A “Gay Myth”—The Story of “Die Liebe der Danae”

Abstract

Richard Strauss first thought of composing a musical setting for the Danae myth in the Spring of 1920. The work was finished on 28th June, 1940, at Alt Garmisch and will be produced this August as the Salzburg Festival. The composer, in a letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal dated 27th June, 1919, expressed his desire to have a subject for a light opera after the style of the Lucian dialogues between gods and hetaerae. Some seven months later the poet produced a sketch for a light, three-act operetta type of work in the Lucian spirit. On 23rd April the libretto went to Strauss. Hofmannsthal took the opportunity of explaining that what he was after was a development from the style of Der Rosenkavalier and of Ariadne and his arrangement of Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. For this there would be needed the kind of light, witty music that Strauss alone, at that particular period of his life, was capable of supplying. This early classical myth which, in the Lucian sense, was to be thought of as a “milesian fairy tale,” flippantly treated, should be as French as possible in manner but without sacrificing the essentially German core and the concealed symbolism and metaphysics that went with it. The poet was already concerning himself, too, with questions of costumes and scenery. He envisaged something in the classical style of the Viennese designers, or even better, in Poiret's.