Hugo Laurenz August Hofmann von Hofmannsthal was an Austrian prodigy, a novelist, librettist, poet, dramatist, narrator, and essayist.
Background
Hugo Hofmannsthal was born on February 1, 1874, in Vienna, Austria, the son of an upper-class Christian Austrian mother, Anna Maria Josefa Fohleutner, and a Christian Austrian–Italian bank manager, Hugo August Peter Hofmann, Edler von Hofmannsthal. His great-grandfather, Isaak Löw Hofmann, Edler von Hofmannsthal, from whom his family inherited the noble title "Edler von Hofmannsthal," was a Jewish tobacco farmer ennobled by the Austrian emperor.
Education
Hugo studied law and later philology in Vienna but decided to devote himself to writing upon graduating in 1901.
Career
In 1900 Hofmannsthal met the composer Richard Strauss for the first time. He later wrote libretti for several of his operas, including Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier with Harry von Kessler, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Die ägyptische Helena, and Arabella.
In 1911 Hugo adapted the 15th century English morality play Everyman as Jedermann, and Jean Sibelius wrote incidental music for it. During the First World War Hofmannsthal held a government post. He wrote speeches and articles supporting the war effort, and emphasizing the cultural tradition of Austria-Hungary. In 1920, Hofmannsthal, along with Max Reinhardt, founded the Salzburg Festival.
Hofmannsthal was raised in "the temple of art". This perfect setting for aesthetic isolation allowed Hofmannsthal the unique perspective of the privileged artist, but also allowed him to see that art had become a flattened documenting of humanity, which took our instincts and desires and framed them for viewing without acquiring any of the living, passionate elements. Because of this realization, Hofmannsthal’s idea of the role of the artist began to take shape as someone who created works that would inspire or inflame the instinct, rather than merely preserving it in a creative form. He also began to think that the artist should not be someone isolated and left to his art, but rather a man of the world, immersed in both politics and art.
Membership
Young Vienna
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
The appearance of the young Hofmannsthal is and remains notable as one of the greatest miracles of accomplishment early in life; in world literature, except for Keats and Rimbaud, I know no other youthful example of a similar impeccability in the mastering of language, no such breadth of spiritual buoyancy, nothing more permeated with poetic substance even in the most casual lines, than in this magnificent genius, who already in his sixteenth and seventeenth year had inscribed himself in the eternal annals of the German language with unextinguishable verses and prose which today has still not been surpassed. His sudden beginning and simultaneous completion was a phenomenon that hardly occurs more than once in a generation. — Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern, Frankfurt am Main 1986.
Connections
In 1901, Hugo married Gertrud "Gerty" Schlesinger, the daughter of a Viennese banker. Gerty, who was Jewish, converted to Christianity before their marriage. They settled in Rodaun, not far from Vienna, and had three children, Christiane, Franz, and Raimund.