To resolve this apparent contradiction and to see if I could situate myself more advantageously Arabella-wise—that is, to come closer to the cultural assumptions that enabled this “fairy tale” and the music it generated to seem believable and palatable—I took a quick reversed-chronology trip back to the “somewhat rotten” time and place of its action. I could have begun with the occasion of the work’s premiere (Dresden, 1933, a few months after Hitler’s assumption of power), with Viorica Ursuleac, Margit Bokor, and Alfred Jerger, under Clemens Krauss), but I decided on 1929, the year of the end of the long, rich composer/librettist collaboration owing to Hofmannsthal’s death, as the more meaningful starting point. It had been a terrible year (and more) for Hofmannsthal, given his health problems and his sensitivity to atmospheric changes, and there had been long unproductive stretches in his work. Then, in July, his son Franz committed suicide, and two days later Hofmannsthal died of a massive stroke while getting dressed for the funeral. He had completed Act 1of Arabella to Strauss’s satisfaction, but Acts 2 and 3 were left without the revisions the composer had wanted, and Strauss, wanting to see the whole thing before him before starting composition, had written little or no music.

It happens that 1929 saw the completion of the Karl-Marx-Hof, emblematic of the impressive achievements of “Red Vienna” in working-class housing, health care, education, and family support. (N.B.: the term “Red Vienna” can be misleading. The Communists, though active and at times disruptive, had little success politically. The Social Democrats constituted the most influential party for most of the ’20s, though with plenty of competition from both right and left, and many of the old Empire’s administrative traditions and habits of deference to title were maintained. Political sympathies aside, the leftward movement was a logical reaction to the hyperinflation and severe privations of the post-WW1 years in both Austria and Germany, from which Strauss, up in Garmisch, had been fairly well insulated, but Hofmannsthal decidedly not.) But the year was also marked by the October collapse of a major bank, the Allgemeine Oesterreichische  Boden-Creditanstalt, due to speculation and bad loans, which—just as with similar happenings in the rest of Europe and the U. S. in the fall of ’29—heralded the onset of the Depression.

Working back from ’29, I encountered first the deadly riots of July, 1927, in which elements of the Viennese citizenry ran amok at the acquittal of three members of a right-wing militia who had shot and killed two innocent bystanders at a small-town parade of government forces—a shot across the bow for the Republic. I then passed back through the years of the nation’s gradual postwar recovery, bedeviled though it was by economic hard times necessitating a humiliating loan from the League of Nations and political strife that extended to the depredations of rival militias; thence to the stepping-down of Karl I, the last of the Habsburg emperors (November, 1918), and the founding of the Republic of German-Austria; on through the influenza pandemic of 1918-20, which carried off many Viennese, including some prominent in politics and the arts, and the famine that followed; into the First World War itself, eventuating the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the severe reduction of Austria as a whole; and to the scandalous “Redl Affair” of 1913, a double-agent intrigue that involved the blackmailing of a high army officer over a homosexual involvement. Midway through the war, the aged Franz Joseph I, who had functioned for sixty-eight years as the bureaucratic glue for what was evidently a well-administered though fractious empire, had died, as did in 1910 (still following my backwards chronology) the charismatic, once-liberal Karl Lueger, who’d been elected Mayor of Vienna in 1897 on an avowedly anti-Semitic, proto-Fascist platform.