Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Hugo von Hofmannsthal was famous in Vienna before he left school, publishing lyric poetry under a pseudonym at sixteen. He gave up the lyric in his twenties, a break explained in the Chandos Letter, a statement of language's failure to reach the world that is now read as a founding document of modernism. He wrote six operas with Richard Strauss, from Elektra to Arabella, and with Strauss and Max Reinhardt founded the Salzburg Festival, where his morality play Jedermann still opens the season. He died of a stroke two days after his son's suicide, on the morning of the funeral.