Stefan Zweig wrote the libretto for a Richard Strauss opera

Person: Stefan Zweig
Lived: 1881–1942
Field: Literature
From: Austrian

The story

Stefan Zweig's literary talent extended to the stage. He wrote plays, including Jeremiah in 1917, and had successfully adapted Ben Jonson's comedy Volpone for the German theatre. Richard Strauss, one of the greatest composers of his time, had written most of his operas with the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. After Hofmannsthal died in 1929, Strauss, 17 years older than Zweig and not yet personally acquainted with him, asked him to write a new libretto. From 1931 Zweig was in effect Hofmannsthal's successor.

Zweig chose another Jonson comedy, Epicœne, or The Silent Woman, about a retired captain who cannot bear noise and is tricked into marrying a supposedly silent bride. The result was the comic opera Die schweigsame Frau. By the time it was ready, the Nazis were in power in Germany and Zweig's books had been banned there because he was a Jew. In 1934 the Nazi press began attacking Strauss over the collaboration.

Strauss refused to withdraw the opera and insisted that Zweig's authorship be credited. At the premiere at the Dresden Semperoper on 24 June 1935, conducted by Karl Böhm, Zweig's name appeared on the programme. Joseph Goebbels, who had planned to attend, stayed away, and the opera was banned after three performances.

Zweig never heard it performed. The opera was staged in Graz and in Prague under George Szell in 1936 and in Zurich in 1942, and after the war it returned to Dresden in 1946. Strauss wrote that its hero had at last been freed from the concentration camp of the Nazi theatre authorities and returned to the city where he had once struggled to get the librettist's name on the programme. It later reached New York in 1958, the Royal Opera House in London in 1961 and Glyndebourne in 1977. Zweig also helped provide the libretto for Strauss's opera Friedenstag (1938), working with Joseph Gregor.

The collaboration endures as part of the record of both artists, and Zweig's memoir The World of Yesterday later included a portrait of Strauss and the opera's fate. The episode shows the respect Zweig commanded among Europe's leading artists, even as the Nazi regime tried to erase Jewish writers from German culture.

Why it matters

Zweig's libretto added a work to the operatic repertoire and stands as a reminder of artistic collaboration that defied Nazi persecution.

About Stefan Zweig

Viennese Jewish novelist and biographer, among the world’s most translated writers of the interwar years, whose exile memoir The World of Yesterday mourns a lost Europe.

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Stefan Zweig

1881–1942 · Literature

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