| Description |
In the year 1900, the Austrian poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote to the German composer Richard Strauss about collaborating on a ballet, but Strauss rejected this idea. Three years later, Hofmannsthal wrote a free rendition of Sophocles' play Elektra, and within four days of its premiere, Elektra was adopted into the repertories of twenty-two European theaters. Strauss saw a performance of the play, and, in 1904, wrote to Hofmannsthal on the possibility of his adopting it as a libretto. Hofmannsthal completed work on this adaptation of Elektra in 1905 and Strauss began writing the score in 1906. The operatic version of Elektra was first performed in Dresden on the 25th of January, 1909. Elektra received mixed reviews and Strauss decided that the next collaboration between himself and Hofmannsthal should be a comedy similar to the comic operas of Mozart. This "comedy" would eventually be known as Der Rosenkavalier and would become the most well-known and successful of the Strauss-Hofmannsthal collaborations. The first performance of Der Rosenkavalier was given on the twenty-sixth of January, 1911. The opera was a huge success, with fifty performances being given in the first year, all of them sold out. Hofmannsthal and Strauss collaborated on four more operas after Der Rosenkavalier: Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Die aegyptische Helena, and Arabella. Throughout the years of their association, Hofmannsthal and Strauss established an extraordinary working relationship which enabled them to create some of the most enduring operas in the German language. |
