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who was assimilated but never enough, Schnitzler’s heroes were philanderers, seekers for meaning in love and art and life, but always, as became Vienna, a little listlessly. They were charming, good-natured, clever and sophisticated; voices of the wit, inconstancy, politeness and unscrupulousness of the Viennese soul—and of its lassitude. The hero of Der Weg ins Freie (The Road to the Open), six months after returning from a “melancholy and rather boring” tour of Sicily with his mistress before a final parting, reminds himself that since then he has done no real work, not even written down “the plaintive adagio which he had heard in the waves breaking on the beach on a windy morning in Palermo.” He is obsessed by a feeling of the “dreamlike and purposeless character of existence.” Discussing a heated debate in the Landtag he replies to a question, “Heated? Well, yes, what we call heated in Austria. People were outwardly offensive and inwardly indifferent.”

Hofmannsthal after his first meeting with Strauss sent him a verse play for a ballet which he had written on discovering “Dionysian beauty” in the wordless gesture of the dance. Not so dedicated to pure art as not to value an association with Strauss, he hoped the Master would set his libretto to music. Strauss, however, was at the moment too busy with Feuersnot and other projects. Pursuing the Dionysian trail, Hofmannsthal began to make notes on Greek themes, on the relation of the supernatural to the bestial, on “phallic exuberance” and the “pathology and criminal psychology” of the tragedies then enjoying revival on the stage. Here he found, not the marble purity of the conventional classical Greece known to the Nineteenth Century, but Nietzsche’s vision of a demonic Greece in whose sins and hates and forbidden bloodstained passions was the birth of tragedy, the earliest statement of man’s compulsive drive toward ruin. The central tragedy, which Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides all had dramatized, was the chain of guilt in the house of Atreus from the sacrifice of Iphigenia to the murder of Agamemnon to the revenge of Electra and Orestes in their ultimate act of matricide. Hofmannsthal followed, but his Elektra turned out to be closer to Poe than Euripides, a nightmare of Gothic horror rather than a drama of man’s fate.

His stage directions describe a palace courtyard at sunset where “patches of red light glimmering through the fig tree fall like bloodstains on the ground and walls.” His characters surpass Salome in extravagant utterances of torment and desire, in ghastly longing for the double slaying of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, in recollections of Agamemnon’s gaping wounds, in sexual images of hatred appearing as a bridegroom, “hollow-eyed, breathing a viperous breath,” whom Electra takes into her bed that it might teach her “all that is done between man and wife.” Crazed with mutual hate, mother and daughter circle each other like mad dogs. Electra is a maniacal fury, feeding the vulture of revenge on her body, groveling in the dust of Agamemnon’s grave at sundown, the hour when she “howls for her father” and sniffs among the dogs for the buried corpse. Clytemnestra is almost putrescent, with “a sallow bloated face” and heavy eyelids which she can only keep open by a “terrible effort.” Dressed in purple, covered in jewels and talismans, she leans on an ivory cane, her train carried by “a yellow figure with the face of an Egyptian and the posture of a serpent.” Sick with terror, evil dreams and an old lust, she is obsessed by the need to spill blood and drives herds of animals to the sacrifice in the hope that if the right blood flows she will be relieved of the nameless horror of her nightmares. It is no word, no pain that chokes her; it is nothing, yet so terrifying that her soul “hungers to hang itself and every nerve cries for death.”

Can one decay alive like a rotten corpse?

Can one fall apart if one is not even ill?

Fall apart wide awake like a dress eaten by moths?

She seems an allegory of Europe and the play a climax of the Schwarzseher, an