The Austrian poet, dramatist, and essayist Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) is best known for his opera librettos. He is also considered a master of German lyric poetry. Hugo von Hofmannsthal was born in Vienna and spent most of his life there. He...

What is perhaps most striking about Hugo von Hofmannsthal are contradictions that characterize his creative imagination. His poetic laboratory was filled with an ever-increasing multiplicity of images, themes, ideas, situations, and dramatis personae....

Hugo von Hofmannsthal is generally considered the most important Austrian writer of the early twentieth century; among German-speaking writers of this period only Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka have generated more commentary. At the same time,...

It was tough enough in antiquity to be a sorceress, let alone the planet's most beautiful woman. In the postmodern world, you have to compete for attention with directors, too.Strauss' "Die Aegyptische Helena" ("The Egyptian Helen") returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Thursday night for...

History hovers nearby at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, where John Adams' ambitious but uneven work about the creation of the atom bomb is being staged just a few miles from the site of the world's first controlled nuclear chain reaction."Doctor Atomic," which had its...