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Musical show based on Richard Strauss’s and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s letters

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A Festival d’Aix-en-Provence production in coproduction with La Cage.

In opera-land, the necessary though often problematic collaboration between composer and librettist plays a central role. Rarely has such a collaboration been as successful as that between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in the early 20th century. There seemed to be something almost inevitable about the encounter between the Bavarian musician and the Viennese poet — both of these cosmopolitan thinkers loved a European culture of which they had a deep understanding. But their collaboration also lookeda lot like an unhappy marriage, given how different the characters of the pragmatic German bourgeois and the idealistic Austrian aristocrat were. The rich correspondence between the two artists bears witness to this hesitant waltz between harmony and dissension. And here are these letters, the starting point of a dramatic and musical evocation, where spoken and sung word, text and music, remind us that any collaboration is enriched by its own asperities.