A Writer of Mystery (and Genius)
Notes on Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Hugo von Hofmannsthal is one of the most interesting characters in literary history. Born with a beautiful name, he was a beautiful writer. Is a beautiful writer.
Mainly, he is known as a collaborator—the chief collaborator in the compositional life of Richard Strauss. Der Rosenkavalier, Elektra, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Ariadne auf Naxos—of all of those Strauss operas, Hofmannsthal is the librettist.
Do you recall what Strauss said when U.S. soldiers came to his door at the end of the war? Drawing himself up (as I picture it), he said, “I am Doktor Richard Strauss, composer of Salome and Der Rosenkavalier.”
Personally, I would have named Elektra, along with Der Rosenkavalier—not that Salome isn’t a masterpiece too.
In 1920, Strauss, Hofmannsthal, and Max Reinhardt, the theater director, founded the Salzburg Festival. The first work presented at the festival was not musical but theatrical: Hofmannsthal’s play Jedermann, his treatment of the medieval English morality tale, Everyman.
Jedermann remains a staple of the festival to this day.
Do you know I knew a man who attended that very first performance, on August 22, 1920? I did. He was George Sgalitzer, and he was seven years old on that day. His grandparents had taken him to the play. I wrote about George in 2003, here.
Back to Hofmannsthal. I have always known him as Strauss’s librettist—a great composer’s (literary) sidekick, to put it rather pejoratively; and as a founder of the Salzburg Festival; and as the author of Jedermann.
But at the beginning of his career, when he was very young, he had dazzled everyone as poet, aesthete, and essayist. He was one of the most talented writers anyone had ever seen. He was headed for the pantheon.
Then something happened, however. Hofmannsthal experienced a kind of crisis, believing that words were futile—incapable of expressing what ought to be expressed, even a kind of fraud.
He put all this in a letter, The Lord Chandos Letter, when he was in his late twenties. We will get to this letter in due course.
Hofmannsthal was born in 1874. His full name was “Hugo Laurenz August Hofmann von Hofmannsthal.” He was Viennese. When he was still a schoolboy, he had the literary world buzzing.
Stefan Zweig writes of this in his classic memoirs, The World of Yesterday. Zweig and his classmates were about seven years younger than Hofmannsthal. They were in awe of him.
Hofmannsthal had peers who were also leaving an impression, says Zweig. These included Rainer Maria Rilke.
But one figure above all fascinated us—seduced, intoxicated, and inspired us: that wonderful and unique phenomenon Hugo von Hofmannsthal …
Zweig continues,
The appearance of young Hofmannsthal is and will remain remarkable as one of the great miracles of early perfection. I know no other example in world literature, except in Keats and Rimbaud, of similar infallibility in the mastery of language at such a young age, of such a breadth of inspired ideas, such a mind, full of poetic substance even in the least of his lines …
Zweig also compares him to Hölderlin and Leopardi, comparisons that seem natural.
One of the reasons that Zweig and his classmates thrilled to Hofmannsthal is that he had emerged from the same milieu as they.
Without hoping that any of us could ever emulate the miracle of Hofmannsthal, we were invigorated merely by his physical existence. It was visible evidence that there could still be a writer of distinction in our own time, our own environment. After all, his father, a bank manager, came from the same Jewish middle class as the rest of us. The genius had grown up in a home like ours, with the same furnishings and the same moral principles as other people of our social class. He had attended an equally tedious grammar school. He had learned from the same textbooks and spent eight years wearing out the seat of his trousers on the same wooden benches. He was as impatient as we were, as passionately devoted to all intellectual values.
In a way, though, Zweig and his classmates could relate to Rilke more than to Hofmannsthal. Zweig explains:
The idea of competing with Hofmannsthal would have appeared blasphemy to even the boldest among us. We knew he was an incomparable, inimitable miracle of early perfection, and if we, at 16, compared our verses with those famous specimens that he had written at the same age we felt frightened and ashamed …
And the other guy?
Rilke too had begun writing and publishing poetry young, at 17 or 18, but compared to Hofmannsthal’s and even in the absolute sense, those early works of his were immature, childish, and naive verses. There were a few golden traces of talent to be found, but you had to make allowances. Only gradually, at 22 and 23, did that wonderful poet, whom we loved beyond measure, begin to form his personal style, and that was a great consolation to us.
So it was not essential to be perfect while still at grammar school, like Hofmannsthal; you could feel your way like Rilke …
Despite the Hofmannsthal miracle, you could emulate the quieter, more normal rise of Rilke.
That makes a lot of sense.
Then Hofmannsthal had that crisis—what some describe as a crisis of faith in language and the general literary art. Never again, says Zweig, was Hofmannsthal “the unique marvel” that he was from about 16 to 24. Yes, he wrote some excellent things thereafter. But “the pure inspiration of those first youthful works was gone, and with it something of the intoxication and ecstasy of our own youth.”
(Let me pause to say that, last November, I wrote an essay about Stefan Zweig and The World of Yesterday. If interested, you may find it here.)
Wanting to know more about the pre-Strauss Hofmannsthal, so to speak, or the unconnected-to-Strauss Hofmannsthal, I turned to a volume called “The Lord Chandos Letter and Other Writings.” It was produced by New York Review Books and may be found here.
The volume begins with a short story called “Cavalry Story.” I began with it too. I read about a page and a half, then realized I wasn’t following it. So I started again. I followed it a little better—but eventually stopped before the story was through, because I wasn’t getting enough of it.
I turned to the next short story, “Tale of the 672nd Night.” This story, I understood, line by line. But once the story went in a bizarre and hellish direction, I had no idea what the author was talking about. I did not know what he was illustrating.
Should I have been more diligent, more patient? A better reader? Probably. But I think we all develop a sense of when to persist and when to wave the white flag.
I moved on to the final item: The Lord Chandos Letter. It is fictional, yet the author is speaking for himself, everyone agrees. He is making a personal statement, having the whiff of a last will and testament.
Hofmannsthal gives himself a little distance by inventing a proxy: a certain Lord Chandos, writing to Francis Bacon in 1603—August of that year, specifically. This Chandos explains to Bacon why he has abandoned literary activity.
It is not a case of writer’s block. It’s more a case of, What’s the point?
The letter is not long (although perhaps long for a mere letter): only about a dozen pages in the NYRB edition. The German word for “letter” is “Brief,” and The Lord Chandos Letter, in its original title, is simply Ein Brief. Hofmannsthal wrote it in 1902, when he was 28. It was published in Der Tag, a Berlin newspaper.
Hofmannsthal, or rather “Chandos,” reflects on the works he wrote when he was a teen. There they are, “tottering under the weight of their grand words,” he says. They might as well have been written by a stranger.
Rhetoric, “so overvalued by our time, is not equal to getting at the heart of things.”
Chandos once had “projects”—writing projects—and he is supposed to have them for the present, and future. “What is man, that he conceives projects!”
These projects, these plans, now “dance before me like miserable mosquitoes on a dim wall no longer illuminated by the bright sun of a happy time, each of them engorged with a drop of my blood.”
There is a lot of pain in this letter: confession and pain.
People have noted, over the years, that, for a guy who has given up on words, Chandos/Hofmannsthal writes damn well. At one point, the author tells Bacon, “But why am I searching again for words, which I have sworn off!”
And toward the end of his letter, he says, “Dear friend, I have tried your patience too much with this lengthy description of an inexplicable state which ordinarily remains bottled up within me.”
In that letter, the inexplicable state is brilliantly unbottled, and explained.
He is a mystery to me, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. I feel I know him a little better than I once did, and less well at the same time. Maybe I will have another crack at him, and maybe you would like getting to know him, too, if you don’t already.
Could Strauss have set Ein Brief to music? He could have set anything to music, yes.
Jay,
I am not educated in the letters and was not aware of the subject of today’s piece. Nonetheless, it is a welcome and interesting distraction. Thank you.