After an introductory discussion about Mann’s and Heidegger’s direct comments about each other, I explore how Mann and Heidegger are situated with regard to what has been called conservative revolution. Mann not only helped to gain currency for the concept of conservative revolution, but he also defended it against what he considered its right-wing and/or fascist spoilers, before eventually providing a thorough criticism of it in his Doctor Faustus. Heidegger’s recently published Black Notebooks show that in the 1930s and 1940s his thought veered towards the direction of conservative revolution, as described in Mann’s novel. To complement the understanding of conservative revolution, I also draw on Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s seminal speech from 1927, which helps to determine how much Heidegger’s philosophy partakes of the spirit of conservative revolution in Germany.

Hofmannsthal’s death in 1929 left Strauss in a quandary. The will to compose was undiminished, and a replacement of similar caliber was difficult to find. Over the ensuing twenty years, Strauss enlisted the services of three further librettists. First was the celebrated Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, who supplied the text for Die schweigsame Frau. After Zweig exiled himself from his Austria in 1936, the distraught composer turned to the Viennese theater historian Joseph Gregor as collaborator on Friedenstag, Daphne, and Die Liebe der Danae. Last was Clemens Krauss, whom Strauss entrusted with the libretto of Capriccio, Strauss’s last opera. Decades earlier, Strauss himself wrote the text for his first music drama, Guntram, but it was “song-and-dance-man” Ernst von Wolzogen (Feuersnot) whose racy libretto served to loosen the Wagnerian chains that bound the composer in Guntram and pointed Strauss in a direction that led the Hofmannsthalian masterpieces of the next three decades.

This chapter explores the cultural, intellectual, and sociopolitical context surrounding Strauss’s operas based on Greek mythology: Elektra, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die ägyptische Helena, Daphne, and Die Liebe der Danae. Offering an overview of Germany’s cultural obsession with ancient Greece from the Enlightenment through the Third Reich, it highlights the changing nature of this engagement while pointing to ways in which German Hellenism informs an understanding of Strauss’s Greek-inspired operas. These works reflect broader cultural debates related to shifting German views of ancient Greece that range from a sunnier and more idealized portrait of the Greeks to a darker, more irrational one. This fundamental opposition between the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses behind Greek tragedy plays out in these operas to one degree or another, while those composed during the Third Reich resonate with views of classical antiquity shaped by the Nazis' increasing focus on issues of race, ethnicity, and biological superiority that were tied to German identity.