For the liberalization and relative democratization that had followed the imperial proclamation of 1857 had been beset by increasing discontent and conflict. The problems inherent in governance of a vast territory that sought to unite fifteen separate ethnic-national identities, each protective of its autonomy, were aggravated by movements associated with anti-Slavism, anti-Semitism, pan-Germanism, and other corrosive initiatives, and—in a succession of events that cannot help but remind us of our own time and place, an alliance had formed between an aggrieved aristocratic class (still culturally, if not politically, strong) with populist elements seeking to preserve traditional folkish, artisanal ways. The prevailing confusion and divisiveness had created a hunger for a firm hand that would restore authority and order, and the forty years of liberal experimentation that had begun in 1860, Arabella’s year of setting, had run out of steam.

What is remarkable about this 70-or-so years of backstory to Arabella’s parturition, crammed with civilization-altering events, is how little it seems to have affected its creators’ work and cultural posture. We could even trace a parallel track through the cultural upheavals of this same period, which after all saw (and I’m just skimming) the arrivals of the styles we call Art Nouveau (in Vienna, the Jugenstil), the Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte, Impressionism and Expressionism in all the arts including music; then of Schoenberg’s pan-tonality and all the analogous developments in literature, architecture, and philosophy—this last including the introduction and increasing acceptance of Sigmund Freud’s “psycho-archeological” analytics—without seeing much of their influence on the collaboration except by way of contrast. The founding of the Salzburg Festival in the immediate aftermath of WW1 (1920) through the alliance of Hofmannsthal and Strauss with the dominant producer and director of the German-speaking theatre, Max Reinhardt, and the designer Alfred Roller, with its dedication to Mozart and the first of what became annual stagings of Hofmannsthal’s own Jedermann, already constituted a planting of the traditional culture’s flag against some stiff, obliterating winds. As for matters operatic, by 1929 Ernst Krenek’s jazzy, cross-racial Jonny Spielt Auf had been a hot ticket in the German-language opera houses for two years, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck had shaken things up four years earlier, and up in Berlin the Weill/Brecht Dreigroschenoper was in its premiere run at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. Yet Strauss and Hofmannsthal were working on a love story of the Vienna that was already fading from view in the time of its setting, the very time of their own emergence as then-“progressive” artists. And the building contractor, who would have introduced the tone of the new Vienna and taken the story at least a small step in the direction of contemporaneous “relevance,” didn’t make the final cut. Yet Strauss and Hofmannsthal reminded each other that they were trying to create a modern opera.

As I outlined in Opera as Opera (pp. 222-24 and p. 230, with the entire chapter as context) Strauss—unlike Puccini and the Italian verists or their French counterpart, Gustave Charpentier—broke away from the E-19 outsider-couple metanarrative. This was true in both the operas he wrote with Hofmannsthal and those he wrote before and after their collaboration. His observance of it in Der Rosenkavalier, by first creating its circumstances in its archetypical form (Octavian/Marschallin) and then turning its social distinctions upside-down (Octavian/Sophie) is a way of luring us into the story, then declaring it dead. The wisp of it that turns up in Salome (with Narraboth’s fatal obsession—see Fremstad, Nilsson, Welitsch, and Others, and the Met’s New “Salome”, 6/10/25) declares it a side issue, and that’s true of the Komponist/Zerbinetta complication in Ariadne, too, again with social caste upended. Strauss’s fixations were two: on myth and sacred legend, not Nordic as with Wagner, but alternately Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman, and on the nature of art itself, especially in its theatrical forms. Yet in Arabella he returned to the E-19 story. He was led there by Hofmannsthal, whose libretto was built up from two of his earlier projects, but went to it altogether willingly.