Often I get up in the middle of the night and stop all the clocks - Hofmannsthal's melancholy Mozartish Cavalier of the Rose

The Cavalier of the Rose (1911), better known as Der Rosenkavalier, was written by Hugo von Hofmannsthal as a libretto.  Strauss had wanted to follow the intense Salome (1905) with something more light and fun and Mozartish.  Instead, working with Hofmannsthal, he did the intense and in many ways quite similar Elektra (1909) as his next opera.  They saved the farcical romantic comedy for next time.  I doubt I would guess, blindfolded, that the music was by the same composer, although the many waltzes might let me guess it was Austrian; I would never guess that the cross-dressing hero and fast-moving physical comedy came from Hofmannsthal, who is admittedly a pretty blank slate, at least not until the great act of renunciation in the last act of the opera.

PRINCESS: There’s many a matter here on earth
nobody could ever believe
did they but hear the story told.
But the one it happens to, that one believes and knows not how…  (Act 3, p. 524)

The princess, the tragic figure of the comedy, begins the play in bed with her young lover, the 17-year-old Octavian, who is so beautiful that everyone he meets, female and male, falls in love with him.  When the grotesque and foolish Baron intrudes on the boudoir, Octavian disguises himself as a female servant.  The Baron is smitten; the comedy is ready to begin – a duel, disguises, pranks, waiters dashing about, like that.  In the next act, Octavian meets his female counterpart Sophia, coincidentally engaged to the vulgar Baron.  There’s the romance.

But wait, didn’t the play begin with Octavian in love with – sleeping with – the Princess?  Didn’t he burst into tears when she suggests that “sooner or later” he will leave her for “one younger and more lovely than I” (427)?  Hofmannsthal includes the necessary frothy, sparkling romantic plot, but he puts this sadder love affair behind it.

PRINCESS:  Time is a strange thing.
While one just lives for the moment, it is nothing.
But then all at once
we feel nothing else but it,
it’s all around us, it’s right inside us,
it trickles away in our faces, it trickles in the mirror,
in my temples it flows away.
And between you and me it is flowing too.
Soundless, as an hour-glass.
Ah Quinquin [Octavian’s nickname]!
Often I hear it flow incessantly.
Often I get up in the middle of the night
and stop all the clocks.  (Act 1, 428-9)

Or as she says earlier, “It’s all a mystery, so much is mysterious” (424).  She is such an unusual character that as beautiful as her part is, she is absent for most of the rest of the opera.  There are hints that she is the Empress of Austria.

Another unusual feature of the libretto is that it only occasionally looks like a libretto, employing choruses and refrains and set-piece arias and so on, although it has all of those at times.  It mostly looks like a play.  The dialogue mostly looks like conversation.  It is highly readable.  Thus, I read it.

Christopher Holme did the version in Selected Plays and Libretti.

For him who is happy as we, be silent and dance! - Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Electra

When Hugo von Hofmannsthal was nineteen, he was widely known as Austria’s greatest living poet.  He brushed against Stefan George’s German circle, which was devoted to pure lyric poetry and private artistic expression.  Somehow this (or that, or the other) led him to abandon the lyric and then fiction – to abandon private art.  See “The Lord Chandos Letter” for details, maybe.

He turned instead to public art, collaborative art, to the stage, co-founding the Salzburg theater festival and most famously writing libretti for Richard Strauss.  Temperamentally, their partnership makes little sense, but that difference in aesthetics and approaches must have been what Hofmannsthal needed.

My taste for Strauss is weak.  I am listening to Elektra (1909) as I write this, and when I am not paying attention it recedes into shrieking backed by strange orchestral sound effects.  “She broke into howls  and threw herself / in her corner” (p. 8).  With attention – well, I would love to see it performed someday.

The libretto – or really the play, first performed in 1903 – is highly readable on its own.  I am looking at Alfred Schwarz’s translation, in Selected Plays and Libretti (Bollingen, 1963).  It is not presented as an original play but as an adaptation of Sophocles, so again, explicitly collaborative.  It is adapted not so much into German as into Freudian.

Electra – in the translation she is Electra – her father is murdered, “driven away, down into his cold pit” (11), by her mother Clytemnestra and her no-good bum of a stepfather.  Her older brother is missing, perhaps dead.  Her younger sister Chrysothemis just wants a normal life.  The closest thing to a love duet is between Electra and her sister:

ELECTRA:  As you struggle against me, I feel what arms
they are.  You could crush whatever you clasp
in your arms.  You could press me, or a man,
against your cool firm breasts with your arms
and one would suffocate!  Everywhere
there is such strength in you!  It flows like cool
pent-up water from the rock.  It streams down
with your hair upon your strong shoulders!

CHRYSOTHEMIS:  Let me go!

The mother, Clytemnestra, is in just one scene, but it is spectacular.  She is superstitious, “completely covered with jewels and charms” (22), terrified of her daughter’s insanity, which she fears is witchcraft, and haunted by guilty nightmares “[s]o that the marrow dissolves in my bones” (29).

As events move towards their inevitable happy ending, the play requires music as much as the opera, something to which Electra can do her “nameless dance”:

ELECTRA:  Be silent and dance.  All must
approach!  Here join behind me!  I bear the burden
of happiness, and I dance before you.
For him who is happy as we, it behooves him to do
only this: to be silent and dance!   (77)

Or maybe this is weirder with no music, Electra dancing only to whatever tormented sounds are in her head.

“I’m falling,” cried the mouth - a perplexing, bizarre, Goethean, fragmented Hofmannsthal story

Kind of an orphan post tonight, a follow-up on Hugo von Hoffmansthal that would have made more sense several months ago.

Despite the declaration of renunciation described, possibly, in “The Lord Chandos Letter” (1901), Hofmannsthal occasionally returned to fiction.  Andreas (written 1912-13) is a novella that threatened to expand into who knows what.  Hofmannsthal pulled the plug on it, having finished the first seventy pages and two episodes as well as fifty pages of notes that suggest not one but several directions for the novel, each more abstract than the last.

Andreas is a young Viennese man of unformed character on a sort of Grand Tour.  He is robbed by a servant who turns out to be an escaped murderer and meets a weightless dream girl on an idyllic farm.  In Venice, he finds a room with a family that is in the process of holding a lottery to auction off their daughter’s virginity – “’Well, it isn’t really so unusual, what she’s doing’” (53) – meets a Knight of Malta, and encounters other mysteries like women who transform into other women, one of whom is probably this woman, encountered in a courtyard atop a grape trellis:

The whole pale face was wild and tense, with a flash of satisfaction, almost childish in its candour.  The body lay somehow on the light trellis of the roof, the feet probably rested on a hook in the wall, the fingertips on the top of a post.  The a mysterious change came over the expression of the face.  With infinite sympathy, even love, the eyes rested on Andreas.  One hand forced its way through the leaves, as if to reach his head, to stroke his hair; the four fingers were bleeding at the tips.  The hand did not reach Andreas, a drop of blood fell on his forehead, the face above him turned white.  “I’m falling,” cried the mouth…  (64)

Hofmannsthal was working on something that could have rivaled Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, published the same year Andreas was abandoned, for sheer weirdness.  Andreas is as Goethean as Alain-Fournier’sbook, drawing together pieces of a number of century-old books – Italian Journey, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, the Venetian Epigrams, and likely many more I have failed to identify or not read.  One of the endings seems to have that Knight willing himself to death in a Rosicrucian ceremony – I must be misinterpreting the fragment, but it invokes the semi-Masonic initiations of Wilhelm Meister.

Those metamorphosing women remind me of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Princess Brambilla, also set in Venice.

Since Hofmannsthal’s fragment is bizarre, complex, and unfinished, I am just banging books against it to see if any meaning drops out.  The colliding texts produce a satisfying clank, at least.

Well, some posts are themselves more fragmented than others, more like notes on a subject for future research.

Hofmannsthal presumably got whatever he needed out of Andreas, anyway.

Andreas can be found in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Selected Prose, Bollingen, 1952, tr. Mary Hottinger.

Writing about not writing - Hofmannthal's "Lord Chandos Letter" and Murnane's Barley Patch

To a certain kind of child, the Viennese ethos of Bildung must have felt so oppressive.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal at first appeared to be the perfect child of Viennese aestheticism, immediately recognized as the city’s greatest poet when he was seventeen.  A central theme of his work, though, was a critique of aestheticism, an inventory of its costs, many of which were presumably felt personally, although Hofmannsthal always wrote with so much distance that there is no way to tell.

In his 1902 story “The Letter” (or “The Lord Chandos Letter”), a writer explains his lack of literary production after a promising start.  It is a description of an aesthetic and linguistic crisis.  His plans to write a kind of “Key to All Mythologies” omnibook leads him into some sort of heightened aesthetic state (“In those days I, in a state of continuous intoxication, conceived the whole of existence as one great unit: the spiritual and physical worlds seemed to form no contrast, as little as did courtly and bestial conduct, art and barbarism, solitude and society…,” 132) which ends in an inevitable crash, but one that takes a strange form.   Words begin to separate from their meaning.  Any concept capable of verbal statement (“This affair has turned out well for this or that purpose”) seems false (“indemonstrable, as mendacious and hollow as could be”, 134).  The problem is with the words, not the concepts:

For me everything disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts; no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one idea.  Single words floated round me; they congealed into eyes which stared at me and into which I was forced to stare back – whirlpools which gave me vertigo and, reeling incessantly, led into the void.  (135)

The narrator’s solution is to engage with the world, with the thing itself, and avoid words; his composition of the formal, elegant letter that is the text of the story might appear to be a contradiction,  but that is merely a form, almost a reflex, while his true language is “a language none of whose words is known to me, a language in which inanimate things speak to me and wherein I may one day may have to justify myself before an unknown judge” (141).

What part of this Hofmannsthal experienced himself is a mystery, but by the time he wrote “The Letter” he had abandoned poetry and to some degree fiction (he wrote but did not publish), and instead turned his attention to theater, opera, and essays, from private to public forms.  An enduring, eminently public,  achievement was co-founding the Salzburg Festival.

The “Lord Chandos” quotations are from Selected Prose, Bollingen, 1952, tr. Tania & James Stern.

Hermann Broch suffered a related crisis.  The Death of Virgil (1945) is the novel in which he abandons novels.  I should read it.

The Australian writer of prose fiction Gerald Murnane recently published a long prose fiction, Barley Patch (2010), which begins with the question “Must I write?” and is in effect a fictional novelist’s fictional justification of his abandonment of fiction.  Murnane’s narrator is the one who dislikes the word “novel” and keeps repeating the phrase “prose fiction,” along with many other phrases.  Some readers would find this intensely irritating:

Sometimes, when I was trying to report in one or another passage in my fiction the connection between one or another fictional personage and one or another fictional landscape, I would suppose that one or another of my readers might later have overlooked the passage that I was trying to write in the same way that I had overlooked the foreground and the middle-ground and even the background of the painting mentioned not long before in this piece of fiction and might have seemed to see behind my fiction, as it were, a semblance of the Midlands of Tasmania or of the Canterbury Plains of New Zealand (94).

Murnane’s, or the narrator’s, purpose is fundamentally Proustian, an attempt to pin down specific combinations of childhood memories through the medium of fiction, a search for some kind of impossible truth, but without the Proustian language and imagery that only leads to blurry failure.  If all the author can imagine is that a character lives in “a building of two or more stories,” then that is how the building will be described.  The inadequacies of memory and imagination battle the inadequacies of language.  And the narrator, like Lord Chandos, insists that this is the end, really, no more writing, once he finally explains, in writing, why he gave up writing.

Barley Patch also makes interesting use of Matthew Arnold’s “The Scholar-Gypsy” (1853).  I would like to read someone else’s essay about that.  Thanks in advance.

Hermann Broch's Vienna - decay leads to the museum

If I think of a culture as a person and then overlay a seasonal metaphor, both of which are misleading ideas, the period from 1860 to 1890 begins to look like Vienna’s Indian summer.  Stifter’s novel again provides a strangely prophetic model (“My collections are getting more complete, the building projects are increasingly receiving their finishing touches”).  The Indian summer is followed by winter, and death.

As attractive as the values of the period can seem to me, I have to ask the same questions I asked about Stifter.  Are we sure that the connection between aesthetics and ethics is so strong?  Is collecting as meaningful an activity as Stifter argues?  Are there risks in an aesthetic focused so strongly on the past?  And fundamentally, are the answers to questions like these the same for individuals and for society?

Aestheticism easily becomes decadent, empty, sterile.  Collecting is almost necessarily neurotic and, like art appreciation more generally, can become, or always is, a device for signaling social status – how good a catch is the guest at my artistic dinner, how visible is my box at the theater.

So were the aestheticized Viennese more like Green Henry, reading and re-reading their second-hand collected Goethe until it is torn from their hands, or more like Törless’s family, who store Goethe “in the bookcase with the green glass panes” that “was never opened except to display its contents to a visitor”?

Hermann Broch, in his critical study Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time (1974)*, argues for the latter, vociferously:  “Was this really nothing but the roast chicken era, a period of pure hedonism and sheer decoration of life?” (59).  Vienna and its “gelatin democracy” (78) was the purest example of the European “value vacuum.”  It “was really far less a city of art than a city of decoration par excellence” where “[p]oetry was an affair of gold-edged books on the parlor table” (60).

Broch, born in 1886, is describing the generation of his parents.  I have written admiringly about the artistic institutions they created, the art museum and the opera.  Exactly the problem, says Broch:

In fulfillment of its duty to tradition, Vienna confused culture with “museumness” [Museumshaftigkeit] and became a museum to itself (unfortunately not in its architecture, where it was guilty of the most outrageous devastations).  Because Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert had miraculously converged on this spot, had been treated badly and nevertheless composed, Vienna set itself up as a musical institution…  The “museumish” was reserved for Vienna, indeed as a sign of its ruin, the sign of Austrian ruin.  For in despondency decay leads to vegetating, but in wealth it leads to the museum.  (61)

The tone of this passage should look familiar to readers of later Austrian literature.  I feel bad about omitting any of it.  Unfortunately, or maybe not, the entire book is not made of this kind of rhetoric.

Broch’s indictment, written from the far side of the horrors of World War II, is ethical.  The Viennese did not achieve the kind of ethical and aesthetic balance Stifter described, but rather used false aesthetic values to “mask” an ethical crisis.  The inevitable aesthetic result was not art but kitsch, and “as the metropolis of kitsch, Vienna also became the metropolis of the value vacuum of the epoch” (81).  And kitsch leads to, well, to Nazis (“the dance of apocalyptic ruin,” 175).  Art can also be the source of ethics, though; true art, of course, not kitsch.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal and other artists, Broch and his generation. are thus engaged in a kind of struggle to fill the ethical vacuum created by their parents.  They mostly lose.

Broch has an outstanding definition of kitsch, by the way - “music in which cowbells ring is kitsch” (16, from “Artistic Style as the Style of the Epoch,” 1919).

*  Written 1947-50 and published in pieces.

Obscenities drawn with charcoal on the bare brick - Hofmannsthal's realistic dream-like "Cavalry Story"

Leaving fictional essay “The Lord Chandos Letter” aside, I believe that the 1898 “Cavalry Story” is Hofmannsthal’s most famous story.  It appears in every gathering of Hofmannsthal’s prose and is sometimes included in short story anthologies.

A couple of Hofmannsthal’s short fictions are about cavalry soldiers, this one and the more sketch-like “Military Story” (written 1896).  They are full of convincing details about tactics, horses, weapons, that sort of stuff.  I could easily believe that Hofmannsthal was writing from experience, like Leo Tolstoy or Stendhal, except that Hofmannsthal would not* join the army until World War I and was, at the time he wrote the military stories, working on a PhD in Romance language philology.  So Hofmannsthal is really more like kid wonder Stephen Crane, pulling his apparent realism out of books and his imagination.

“Cavalry Story” begins:

On the morning of July 22, 1848, a patrol squadron, the 2nd squadron of Walmoden cuirassiers numbering 107 cavalrymen under Captain Baron Rofrano, left the San Alessandro mess before six o’clock and rode in the direction of Milan.  An inexpressible stillness lay over the open, glittering landscape; early-morning clouds climbed from the peaks of the distant mountains toward the shining sky like tranquil puffs of smoke; the corn stood motionless in the fields, and country houses and churches shone between stands of trees that seemed to have been washed.  (1)

The beginning could be straight from some regimental history, while the second sentence is firmly fictional, what with its metaphors and hint of subjectivity.  The rest of the story will be similarly split between a clear and direct presentation of military action, and passages describing the increasingly heightened perceptive or emotional sensibility of the story’s protagonist, Sergeant Anton Lerch.

The first long paragraph quickly covers the start of the squadron’s big day as they drive off an attack, take numerous prisoners, capture a spy with “detailed plans of the greatest importance,” and then a cannon, and then more prisoners.  “The squadron suffered one casualty” (2).  Sergeant Lerch is, as someone other than me might now say, pumped.  His passions are by no means tamed when he discovers that he may well be able to bivouac with an ex-lover, possibly a prostitute.  Her appearance in Milan is a coincidence, a little odd.  Lerch is excited.

The squadron returns to action.  Passing through a village, “[s]o inflamed was his imagination” the Sergeant experiences a series of almost hallucinatory sights (ellipses are all mine):

The village remained deathly quiet – there was not a child, not a bird, not a breath of air…  obscenities drawn with charcoal on the bare brick…  a weird half-naked figure lounging on a bed…  A dog ran busily out of the next house, head raised, dropped a bone in the middle of the road, and tried to bury it in a crack in the pavement…  (6)

A story that first seemed realistic has become dream-like.  Next, battle is joined, close and bloody, with Sergeant Lerch fighting at his peak.  Has he passed through the dream, or does he remain within it?  Every episode of the story increases the intensity of the character’s emotional and perceptual state, leading to – well, if this story resembles that of anyone else, it is Heinrich von Kleist, so do not expect a jolly ending.  Sergeant Lerch is not an aesthete, like the protagonist of “Tale of the 672nd Night,” but for Hofmannsthal a heightened aesthetic sense, however attained, is dangerous.

I am still not sure why.  I will keep reading.

All quotes are from the NYRB collection.

* Update: Nope, I was wrong about that. Hofmannsthal spent a year in military service in 1894, when he was 20. Not that that explains his sense of what combat was like.

An effort that was fruitless and thus exhausting - Hofmannsthal's collected fiction

In his fiction, Hugo von Hofmannsthal is a ghost.  His invisibility amazes me.  Arthur Schnitzler for decades obsessively rearranged the same story; each Hofmannsthal story exists is unique, which is frustrating.  Repetition is easier to understand.

When I say “each Hofmannsthal story,” I mean all five of them, all published before he was 28 years old.  In the last one, the “Lord Chandos Letter” (1902), which I am perhaps abusing by calling it a story, Hofmannsthal obliquely announced his renunciation of prose fiction, and poetry, too.  Afterwards, he wrote essays, criticism, plays and libretti, but no poems and no stories (discounting an unfinished novel).

Thus my failure to understand the valuable service New York Review Books did by assembling The Lord Chandos Letter and Other Writings (2005, translations by Joel Rotenberg).  I first thought the book was a bit of a ragbag.  Just 128 pages, several of them blank, for such a varied and productive writer.  Several of the pieces are prose poems, several are unfinished.  What a mess – but I was wrong,  the principle of selection was not eccentric but completist.

For the sort of reader to whom poetry is tedium and the idea of reading a play or, you gotta be kidding me, an opera libretto is laughable, the NYRB book is the way to read Hofmannsthal.  Other valuable collections of Hofmannsthal’s prose exist, but they omit published stories and some good scraps.  End of bibliography.

“Tale of the 672nd Night” (1895) is the earliest story.  The title tells me that I am in the world of the Arabian Nights.  A wealthy young Persian man cuts himself off from the affairs of the world on order to devote himself to beauty:

For a long time he was drunk on this great, profound beauty that was his, and all his days were more beautiful and less empty among these objects, which were no longer dead and insignificant, but a great legacy, the divine work of all the generations.

Yet he felt the triviality of all these things along with their beauty.  The thought of death never left him for long, and it often came over him when he was among laughing and noisy people, at night, or as he ate.  (16)

When I said Schnitzler, but not Hofmannsthal, was constantly rewriting one story, I was unfair.  The difference is Hofmannsthal keep changing the form and style of the story.

Even his few servants begin to torment him simply by their human existence:

A terrible apprehensiveness came over him, a mortal fear of the inescapability of life.  What was more terrible than their ceaseless observation of him was that they forced him to think about himself, an effort that was fruitless and thus exhausting.  (20)

But soon whatever remains of his concern for his servants leads to a bizarre series of adventures (surreal and Kafkaesque would not be bad descriptors) in which his search for beauty betrays him.  By the end the story is not at all like anything I remember from the Arabian Nights, but rather more like Heinrich von Kleist.  Life is escapable after all.

Partly not yet intelligible, partly no longer so - an early Hugo von Hofmannsthal verse play

The early verse plays of Hugo von Hofmannsthal could easily be staged along the lines of a Noh drama.  The characters, such as they are, might as well wear masks and accompany their monologues with five hundred year old gestures and ritual music.  It is no wonder that he later turned to opera.  I have no idea what Hofmannsthal knew about Japanese theater – I do not know what the German equivalent of Pound’s book might have been – but he was working on similar problems.

How to compress meaning, basically, like so many of the poets who were his contemporaries, but with an emphasis on meaning, separating him from Stéphane Mallarmé and Stefan George, poets who often seemed to pursue a pure form of poetry, free of meaning.  Hofmannsthal wrote some poems in that vein, too, but he quickly turned against aestheticism.

In his verse play “Death and the Fool (Der Tor und der Tod),” Death, “the bow of his violin in one hand, the violin hanging from his belt,” comes for the aesthete:

In every hour pregnant with more than chance
Experienced fully in your earthly station,
‘Twas I who touched your very soul’s foundation
With power most holy, fraught with mystery.  (114-5)

Death is claiming that he is actually the source of the aesthete’s sense of beauty, the familiar idea that the Sublime is the result of fear.

Claudio, the aesthete, has been suffering through a crisis of meaning:

Too much attracted to mere artifice,
I saw the very sun with eyes long dead
And through dead ears drew sounds into my head:
Not wholly conscious, not free from consciousness,
My sufferings petty and my joys gone stale,
Always I dragged along that awful curse
Which made my life a book, some twice-told tale
Partly not yet intelligible, partly no longer so…  (103)

A crucifix, a painting, and an old decorated chest (representing tradition or history, I guess) are by turn rejected as insufficient.  Death is accompanied by Claudio’s own dead, his mother, a girlfriend, and a friend who he drove to suicide, all of whom deliver their monologues of woe and exit the stage.  Claudio concludes that he has never really lived (“Indeed unloving and indeed unloved,” 133), and is therefore reconciled with death.

Now obviously this is hardly as compressed or obscure or allusive as a Noh play.  If anything it is all too thumpingly obvious, the ideas hardly justifying the quality of the verse.  But Hofmannsthal was only nineteen years old when he wrote it.  The ideas would develop quickly.  He moved fast.

DEATH:  Strange are these creatures, strange indeed,
Who what’s unfathomable, fathom,
What never yet was written, read,
Knit and command the tangled mystery
And in the eternal dark yet find a way.  (137)

Michael Hamburger is the translator here, as found in Poems and Verse Plays, Pantheon, 1961.

The Austrian Literature Non-Challenge - Mellow fruit unendingly

Happy New Year!  Welcome back to Wuthering Expectations, where the literature of the year, which usually means more like nine months, is Austrian.

The Austrian Non-Challenge was meant to be the sequel to the earlier Scottish and Portuguese Reading Challenges, surely among the greatest reading challenges in book blog history, but the more I explored and thought about what I wanted to accomplish, the less social the whole thing seemed.  It may all be too narrow to support the amusing Challenge rhetoric.

However, as I spend a few days planning ahead, showing my bibliographic work, I do want to invite anyone interested to read along with me.  If anything strikes your fancy, or I fail to mention something I ought to read, let’s read it together.  This has always worked out well in the past.

This is what I am looking for:  the big change, the birth of the New, the invention of the Modern.  The metaphors are bad because the New, birthed by Flaubert and Baudelaire and Manet and others, is already thirty or forty years old by 1890 when Austrian literature begins to crack open.  The transition in Austrian literature, and art, and music is late but fast.  So I hope that I might learn something about how it happened, about the change in the ideas or tastes, the artists or audience.

My guess is that I cannot, that I am fundamentally mistaken in some way and am looking in the wrong place, and it is possible that I will never mention the idea again.  The books should still be good either way.

Two writers with parallel careers will likely make up the core of my Austrian reading.  Arthur Schnitzler has been on Wuthering Expectations recently enough that I will zip past him.  I want to read more of his plays, including some puppet plays that sound promising, and more of his fiction, including his single novel, the 1908 The Road to the Open, which sounds more relevant than good (pretty good and highly relevant), but we will see.  More promising:  the early stream of consciousness showpiece “Lieutenant Gustl” (1901) and some later novellas.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal was a decade younger than Schnitzler but their careers overlap almost perfectly because Hofmannsthal was another of those weird teenage literary prodigies I have been coming across lately, a writer of poems, essays, short stories, and verse plays of remarkable assurance and originality. 

Still in his twenties, Hofmannsthal suffered an aesthetic crisis  that he describes in the 1902 fiction now know as “The Lord Chandos Letter.”  The result in his own life was an almost complete abandonment of poetry and to a lesser degree fiction for theater, leading, eventually, to his series of operatic collaborations with Richard Strauss.  Here is a Hofmannsthal poem from 1898:

Traveller’s Song (Reiselied)
To engulf us water’s eddy,
Down the boulders roll, to crush,
And to bear us off already
Birds on powerful pinions rush.

But a landscape lies below
In its ageless lakes reflecting
Mellow fruit unendingly.

Brim of well and marble brow
Gleaming rise from flowery meadows,
And the gentle breezes blow.  (tr. Michael Hamburger)

Can I get to the mellow fruit before I am crushed by the boulders, that is the question.  The poem is on p. 11 of Poems and Verse Plays, Pantheon, 1961.

Tomorrow:  more fine Austrian writers, and perhaps even some duds.

Coming up: weird German playwrights for German Literature Month

German Literature Month, so designated by Lizzy’s Literary Life and Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat, approaches.  At either link, you will find an orderly, well-defined schedule for the month.  My understanding is that it is should be followed only in spirit, although the schedules for the readalongs of Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest and Heinrich Böll’s The Silent Angel might have more meaning.

I have written before, if I am not imagining it as the result of a wine and tobacco induced E. T. A. Hoffmann-style dream, about my bewilderment and irritation at the poor status in the English-reading world of pre-20th century German-language literature.  Goethe, a titan, the equivalent, in English terms, of Shakespeare, Johnson, and Wordsworth combined in a single person, shrivels down to the author of Faust (part I only) and the “autobiographical” Sorrows of Young Werther.  German poetry is hopeless, despite numerous fine translations; German fiction, the rich line of novellas, is too weird.  Theodor Fontane can be credited with bringing Flaubert into German, Frenchifying German fiction, so I hope many readers in the “too weird” crowd will enjoy Effi Briest a lot. The business with the crocodile and Chinese servant is still a little weird.

Weirdest of all, though, is the startling German dramatic tradition.  The strange and wonderful things one found on the German stage.  That stage might well be imaginary – I am thinking of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, “finished” (by his death) in 1837, published in 1879, performed in 1913.  Large parts of Faust seem unstageable, too, although they have all been staged.

My point here is actually to pin up my German Literature Month reading list, except that I have not really decided yet.  I will mess around with some of the late 19th century playwrights, that’s all I know, the three almost exact contemporaries – Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, and Frank Wedekind.  (Sorry – Wedekind’s first name must be Franz, not Frank.  Let me look that up.  Ah, his full name is Benjamin Franklin Wedekind.  Of course.)

Wedekind is most famous, I think, for Spring Awakening, which was recently bent into a Broadway musical, and the two Lulu plays.  Schnitzler’s best known play is Der Reigen / La Ronde.  Hauptmann won the Nobel Prize in 1912, but seems to now be the least known in English, meaning: the titles of his plays do not ring bells for me.

I am tempted, too, by some younger playwrights, like Hugo von Hofmannsthal, lively poet, librettist for the dreary Richard Strauss – someday I hope to be able to spell Hofmannsthal’s name correctly without looking it up.  Or I might try the Expressionist Georg Kaiser, author of Gas and also Gas II.  The titles alone attract my interest.  I’m not going to read all or even much of this in November, though.

This piece must be among the most ignorant I have ever written for Wuthering Expectations.  Speculative might be a kinder word.  Corrections, admonitions, and recommendations are most welcome.

Oh, there will also be some of this in November:

That’ll be fun, right?