But Strauss was, in fact, quite serious. His preoccupation with marriage and fidelity, with domestic relationships formed a continuous theme throughout his life's work, and it established a significant bond between himself and his librettist of nearly three decades, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Hofmannsthal was quick to remind Strauss of this motif in Ariadne auf Naxos , when the composer began to lose interest in a project he saw as too stylized. The poet envisioned a lighter orchestra, one without the dense leitmotiv treatment so apparent in Die Frau ohne Schatten , and Strauss was largely successful in shifting more focus on the voices.
Permanence is numbness and death.
And yet all human merit is linked with permanence, unforgetfulness, constancy. This is life's great enigma, a paradox explored with great poignancy in what Hofmannsthal declared to be his finest libretto, his last completed opera text for Strauss.