quintusmarcus's review
3.0
Hugo von Hofmannsthal is best know as the librettist for some of Richard Strauss' greatest operas, including Der Rosenkavalier and Die Frau ohne Schatten. This collection brings together poems, fiction, essays, and plays, including the first act of Rosenkavalier. Strongly influenced by the Symbolists, Hofmannsthal's prose is murky, and there is usually a lot going on just beneath the surface of his work. In his essay "Shakespeare's Kings and Noblemen", Hofmannsthal specifically remarks on that sense of what lies beneath the surface: "Shakespeare needs to be played, because only then can we hear and see what he does not and cannot say. If he were to say what would be necessary to make uncreative readers understand him without seeing him acted, then he would cease to be Shakespeare." Hofmannsthal speaks of the "Atmosphere" of Shakespeare, locating it in just those moments of quiet action like this example from the play Julius Caesar, when Brutus lifts the lute out from under the boy singer on the night before the great battle: "Here, when Brutus, Caesar's murderer, picks up the lute, so that it shall not be broken, here as nowhere else do we face the tornado of existence that sucks us down. These are the flashes of lightning wherein a heart reveals itself completely" ..."And in Shakespeare they are legion. They are the cataclysms of his atmosphere."
The collection also includes the famous Letter to Lord Chandos, wherein Hofmannsthal struggles with the ability to express reality in words--"My case, in short, is this: I have completely lost the ability to think or speak coherently about anything," which means that the author of the letter abandons the vocation or profession of a writer because no word seems to him to express objective reality. In his novel Bartleby & Co, Enrique Vila-Matas remarked, "...this letter of Lord Chandos captures the essence of the crisis of literary expression which affected the generation of Viennese writers at the end of the nineteenth century and speaks of a crisis of confidence in the basic nature of literary expression and human communication, of language understood as universal, regardless of the different languages that are spoken." It was this crisis of confidence that drove Hofmannsthal further and further into the dream world of works like Die Frau ohne Schatten, a drama of nearly impenetrable symbolism saved only by Richard Strauss' musical setting. Without Strauss, Hofmannsthal would be very difficult to absorb, and for this reason his prose works have not achieved the acclaim of his opera libretti. Ultimately, these stories and poems are curiosities worth examining, but not writings to which many will want to return.
The collection also includes the famous Letter to Lord Chandos, wherein Hofmannsthal struggles with the ability to express reality in words--"My case, in short, is this: I have completely lost the ability to think or speak coherently about anything," which means that the author of the letter abandons the vocation or profession of a writer because no word seems to him to express objective reality. In his novel Bartleby & Co, Enrique Vila-Matas remarked, "...this letter of Lord Chandos captures the essence of the crisis of literary expression which affected the generation of Viennese writers at the end of the nineteenth century and speaks of a crisis of confidence in the basic nature of literary expression and human communication, of language understood as universal, regardless of the different languages that are spoken." It was this crisis of confidence that drove Hofmannsthal further and further into the dream world of works like Die Frau ohne Schatten, a drama of nearly impenetrable symbolism saved only by Richard Strauss' musical setting. Without Strauss, Hofmannsthal would be very difficult to absorb, and for this reason his prose works have not achieved the acclaim of his opera libretti. Ultimately, these stories and poems are curiosities worth examining, but not writings to which many will want to return.
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