Alas for von Hofmannsthal, but here was another long-dead playwright who seemed nearly as gifted; and the musical 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 I’ll be sorry for myself. Branches and boughs.
Brown hills, the valleys faint with brume, A burnish on the lake . ..
There was a speech for a great tragic comedian, in the spirit of Falstaff; the final union of laughter and tears, punc-tuated by the sleepy comments of Reedbeck, to whose son-orous snore (trombones, no less than five of them, con sor-dini?) the opera would gently end… .
What could be better? And yet he had come upon the play only by the unlikeliest series of accidents. At first he had planned to do a straight knockabout farce, in the idiom of The Silent Woman, just to warm himself up. Remembering that Zweig had adapted that libretto for him, in the old days, from a play by Ben Jonson, Strauss had begun to search out English plays of the period just after Jonson’s, and had promptly run aground on an awful specimen in heroic couplets called Venice Preserv’d, by one Thomas Otway.