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Gedichte Und Kleine Dramen
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
- GenresPoetryGerman Literature
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1949
About the author
Hugo von Hofmannsthal
466 books133 followersAustrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal established his reputation with lyric poems and a number of plays, including
Yesterday
(1891) and
Death and the Fool
(1893).
This Austrian novelist, librettist, poet, dramatist, narrator, and essayist flourished.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_vo...
This Austrian novelist, librettist, poet, dramatist, narrator, and essayist flourished.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_vo...
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 22, 2025
Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote the librettos for two of the most beautiful operas I’ve ever seen, Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Der Rosenkavalier, which I saw within about a month of each other in early spring of 2022, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, with an absolutely radiant Lise Davidsen as Ariadne, and Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin. Strauss and Hofmannsthal were perfectly matched: Hofmannsthal’s words, like Strauss’s music, marry the promise of the fast coming modern to the unselfconscious beauty of the swiftly passing romantic.
A gut feeling—inspired, no doubt, by my love of Strauss’s operas—inspired me to purchase, on impulse, this rather obscure collection of Hofmannsthal’s lyric poems and short lyric dramas. The poems are lovely, but the plays are the stars. Closet dramas, they seem to have been intended to be read aloud—Hoffmansthal later called them “operas without music” or “speaking masques.” Expecting to find them difficult in German, I thought I would only read a few. But they were so enchanting that I read them all.
Reading Hofmannsthal in German reminds me, a little, of what I think it may have felt like to read English literature when I was a child. In elementary school, I was obsessed with Steinbeck. I read all his novels, short and long. I know, now, that I can’t very well have understood them—at least not in the sense I would if I read them now. For example, I remember, vividly, the opening of Grapes of Wrath, with the turtle in the dust; remember equally vividly the passage where they government soaks piles of oranges in kerosene to prop up the price, while migrant workers go hungry. But the very last scene, which I won’t spoil, but which would no doubt have been highly memorable if I’d been just a few years older when I read the novel, didn’t stick in my mind at all. I didn’t understand it. Didn’t have the life experience to understand it. So much of the novel went right over my head. But that didn’t stop me from loving it. I loved it, above all, for its language—for how it felt to read Steinbeck’s words, whatever it was he might or might not have been trying to say.
I’m not saying that I didn’t understand these plays—I believe I mostly did. But what captivated me about Hofmannsthal’s closet dramas was not what they say or do, not the stories they tell, but the way they use the German language. It is all so new and fresh to me! All so novel! It is like I am a child learning how to read again, because, of course, I am a child learning how to read again.
These plays are dreamy, in the sense that to read them is to dream. Their witches and princes and sailors and mountain queens and lovers and specters appear like fragments of nightmare or figments of waking fantasy. This is why I can hardly read modern fantasy anymore; because in books like this—or Shakespeare, Ovid, Coleridge, Rachilde—ghosts and witches and princesses inhabit a world deeper than thought. Clever and accomplished though they tend to be, contemporary authors, in my experience, are generally content with only a pale approximation of this ineffable magic.
A gut feeling—inspired, no doubt, by my love of Strauss’s operas—inspired me to purchase, on impulse, this rather obscure collection of Hofmannsthal’s lyric poems and short lyric dramas. The poems are lovely, but the plays are the stars. Closet dramas, they seem to have been intended to be read aloud—Hoffmansthal later called them “operas without music” or “speaking masques.” Expecting to find them difficult in German, I thought I would only read a few. But they were so enchanting that I read them all.
Reading Hofmannsthal in German reminds me, a little, of what I think it may have felt like to read English literature when I was a child. In elementary school, I was obsessed with Steinbeck. I read all his novels, short and long. I know, now, that I can’t very well have understood them—at least not in the sense I would if I read them now. For example, I remember, vividly, the opening of Grapes of Wrath, with the turtle in the dust; remember equally vividly the passage where they government soaks piles of oranges in kerosene to prop up the price, while migrant workers go hungry. But the very last scene, which I won’t spoil, but which would no doubt have been highly memorable if I’d been just a few years older when I read the novel, didn’t stick in my mind at all. I didn’t understand it. Didn’t have the life experience to understand it. So much of the novel went right over my head. But that didn’t stop me from loving it. I loved it, above all, for its language—for how it felt to read Steinbeck’s words, whatever it was he might or might not have been trying to say.
I’m not saying that I didn’t understand these plays—I believe I mostly did. But what captivated me about Hofmannsthal’s closet dramas was not what they say or do, not the stories they tell, but the way they use the German language. It is all so new and fresh to me! All so novel! It is like I am a child learning how to read again, because, of course, I am a child learning how to read again.
These plays are dreamy, in the sense that to read them is to dream. Their witches and princes and sailors and mountain queens and lovers and specters appear like fragments of nightmare or figments of waking fantasy. This is why I can hardly read modern fantasy anymore; because in books like this—or Shakespeare, Ovid, Coleridge, Rachilde—ghosts and witches and princesses inhabit a world deeper than thought. Clever and accomplished though they tend to be, contemporary authors, in my experience, are generally content with only a pale approximation of this ineffable magic.
Displaying 1 of 1 review