The Life of Richard Strauss (Cambridge, 1999), 104Google Scholar.
45 An early note suggests that Hofmannsthal planned at one stage to have him present, à la Wizard of Oz, behind a curtain; SW, XXV.1, 252. Hofmannsthal, while at work on the first version of Ariadne auf Naxos and discussing initial ideas for Die Frau ohne Schatten, even tempts one into drawing another parallel: between Keikobad (and, indeed Agamemnon in Elektra) and Jourdain from Molière's Le bourgeois gentilhomme. ‘The Maecenas (=Jourdain) himself remains un-named, allegorical, in the background, represented only by his footmen who transmit his bizarre commands’; Letter to Strauss 9 January 1913 (HSC, 153; BW, 211).
46 The key evidence for this interpretation is Hofmannsthal's famous letter to Strauss of 20 March 1911 in which he writes the following: ‘Two men confronting two women, and for one of the women your wife might well, in all discretion, be taken as a model – that of course is wholly entre nous, and not of any great importance. Anyway, she is a bizarre woman with a very good soul, au fond; unfathomable, moody, domineering [unbegreiflich, launisch und herrisch] and yet at the same time likable’ (HSC, 76; BW, 112–13). For Barak representing Strauss, see, for example, Gilliam, The Life of Richard Strauss, 105–6. Norman Del Mar, in addition, notes a characteristically Straussian self-quotation in Act II scene 1 of Die Frau ohne Schatten. Here, as the Wife denies having a husband, Strauss quotes a theme associated with Kunrad (a thinly veiled portrait of Strauss himself) from Feuersnot (1901); Del Mar, , Richard Strauss, 3 vols. (1962–72; rpt. London, 1986), II, 185n31Google Scholar.
47 Steinberg, Michael P., The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival (Ithaca and London, 1990), 157n18Google Scholar. See also Mayer, Hans, Versuche über dir Oper (Frankfurt am Main, 1981), 135–9Google Scholarpassim.
48 First among the sources in this regard must be counted Goethe's ‘Märchen’ of 1795, recently published in English in Goethe, , The German Refugees, trans. Mitchell, Mike (London, 2006)Google Scholar. This fairy-tale has invited a long tradition of allegorical interpretation, as charted, for example, in Bauschinger, Sigrid, ‘Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten’, in Goethe Handbuch, ed. Witte, Bernd and Schmidt, Peter, 4 vols. (Stuttgart and Weimar, 1997), III, 248–52Google Scholar. A further likely source, but one not, as far as I am aware, mentioned in the literature, is Wilhelm Hauff's ‘Märchen als Almanach’, which opens his first collection of fairy-tales, Märchenalmanach für das Jahr 1826 (Hauff, , Sämtliche Märchen, ed. Castein, Hanne (Munich, 1986), 9–13Google Scholar). This self-proclaimed fairy-tale about fairy-tales serves not only as an introduction to the collection it heads, but also as a justification of that collection's validity. It tells of Märchen, the daughter of the benevolent Queen Phantasie, who lives in a ‘beautiful, far-away Kingdom’. The Queen, ‘in the royal adornment of her eternal youth and beauty … would descend to the earth, for she had heard that the people there lived their lives in sad seriousness, under the shadow of toil and struggle’ (9). Märchen is sent down to help enrich these lives, but is increasingly unwelcome. The pastoral task she used to enjoy now leads to her being treated with suspicion, while her brothers, the ‘Dreams’, are able still to commune with the humans while they slumber. Matters have come to a head, and, in a passage that elides creative and biological fecundity, she tells her mother in tears: ‘Oh, if only you knew, how they did it to me: they branded me an old maid and threatened not even to let me in next time’ (11). As the allegory becomes stretched somewhat, we learn that it is the evil aunt, ‘Fashion’ (Die Mode), who is to blame. Eventually Märchen is readmitted, having been dressed in the beautiful new covers of an almanac, to deliver the stories that constitute the rest of Hauff's own almanac. This is clearly consonant with interpretations such as that by Benjamin Bennett, where the Empress's development throughout the opera is ‘an allegory of the poet's situation’; Bennett, Benjamin, Hugo von Hofmannsthal: the Theatres of Consciousness (Cambridge, 1988), 251CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
49 Hofmannsthal, ‘Ad me Ipsum’, in GW, X, 603; and 605–8 passim.
50 Gilliam, Elektra, 68.
51 Mayer, Versuche über dir Oper, 139.
52 Letter to Strauss, 25 July 1914 (HSC, 209; BW, 284–5).
53 Werfel, Franz, Zwischen oben und unten: Prosa, Tagebücher, Aphorismen, literarische Nachträge (Munich, 1975), 656Google Scholar. Quoted In Finney, Gail, Women in Modern Drama (Ithaca and London, 1991), 177Google Scholar. The Emperor's own use of language often suggests such a role, particularly during his initial appearance, where barely concealed double entendres clearly mix hunting with sexual conquest. At reh. 32+1, for example, he sings the following to a characteristic horn-like motif: ‘Da stürzte sie hin und ich auf sie mit gezücktem Speer’ (She fell to the ground and I onto her with spear drawn).
54 Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity, 31.
55 Freud, Sigmund, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in On Metapsychology: the Theory of Psychoanalysis, ed. Richards, Angela and Dickson, Albert, Pelican Freud Library 11 (London, 1984), 254Google Scholar.
56 Letter to Strauss, 28 December 1913 (HSC, 184; BW, 255). It is also possible, therefore, to see her embodying the essential objectivity that Broch detected in the young Hofmannsthal's verse, where ‘the ego is concealed, the lyrical statement is shifted to the object in an attempt to reclaim it from what is seen, felt and experience, in short every element of subjectivity, is cut off’. Broch, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and his Time, 118.
57 As the notes reproduced in SW, XXV.1 reveal, the Emperor's mother was ‘a sufferer; the father dead prematurely, thus he seeks the unburdened one: the Fairy-Daughter’ (198). The Empress, on the other hand, is all ‘fear, doubt – suffers and knows not that this is blessed suffering’ (183). Elsewhere Hofmannsthal refers tersely to ‘The disease of the Empress's soul: doubt in everything. Loss of consciousness of the self [Verlust des Ich-gefühls]’ (192). In another note she is described as being unable to derive pleasure from the world as a result of ‘Selbstverkleinerungswahn’ (an untranslatable term that might be rendered ‘self-undermining madness’); ‘water appears to her as unclear, all humans old, even the flowers without scent and ugly’. To this Hofmannsthal added in pencil that ‘the Emperor's face [appears] to her hard, paralysed’ (183). This is one stage, one might suggest, before death – before Benjamin's facies hippocratica. Archetypal gendered roles have clearly left their mark on the Empress's psyche, too: her father represents death; her mother stands for life (204). The father lived on in the Spirit King Keikobad. The fate of her mother is unclear, but she has long been absent.
58 Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 253–4.
59 This idea of ‘loss’ is further developed by Julia Kristeva into an un-knowable Thing: the ‘Black Sun’ by which the melancholic lives. Kristeva cites a metaphor provided by Gérard de Nerval ‘that suggests an insistence without presence, a light without representation: the Thing is an imagined sun, bright and black at the same time’; see her Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Roudiez, Leon S. (New York, 1989), 13Google Scholar.
60 Compare this, for example, to the entrance of Elektra in Strauss's first Hofmannsthal opera. There the title character's subjectivity, according to Carolyn Abbate, sweeps all before it. The music ‘is a composition that resounds in [Elektra's] mind’, Abbate writes, while the ‘Agamemnon’ motif with which the opera opens stands not for ‘Agamemnon at all, but rather Elektra's voice; more specifically, the mourning lament that so strongly marks her existence’. Abbate, Carolyn, ‘Elektra's Voice: Music and Language in Strauss's Opera’, in Richard Strauss Elektra, ed. Puffett, Derrick, Cambridge Opera Handbook (Cambridge, 1989), 109Google Scholar.
61 The first typescript of Act I scene 1, sent to Strauss as a ‘little New Year's gift’ on 28 December 1913 (HSC, 184; BW, 255), is preserved in the manuscript collection of the Freies Deutsches Hochstift in Frankfurt (cat. FDH 25476). On p. 13 of this document, against a passage of text eventually cut from the Emperor's aria, Strauss has jotted the Falcon's d′′′–c♯′′′ motif, with the straightforward designation ‘Falke’.
62 Hofmannsthal, The Woman without a Shadow, 50; SW, XXVIII, 155; see also Grasberger, Franz, ‘Zur “Frau ohne Schatten”’, Hofmannsthal Forschungen, 6 (1981), 32Google Scholar.
63 Grasberger argues that the ‘melancholic-monotone call of the Falcon’ is derived from the interval of the second as it appears in the minor-key version of what Specht designates the ‘Lovers’ theme; Grasberger, 33. Richard Specht, author of both the ‘official’ Thematische Einführung to Die Frau ohne Schatten (Berlin, 1919) and a two-volume study of Strauss (Richard Strauss und Sein Werk, 2 vols. (Leipzig, Vienna and Zurich, 1921)), adopts a different strategy: one that tries to tame the Falcon's motifs by placing them within longer composite motifs that imply narrative. For example, see the two motifs Nos. 43 and 44 in the ‘Thementalfeln’ accompanying his 1921 study. No. 43 (‘Der Falke führt den Kaiser’ (The Falcon leads the Emperor)) combines one of the Emperor's themes with the Falcon's cry; No. 44 (‘Falkenflug zur Liebesbeute’ (Falcon's Flight to Love's Booty)) combines the wing-beat motif with the Liebesbeute motif. Specht, Richard Strauss und Sein Werk, II, ‘Thementafeln’, 47.
64 The inevitable result of this fixity – dissonance and a tendency towards bitonality – also, Reinhold Schlötterer has argued, helps bolster the opera's modernist credentials; see Schlötterer, , ‘Hugo von Hofmannsthals Vorstellung von Moderne und ihre Auswirkung auf die Musik von Richard Strauss’, in Richard Strauss und die Moderne, ed. Edelmann, Bernd, Lodes, Birgit and Schlötterer, (Berlin, 2001), 24Google Scholar.
65 This first appearance accompanies the words underlined in the phrase ‘Wollte Gott, daß ich heute meinen roten Falken wiederfände’ (God willing that I might find again my red falcon today), at reh. 28. It is followed by musical descriptions of the emperor's horse neighing and struggling with fatigue. Translations from the libretto are adjusted from Mary Whittall's translation, included in the booklet of the CD recording Richard Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra cond. Wolfgang Sawallisch, EMI CDS 749074 (Hayes, Middlesex, 1988).
66 Finney, Women in Modern Drama, 181. For a further feminist critique, focusing more on the relationship between Barak and his Wife, see Janke, Pia, ‘Schattenlose Frauen • Schicksallose Wesen – Zu Hofmannsthals und Strauss' Frau ohne Schatten’, in Richard Strauss – Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Frauenbilder, ed. Dürhammer, Ilja and Janke, Pia (Vienna, 2001), 259–68Google Scholar.
67 Smart, Mimomania, 24.
68 Ibid.
69 In the so-called Regieskizze developed by Hofmannsthal, Alfred Roller (designer) and Hans Breuer (director) for the opera's Vienna première on 10 October 1919, the Empress is to speak the ‘words directed to the Falcon towards an invisible treetop in the garden assumed to be to the back and left’. SW, XXV.1, 674.
70 Specht, ‘Thementafeln’, 44.
71 Schlötterer, ‘Hofmannsthals Vorstellung von Moderne’, 24.
72 These chords occur three bars after reh. 24 in the opera of Ariadne auf Naxos (1916); Strauss, Richard, Ariadne auf Naxos: eine oper in einem Aufzug nebst einem Vorspiel, Klavierauszug mit text (1916; rpt. London, 1944), 102Google Scholar.
73 Benjamin, 183–4 (359).
74 Letter to Strauss, 25 July 1914 (HSC, 208; BW, 284).
75 Letter to Strauss, 3 June 1913 (HSC, 167; BW, 232).
76 This passage starts at reh. 69 and is marked ‘singend’ in the orchestral study score (the Italian equivalent ‘cantando’ is used in the vocal score).
77 ‘What the music will have to give him’, wrote Hofmannsthal (letter to Strauss, 26 December 1913), ‘is not so much the sharply characteristic as the truly musical; he should be a sweet and well-tempered voice in the whole’ (HSC, 184; BW, 255).
78 Wolfgang Perschmann is the only commentator, as far as I am aware, to note this harmonisation (Perschmann, , Hugo von Hofmannsthal und Richard Strauss Die Frau ohne Schatten: Sindeutung aus Text und Musik (Graz, 1992), 72): ‘A fact most deserving of consideration’Google Scholar, he exclaims, without exploring further.
79 Benjamin, 152 (330).
80 Del Mar, Richard Strauss, II, 190.
81 In a remarkable page in Strauss's sketch books, the verso of page 29 in No. 26 of Franz Trenner's catalogue, the composer splits the six staves at his disposal into three systems, numbered ‘1. Pos’, ‘2. Pos’ and ‘3. Pos.’. Within the labyrinthine system of sketches for the opera, this page stands out with remarkable clarity, as he sets out three separate fanfares for trombones, including that which becomes fixed in Example 3.
82 GW, VIII, 447.
83 Benjamin, 74 (253).
84 As Hofmannsthal explained to Strauss: ‘each stage on her road to humanity is marked, as it were, by flaming beacons’ (letter 25 July 1914; HSC, 209; BW, 285).
85 Letter to Strauss, 24 July 1916 (HSC, 256; BW, 351).
86 Letter to Hofmannsthal, 28 June 1916 (HSC, 258; BW, 353–4).
87 Koch, ‘Fast Kontrapunktlich Streng’, 469. Hofmannsthal was, however, critical in retrospect of the structure of Act II: ‘What is wearying and oppressive is the second act, especially the periodic return to the Dyer's home. Here I have gone wrong. On the stage regular repetition is either funny or tedious. How do we find a way out?’ Letter to Strauss, 15 April 1922 (HSC, 351–2, BW, 476).
88 Adorno, Mahler, 137–8.
89 Bayreuther, Rainer, ‘Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der “Alpensinfonie” von Richard Strauss’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 51/3 (1994), 213–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
90 Youmans, Charles, Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition (Bloomington, IN, 2005), 219Google Scholar.
91 Quoted in Kohler, Stephan, trans. Spencer, Stewart, ‘Preface’ to Richard Strauss, Eine Alpensinfonie Op. 64 (London, 1996), IVGoogle Scholar.
92 These quotations are from the inside cover of Tr. 23 and page 12 of Tr. 9 respectively, quoted in Bayreuther, ‘Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der “Alpensinfonie”’, 234.
93 Letter to Strauss, early April 1915 (HSC, 219: BW, 303 (the couplet is left untranslated in HSC). Hofmannsthal noted these lines in his diary as early as 1906 in a note against which he retrospectively jotted: ‘Die Frau ohne Schatten actually built on this idea’. Hofmannsthal's notes for Die Frau show that he even at one point envisaged the chorus singing the couplet as a fugue. See GW, X, 478, and SW, XXV.1.
94 Youmans, Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music, 222.
95 Ibid.
96 GW, X, 603.
97 Bennett, writing in 1988, counts just five appearances in Hofmannsthal's works as published then; Bennett, Hugo von Hofmannsthal: the Theatres of Consciousness, 252.
98 ‘Through mutual love, Ariadne and Bacchus are mutually (Hofmannsthal would say “allomatically”) transformed.’ Gilliam, Bryan, ‘Ariadne, Daphne and the Problem of Verwandlung’, this journal, 15/1 (2003), 72Google Scholar.
99 Bennett, Hugo von Hofmannsthal: the Theatres of Consciousness, 258.
100 Charles Youmans sees Strauss's worldview, from the 1890s, coalescing around ‘mutually reinforcing ideals: work, family, and nature. These components were valuable not just in their own right but because they cooperatively insulated him from the fruitless metaphysical dilemmas that had plagued him for so long.’ Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music, 216.
101 Letter to Strauss, 26 March 1915 (HSC, 217; BW, 203). Additionally, in the first version of the libretto for Act III (Monacensia. Literaturarchiv und Bibliothek München, Signatur: Richard Strauss A III), Hofmannsthal had also marked in pencil exactly what his requirements here were: ‘Musik abklingend.=quasi Epilog. (wie jener zarte “Schluss nach dem Schluss” im “Rosencavalier”’). See also SW, XXV.1, 512. Hofmannsthal's amendments to this typescript, and its other deviations, are noted in SW, XXV.1, 509–12.
102 Schlötterer, ‘Hofmannsthals Vorstellung von Moderne’, 23.
103 See Günter Brosche, ‘Richard Strauss und Arnold Schoenberg, mit unveröffentlichten Briefen’, Richard Strauss-Blätter, 2 (December 1979), 21–7.
104 Masson, Jean-Yves, Hofmannsthal, renoncement et metamorphose (Lagrasse, 2006), 163Google Scholar.
105 Hofmannsthal, The Woman without a Shadow, 94 (SW, XXVIII, 195–6).
106 See, for example, Hofmannsthal's letter to Raoul Auernheimer, 20 December 1919, in Daviau, Donald G. (ed.), ‘The Correspondence of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Raoul Auernheimer’, Modern Austrian Literature, 7/3–4 (1974), 254–5Google Scholar; also quoted in SW, XXVIII, 428–9.
107 von Hofmannsthal, Hugo, ‘The Egyptian Helen’, trans. Cohn, Hilde D., The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 15/2 (December 1956), 213CrossRefGoogle Scholar; GW, V, 498.
108 Letter to Hofmannsthal 11 June 1925; Benjamin, Walter, Briefe, ed. Scholem, G. and Adorno, T. W., 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 1967), I, 435Google Scholar. See also Benjamin, 's review, ‘Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Der Turm’, trans. Livingstone, Rodney, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Jennings, Michael W., 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1999), I, 104Google Scholar (originally published in Die Literarische Welt, March 1928; reprinted in Gesammelte Schriften, III, 98–101). For a discussion of Hofmannsthal's post-war dramas with reference to Benjamin and others, see Nicolaus, Ute, Souverän und Märtyrer: Hugo von Hofmannsthals späte Trauerspieldichtung vor dem Hintergrund siener politischen und ästhetischen Reflexionen (Würzburg, 2004)Google Scholar.