HOFFMANNSTHAL, HUGO VON. – Austrian writer, born in Vienna on 1 February 1874, died at Rodaun (near Vienna) on 15 July 1929. Together with George and Rilke, he effectively fought naturalism, opposing its materialistic forms with a fine and delicate poetry, rich in inwardness. Having published his first verses at barely fifteen (under the pseudonym “Loris”) and, at seventeen, the drama Gersten (under the pseudonym “Theophil Morren”), at nineteen he was already celebrated for the short drama Der Tor und der Tod, preceded the year before by a fragment of another little drama, Der Tod des Tizian (1901).
In these youthful works there shines forth, above all, a prodigious ability to assimilate and evoke the tonalities, forms, and accents of Faust, Shakespeare, Hauptmann, and Stifter, as well as to render through words, at once, the musical and pictorial qualities of language. But beyond all this, H. was afflicted by an acute tormenting desire for an ever deeper interpretation and possession of reality. Hence the progressive inwardness of his later production. The dramas Der Kaiser und die Hexe (1897) and Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919) mark the two principal stages in this direction, together with Der Turm (1925), which also retains a political tone in its enthusiastic celebration of the world of the spirit as the sole salvation of both individuals and states. This attitude (which culminated in the 1927 address to the students of Munich: Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation) is nothing other than a form of his constant striving toward that “universal human,” of which his passion for the theater remains the most eloquent expression, and of which a significant indication may also be discerned in the fact that he never strayed, as George did, from his original Catholicism into any kind of paganism. He also left several minor dramas: the libretti for Strauss, Der Rosenbevalier (1911), Ariadne auf Naxos (1912), Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919); a few lyrical poems (Gesammelte Gedichte, 1907), and an unfinished novel: Andreas oder die Vereinigten (1911–32).