Abschied vom Trauerspiel

Reviewed by: Abschied vom Trauerspiel: Kunsttheoretische Überlegungen zu Hofmannsthal by Klaus von Schilling Vincent Kling Klaus von Schilling, Abschied vom Trauerspiel: Kunsttheoretische Überlegungen zu Hofmannsthal. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2018. 520 pp. In Abschied vom Trauerspiel, Klaus von Schilling's new book about Hofmannsthal, the author captures in his title the nature of Hofmannsthal's individual talent in its historical moment and, in his subtitle, to contextualize his author's sensibility by showing how tragedy as a genre had been denigrated [End Page 94] through the nineteenth century. Hofmannsthal's disposition was therefore both a part of a larger cultural manifestation and a product of his own temperament, which found comedy more congenial. Consider that the five libretti he wrote for Richard Strauss were all comedies (he adapted Elektra, which already existed as a spoken drama); he affirmed Novalis's dictum (in "Die Ironie der Dinge," for example) that "Nach einem unglücklichen Krieg müssen Komödien geschrieben werden," an admonition he followed so successfully that Der Schwierige (1921) is oft en cited as the greatest comedy in German; he praised (in "Shakespeare und wir") not only the comic interludes in the tragedies but also drew special attention to the poignancy and seriousness of Shakespeare's comedies, best exemplified by Sir John Falstaff. In a time of uncertainty, shift ing values, and upheaval, Hofmannsthal, whose Lord Chandos had already despaired of language, found expressive redemption in the ambiguity, the irony, the many-layered nuances comedy fosters and the communal refuge in the vision of reconciliation and harmony it enacts. By contrast, it is telling that Hofmannsthal's first attempt at tragedy, Ascano und Gioconda (1892), remained a fragment, and other works, including the two versions of Der Turm, never achieved the finality he envisioned. The tragedies are oft en febrile and forced as well, seemingly attempting by sheer force to override Nietzsche's view of tragedy as a modality debased by contemporary life. A quarter-century aft er Elektra, for instance, it was still possible for discerning critics to decry the pathological violence of the play, as when E. M. Butler called it a "Graeco-Freudian Myth." Schilling considers Hofmannsthal's tragedies in chronological order, beginning with his early work Das Leben ein Traum, an adaptation of Calderón's La vida es sueño, and ending with an extensive treatment of "Die beiden Fassungen des Trauerspiels 'Der Turm'" (235–389), late, masterful reworkings of the same play. Hofmannsthal, trained as a Romanist, was exquisitely sensitive to both the richness and the burden of the entire Western tradition, never more so than when engaging with his great Spanish forebear, whose eminence made Hofmannsthal's work of adaptation burdensome. The other tragedies Schilling considers are Das gerettete Venedig, Elektra, and Ödipus und die Sphinx, once more all adaptations. It is quite indicative for his thesis that one section of Schilling's chapter on Ödipus und die Sphinx (203–34) is titled "Scheitern und Gelingen" (203–8). And indeed, it is remarkable to note how much of Hofmannsthal's work remained fragmentary or incomplete; it [End Page 95] is almost emblematic of his life's striving that sudden death interrupted his revisions of Arabella. Considering the frequent fragmentation in Hofmannsthal's tragedies, Schilling is astute in drawing on Macbeth for his book's epigraph—"Und nichts ist, als was nicht ist" (5). That view also bears out the thesis of Schilling's study, which is that Hofmannsthal in his time could only bid farewell to tragedy, not revive it with any robustness. "Hofmannsthals Werk ist immer wieder—und zu Recht—als ein 'spätes' verstanden worden, das ein genaues Bewusstsein des eigenen Ortes ausbildet, als Endpunkt einer langen Tradition" (13); it is too self-conscious, in other words, too keenly conscious of its long pedigree, too full of nuance to induce the abandon tragedy requires. It attempts to embrace universality by reviving the idea of "Welttheater" at the heart of Calderón's work (87–108), but at precisely a time when such unanimity or comprehensiveness had been forever dispelled. Schilling frames his study by drawing on Nietzsche's monumental work about tragedy as arising from music (33–50) and

Art · Comedy · Drama · Irony · Literature · German Literature and Culture Studies · Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies · History · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophy