Getting ready for Santa Fe Opera’s new production of one of my favorite Strauss operas.
The biographer Michael Kennedy on the rapport between composer and librettist:
We do composer and librettist an injustice if we judge the creation of Ariadne only through their published correspondence, which has misled some writers to assume that Hofmannsthal was Strauss’s intellectual superior and that this was a partnership between a Viennese man-of-letters and a Bavarian musician baffled by his collaborator’s metaphysical flights of fancy. Strauss certainly acted as a brake on these, but he understood totally what Hofmannsthal was aiming for, even if he sometimes thought it unnecessarily obscure.
Hofmannsthal’s libretto here.
Filed under: Santa Fe Opera, Strauss
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 