From his early experiences as a conductor to the final performances of his operas, Richard Strauss collaborated with the most accomplished artists in the German-speaking theater. These associations set standards for productions of his stage works which were essential for their short- and long-term success. Important collaborators included the directors Max Reinhardt and Rudolf Hartmann, choreographers Heinrich Kröller and the duo of Pino and Pia Mlakar, and designers Alfred Roller and Ludwig Sievert. These and other partnerships flourished in the cities which Strauss favored for his premieres: Dresden, Munich, and Vienna. Under the auspices of the Salzburg Festival, Strauss and his stage collaborators established a vital legacy of production that continues into the present.

The chapter presents a survey of the life and works of Richard Strauss's foremost librettist, the Austrian poet, playwright, and essayist Hugo von Hofmannsthal whose fame as a poetic genius began in his teenage years. His early poetry and poetic dramas established his reputation as the poet of aestheticism – an image he tried to shed all his life. A person of extraordinary sensitivity and erudition, he was drawn to Greek dramas, mythology, as well as folk and fairy tales which he tried to recreate for a modern audience. They offered him a framework for expressing social and ethical questions in a subtle, seemingly un-didactic fashion. In literary history, he is primarily noticed for his language skepticism (above all, his Letter of Lord Chandos); for the general public, his collaboration with Strauss is certainly the highpoint of his career (the operas Der Rosenkavalier and Elektra leading the list).

This chapter traces the history of European festivals from Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth (with its professed inspiration in the Festival of Dionysus in fifth-century Athens) through the Salzburg Festival, the Festival d’Avignon, the Edinburgh International Festival, and the Festival of Athens and Epidaurus, to the Théâtre des Nations and its successor, Germany’s Theatre der Welt. Examining festival repertoires, it traces an evolution of the representation of difference and the relationship between the international repertoire and the local, settling finally on the 2017 Hamburg edition of Theater der Welt and asking: can an international theatre festival still be a place and a site for community-building and transformation? Examining the supposed ‘global aesthetics’ in evidence in Hamburg’s rigorous deployment of the local, it argues that the political and the aesthetic at festivals necessarily become inextricably entangled.