among the current scripts for 3-Vthough he doubted it
he found himself unable to tell the good from the bad
through the fog cast over both by incomprehensibly tech-
nical production directions. Eventually, and for only the
third time in his whole career, he had fallen back upon a
play written in a language other than his own, andfor
the first timedecided to set it in that language.
The play was Christopher Fry’s Venus Observed, in all
ways a perfect Strauss opera libretto, as he came gradually to
realize. “Though nominally a comedy, with a complex farcical
plot, it was a verse play with considerable depth to it, and a
number of characters who cried out to be brought by music
into three dimensions, plus a strong undercurrent of autum-
nal tragedy, of leaf-fall and apple-fallprecisely the kind of
contradictory dramatic mixture which von Hofmannsthal
had supplied him with in The Knight of the Rose, in Ariadne
at Naxos, and in Arabella.
Alas for von Hofmannsthal, but here was another long-
dead playwright who seemed nearly as gifted; and the musi-
cal opportunities were immense. There was, for instance, the
fire which ended act two; what a gift for a composer to whom
orchestration and counterpoint were as important as air and
water! Or take the moment where Perpetua shoots the apple
from the Duke’s hand; in that one moment a single passing
reference could add Rossini’s marmoreal William Tell to the
musical texture as nothing but an ironic footnotel And the
Duke’s great curtain speech, beginning:
Shall I be sorry for myself? In Mortality’s name