‘Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance… Those Greeks were superficial — out of profundity [Nietzsche’s own italics].’ Thus said Nietzsche in the preface to The Gay Science. I expect Richard Strauss knew the passage. At any rate, many of his works give the impression of being composed by someone who wasn’t sure how profound he could be, or wanted to be, or indeed what profundity was.
This is most evident in Ariadne auf Naxos, which deals explicitly with these issues. To add to his perplexities at this time, Strauss had Hugo von Hofmannsthal lecturing him in letters. The key one is printed in the Royal Opera’s programme for the revival of Ariadne. In it Von Hoffmansthal cultivated that vein of genteel mystical mythology that alternately cowed Strauss into agreement and left him feeling irritable and more determined than ever to be ‘the Offenbach of the 20th century’.
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