Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Librettist

b. Vienna, February 1, 1874;
d. Vienna, July 15, 1929

The Hofmann family was a mix of Jewish, Italian, Swabian, and Austrian ancestries. They prospered as textile merchants, moving from Prague to Vienna at the end of the 18th century, and were promoted for their services into the nobility as “von Hofmannsthal” by the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1835. The future librettist’s father, another Hugo, won renown as a lawyer and banker, and he took charge of his son’s extracurricular education, which has since led to inevitable comparisons with the Mozart family.

The younger Hugo grew up as a kind of fairy-tale prince, brilliant at everything, striving for self-transcendence in saintly seclusion. He was born into Vienna at the apex of the civilized world, when the likes of Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, and Alban Berg walked the streets and chatted in cafés. After acquiring an education without apparent effort, Hofmannsthal by the age of 17 won fame in the city’s highest artistic circles as a lyric poet of uncanny maturity. His evolving aesthetic centered on breaking out of existing forms while obeying self-imposed restrictions. In all of his activity, style came before form or content, and his final goal was creating art that would improve the human spirit and enrich society.

At 25, he looked to the heightened reality of theatre, gesture, and dance for answers to his misgivings. His output from that period induced adaptations of Sophocles’s Electra (1904), Oedipus Rex (1906), and the 15th-century English morality play Everyman (1911). In 1920, with the renowned German director Max Reinhardt, Hofmannsthal co-founded the Salzburg Festival.

Hofmannsthal saw great power in the potential for music to be joined to carefully crafted language in order to create universal symbols out of nothingness. His collaboration with Strauss, lasting from 1906 until his death in 1929, is how he is best remembered today.