Abstract
Originating as a divertissement in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s adaptation of Moliere’s Ie Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Ariadne aufNaxos stemmed from the poet’s attempt to create a work wherein “the buffo element … is throughout interwoven with the heroic.” As he explained it to his collaborator Richard Strauss, the poet saw in this synthesis of opera seria and commedia dell’ arte elements a “new genre which to all appearances reaches back to a much earlier one, just as all development goes in cycles” (Strauss and Hofmannsthal 1961:76). Embedded in Gentilhomme, the work reached back towards the divertissements familiar in the comedie-ballets of Moliere’s time while simultaneously looking forward to a proto-postmodern aesthetic. The question that has bedeviled numerous commentators has been whether or not this synthesis is successful (and concomitantly, what constitutes a success in this case). The opera’s conclusion has given rise to the most serious contentions (Forsyth 1982:194-203). On the one hand, those who identify the opera with the postmodern tend to see the synthesis as successful-a success predicated upon its perceived lack of cohesion, its tendency towards the fragmentary, the incommensurable. On the other hand, critics such as Karen Forsyth, concentrating on the historicism of the work, condemn it as a failure. Forsyth, in particular, feels that the opera fails owing to Hofmannsthal’s inability to reconcile his reversion to lyric drama with the divertissement structure of the original conception (1982:56-61). However, such condemnation fails to consider the opera within the larger context of Hofmannsthal’s increasing concern with the ethicality of his aesthetic project.