Stefan Zweig's Ben Jonson Adaptation for Richard Strauss And

Rudolf Weiss (Vienna) The Return of The Silent Woman: Stefan Zweig’s Ben Jonson Adaptation for Richard Strauss and Ronald Harwood’s Collaboration Zweig’s free adaptation of Jonson’s Volpone proved to be his greatest success in the theatre. When Zweig became the successor of Hofmannsthal as Richard Strauss’s librettist, he suggested to him another comedy by Jonson, Epicene, or The Silent Woman. This was the starting point of the collaboration between Zweig and Strauss on their opera Die schweigsame Frau. In the first part of this essay the multiple facets of this transfer of English Renaissance comedies onto the twentieth-century Austrian/German theatrical and operatic stages are examined. In the second part of the essay, a contextualised reading of Ronald Harwood’s play Collaboration is provided. This bio/docu-play dramatises the collaboration of Zweig and Strauss on Die schweigsame Frau against the background of the troubled political circumstances, which entail two more collaborations of a very different kind, that of Strauss and Zweig with the Nazi regime, Strauss as the figure-head of German music and president of the Reich Music Chamber, Zweig as a welcome victim who allowed the barbarians to drive him into exile and into suicide. A detailed study of Harwood’s source material, particularly his creative appropriation of it, as well as an analysis of his dramaturgy and manipulation of audience response accompany The Silent Woman as Die schweigsame Frau on her return journey into the anglophone world. Overture Stefan Zweig, after having adapted Jonson’s Volpone successfully in the mid- twenties, turned the English author’s Epicene, or The Silent Woman into a libretto for Strauss’s opera Die schweigsame Frau in the early 1930s (premiere 1935). In 2008 The Silent Woman, under the name of Die schweigsame Frau crosses the Channel again to return to England, however not in the shape of the opera but as a play on the conception, composition, and first performance of the opera buffa: Ronald Harwood’s Collaboration, which was first performed at the Chichester Festival, where also the earlier companion piece Taking Sides was produced. In Collaboration Harwood dramatises the artistic cooperation of Zweig and Strauss on the opera, the political circumstances and repercussions of its premiere in Dresden, and the composer’s involvement with the Nazi regime. While the adaptation of the Jonson plays falls exactly within the domain of theatrical transfer, Harwood’s bio/docu-play appropriates for English(-speaking) audiences the 372 Rudolf Weiss biographies of an Austrian writer and a German composer and their doomed collaboration immediately before and in the years after the Nazis seized power in Germany. Volpone: Stefan Zweig’s lieblose Komödie Stefan Zweig became first acquainted with the work of Ben Jonson through a French source, Hippolyte Taine’s Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise. Taine’s work had been familiar to Zweig since the early years of the century, when he was working on his doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of Hippolyte Taine for the University of Vienna, which he submitted in 1904 (cf. Forsyth 621). Twenty years later, when Zweig was conducting research in the Marseille library for his novella “Verwirrung der Gefühle”, whose protagonist is a professor of literature specialising in the Elizabethan period, he consulted Taine’s history of English literature again (cf. Patsch 62). On this occasion he also read Taine’s extensive analysis of Ben Jonson’s plays, among them Volpone and Epicene.1 It was Zweig himself who contributed to the emergence of several myths as to the genesis of his adaptation of Volpone. In letters as well as in an article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of 28 September 1927, Zweig claimed that in the early stages of the adaptation he was working from a French summary of Ben Jonson’s play and described the pleasure he derived from doing so (cf. Patsch 63): Es macht mir sehr viel Spaß, dieses vollkommen freie, sorglose und übermütige Szenen-finden – als ich aber heimkam und die Bearbeitung mit dem Original verglich, bemerkte ich, daß sich in der Erinnerung … vieles verschoben und verändert hatte, daß dem Original sogar einige Figuren entlaufen, andere wieder dazugekommen waren und daß sich alles verwandelt hatte. (qtd. in Patsch 62) In his account of the genesis of the adaptation of Volpone, Alfred Mathis introduces the legend, which is then repeated by Willi Schuh, that Zweig consulted (not Taine’s literary history) but J. J. Jusserand’s Histoire littéraire du peuple anglais (cf. Mathis 174; Briefwechsel 162). Moreover, Mathis takes Zweig’s story of the miraculous writing process and the immediate acceptance of a draft of Volpone by the Hoftheater Dresden, which he tells in Die Welt von Gestern, at face value (cf. 174): Ich hatte vor, eine Fassung in Versen zu machen, und schrieb mir in neun Tagen leicht und locker in Prosa die Szenen hin. Da zufällig das Hoftheater in Dresden 1 Karen Forsyth has her doubts that Zweig worked from this source at all (cf. 621). .

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