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Strauss was – quite wrongly – accused of complicity with the Nazis, who were hugely suspicious of his collaboration with the Jewish writer Stefan Zweig who did the libretto of Die schweigsame Frau and they kept a close watch on this independent aristocratic character who had a Jewish daughter-in-law. When some naive GI came upon him at the end of the war and accused him of being a Nazi he said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, I am the author of the Der Rosenkavalier.’
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When the author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Arcadia hit the big time with the Broadway production of The Real Thing – which had Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close as the leads with Mike Nichols directing – the New Yorkers asked Stoppard if he was Jewish and he replied ‘Jew-ish’. In fact his mother had done everything in her power to hide from her Jewish background and it was only after her death that Stoppard himself started to investigate it and to identify with his Jewish inheritance. One fruit of that is his mammoth exploration of Viennese Jewry from the late 19th century to the atrocities of Hitler. Leopoldstadt first appeared in 2020 but then had to close because of Covid. It was revived in London and has been a huge hit in New York. There is an NT Live version of it which has been shown here very briefly but it would be marvellous if it could be put on again to coincide with Louise Adler’s extraordinary-sounding Adelaide Festival Writers’ Week with its Jewish guests, its Palestinian guests, its Ukrainian representation: a huge contradictory smorgasbord worthy of the publisher of Mark Latham, Tony Abbott and Louise Milligan.
Writing by a true writer Peter Craven in The Spectator.