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9781503635647

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In Larry Wolff's brilliant telling, an opera's fairy-tale empress and a real-life Habsburg empress come to embody the phantom political culture of an empire that to this day maintains a powerful hold over Central and Eastern European institutions and imagination. -Pieter M. Judson, author of The Habsburg Empire: A New History This alluring and original work of history explores the parallel lives of a twentieth century opera, the twilight of the Habsburg Empire, and its last emperor and empress. Politics is woven into the opera's creation and its later life. In this brilliant book, art imitates life, and life art, through mirror images, shadows and the unexpected destinies of historic personages. -Leon Botstein, Bard College Larry Wolff's dual biography of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's fictional empress (The Woman without a Shadow, premiered in 1919) and the last Habsburg empress Zita, who lived until 1989, is a silver rose of a book-a brilliant account of an imperfect operatic masterpiece, its allegorical investments, and its call for the repopulation and humanization of Europe in the wake of World War I. -Michael P. Steinberg, author of The Afterlife of Moses

Larry Wolff's dual biography of Richard Strauss's and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's fictional empress and the last Habsburg empress Zita is a silver rose of a book-a brilliant account of an imperfect operatic masterpiece, its allegorical investments, and its call for the repopulation and humanization of Europe in the wake of World War I. -Michael Steinberg, Brown University This alluring and original work of history explores the parallel lives of a twentieth century opera, the twilight of the Habsburg Empire, and its last emperor and empress. Politics is woven into the opera's creation and its later life. In this brilliant book, art imitates life, and life art, through mirror images, shadows and the unexpected destinies of historic personages. -Leon Botstein, Bard College

"""In Larry Wolff's brilliant telling, an opera's fairy-tale empress and a real-life Habsburg empress come to embody the phantom political culture of an empire that to this day maintains a powerful hold over Central and Eastern European institutions and imagination.""—Pieter M. Judson, author of The Habsburg Empire: A New History ""This alluring and original work of history explores the parallel lives of a twentieth century opera, the twilight of the Habsburg Empire, and its last emperor and empress. Politics is woven into the opera's creation and its later life. In this brilliant book, art imitates life, and life art, through mirror images, shadows and the unexpected destinies of historic personages.""—Leon Botstein, Bard College ""Larry Wolff's dual biography of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's fictional empress (The Woman without a Shadow, premiered in 1919) and the last Habsburg empress Zita, who lived until 1989, is a silver rose of a book—a brilliant account of an imperfect operatic masterpiece, its allegorical investments, and its call for the repopulation and humanization of Europe in the wake of World War I.""—Michael P. Steinberg, author of The Afterlife of Moses"

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Larry Wolff is Silver Professor in the Department of History at New York University. His books with Stanford University Press include Inventing Eastern Europe, Venice and the Slavs, The Idea of Galicia, The Singing Turk, and Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe.

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