Plays and Libretti

A timeless collection of Hofmannsthal’s dramatic and comic writings for the stage

This volume brings together six pieces—three plays, three libretti; three serious works, three comic ones—that display the broad range of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s theatrical writings. The superficial conventions of Viennese imperial society are revealed in his libretto for Richard Strauss’s comic opera Der Rosenkavalier while his adaptation of Sophocles’s Electra demonstrates his power to reinvest old myths with new meaning. The medieval morality play and Calderón’s writings influenced his Salzburg Great Theatre of the World, an exposition of the Christian evaluation of man and his destiny. Under the cloak of the comedy of manners, Hofmannsthal looks at contemporary society in Arabella and The Difficult Man. But it is in The Tower that he gathers up all these perspectives on life and presents a shattering statement about the nihilism of his day and our own.