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.

LRB 12 March 2009 | PDF Download