“Dock gewiss,” Strauss said politely.
But the work went forward. He was making a little income now, from small works. People seemed to feel a special interest in a composer who had come out of the -mind sculptors’ laboratories; and in addition the material itself, Strauss was quite certain, had merits of its own to help sell it.
It was the opera which counted, however. That grew and grew under his pen, as fresh and new as his new life, as founded in knowledge and ripeness as his long full memory.
Finding a libretto had been troublesome at first. While it was possible that something existed that might have served 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 technical 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.