With Ariadne the great partnership- comparable with Mozart and da Ponte and Verdi and Piave continued. Fortunately most of their collaboration was conducted by mail, so the fascinating relationship between them can be studied in depth. Their personalities were markedly different. Hofmannsthal, ten years younger than Strauss, was moody, insecure, priggish, introverted, a loner. Sometimes, as he wrote in 1909, his work could be held up for two or three weeks by what he called ‘a slight by must deplorable nervous depression’. Strauss was self-confident, practical, good-natured and level-headed. More
Hofmannsthal had an idea to salvage Ariadne. He wrote Strauss he was going to delete Molière and instead to write a new prologue with the figure of the Composer as the central character. “This prologue will not take the place on the Ariadne stage but behind it, in a large hall surrounded by the dressing rooms of the artists. The rich man will be represented by one of his lackeys. The Composer will be shown falling in love, being fooled, mistreated as a guest, visitor and vanquished in one person…The whole prologue will be less than half an hour, then a short intermission, and afterwards the uncut Ariadne. Do you agree with this plan? With a little luck I could do it- when do you want to have it?” More
The more common tradition, however, was, that Theseus left Ariadne in Naxos alive; but here the statements again differ, for some relate that he was forced by Dionysus to leave her, and that in his grief he forgot to take down the black sail, which occasioned the death of his father. According to others, Theseus faithlessly forsook her in the island, and different motives are given for the act of faithlessness. According to this tradition, Ariadne put an end to her own life in despair, or was saved by Dionysus, who in amazement at her beauty made her his wife, raised among the immortals, and placed the crown which he gave her at his marriage with her, among the stars. More
The traditional visual symbols for tragedy and comedy are two masks. The tragic mask wears an expression of lament or despair, while that of the comic mask is of confident glee. One weeps; the other laughs.
The first point to be made is that both are masks: both are images which transform reality, according to particular points of view. The face inside the mask, that of the human being, remains the same. Man adopts one mask or the other according to his mood, but does so in order to explore the same essential human problems that drama and music-drama have always explored. More
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