Denis Fodor wrote:

>Julia Werthimer writes:
>
>>...As time has gone by, I have become less enamoured of von Hofmannsthal's
>>libretto.  It seems to me pretentious in many ways;...
>
>Hofmannsthal wore his Intellekt on his sleeve like a brassard.  In FoS he
>couldn't justify it.  He draws superficially on too many sources to produce
>something persuassively his own, something that convincingly explains the
>moral of his story.  ...

I'm not sufficiently familiar w/ Hofmannsthal's work to identify his
writings by the time in his life that they were produced.  I remember
a literature professor explaining that he had been a child prodigy (rare
among poets), had drifted into mediocrity, and finally experienced a
resurgence of talent just before he died.  A cruel publisher is supposed
to have said to him (anticipating Gould on Mozart by a few years) that
Hofmannsthal's greatest tragedy was that he hadn't died in his early 20s.

wm