RRP: £9.95
BINDING: Paperback
PUBLISHED: 2007
ISBN: 9780946162741
PAGES: 118
Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Selected Tales
Translated from the German by J. M. Q. Davies
The restless, alienated spirit of turn-of-the-century Vienna is brilliantly caught in these tales – hitherto not readily available together in English translation – by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, one of the major writers of the Early Modernist period and Richard Strauss’s librettist. Powerful issues and emotions lie below the surface of these narratives – of a young aesthete’s crack-up as he wanders through a terrifying psychic landscape (The Tale of the 672nd Night); of an insubordinate soldier’s brutal nemesis during Field Marshal Radetzky’s 1848 campaign against Italian insurgents (A Cavalry Tale); of love and death in time of plague in seventeenth-century France (Marshal de Bassompierre’s Adventure).
The celebrated Letter from Lord , a fictional epistle addressed to Francis Bacon, records a young writer’s crisis over the mismatch between words and truth. Finally, in the delightful comedic gender-reversal story Lucidor, the nucleus of the libretto of Strauss’s Arabella, the cloud of sexual repression and violence hanging over the characters in the other tales is lifted.
‘Crafted with subtlety … fresh and a joy to read.’ – Steven Kippax, The London Miscellany
HUGO von HOFMANNSHTAL was born in Vienna in 1874, a contemporary of Klimt, Schiele, Mahler, Schoenberg and Freud. In German-speaking countries he is best known as a dramatist, librettist and lyric poet – he wrote some of the finest lyric verse in the language – and for his work with the producer Max Reinhardt in establishing the Salzburg Festival. But the fascinatingly original short novellas written in his earlier years and contained in the present volume are his lasting international legacy. He died in Vienna in 1929.