bavarikon4UDescription
The Austrian writer, dramatist, lyricist, librettist and co-founder of the Salzburg Festspiele, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), is considered as the most important representative of the German Fin de Siècle and of the Wiener Moderne. His exchange of letters from the estate of Elsa and Hugo Bruckmann comprises 64 letters addressed to them between the years of 1893 to 1922. Hofmannsthal had met Elsa Bruckmann in the winter of 1893/94 in Vienna. Thus, the foundation was laid for an ever-closer relationship that developed beyond a mere "Geistesverwandtschaft" (congeniality) into a dalliance. The daughter of the royal-Bavarian Uhlan officer Prince Theodor Cantacuzène from old Byzantine nobility (1865-1946) was one of the most dazzling figures of Munich society of the first half of the twentieth century. She led a Salon, in which painters, poets, musicians, scientists, scholars and diplomats used to gather and became later a patron of Adolf Hitler. In 1898, she had married the Munich publisher Hugo Bruckmann (1863-1941). Far from courting exaggerated expectations and disappointments, Elsa and Hugo "wisely prepared for a friendship that was borne by a lasting appreciation and included later the respective partners and was going to last over the coming three decades" (Klaus E. Bohnenkamp). Datum: 2016
Author
Peter Czoik