The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Lonely Way--Intermezzo--Countess Mizzie, by
Arthur Schnitzler

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Title: The Lonely Way--Intermezzo--Countess Mizzie
Three Plays

Author: Arthur Schnitzler

Translator: Edwin Bjorkman

Release Date: August 21, 2009 [EBook #29745]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE PLAYS ***

Produced by Juliet Sutherland and the Online Distributed
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THE LONELY WAY:

INTERMEZZO:

COUNTESS MIZZIE

THREE PLAYS BY

ARTHUR SCHNITZLER

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
EDWIN BJOeRKMAN

NEW YORK
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
MCMXV

COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY MITCHELL KENNERLEY

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION vii

THE LONELY WAY 1

INTERMEZZO 139

COUNTESS MIZZIE 261

INTRODUCTION

Hermann Bahr, the noted playwright and critic, tried one day to explain
the spirit of certain Viennese architecture to a German friend, who
persisted in saying: "Yes, yes, but always there remains something that
I find curiously foreign." At that moment an old-fashioned Spanish
state carriage was coming along the street, probably on its way to or
from the imperial palace. The German could hardly believe his eyes and
expressed in strong terms his wonderment at finding such a relic
surviving in an ultra-modern town like Vienna.

"You forget that our history is partly Spanish," Bahr retorted. "And
nothing could serve better than that old carriage to explain what you
cannot grasp in our art and poetry."

A similar idea has been charmingly expressed by Hugo von Hofmannsthal
in the poem he wrote in 1892--when he was still using the pseudonym of
"Loris"--as introduction to "Anatol." I am now adding a translation of
that poem to my own introduction, because I think it will be of help in
reading the plays of this volume. The scene painted by Hofmannsthal
might, on the whole, be used as a setting for "Countess Mizzie." For a
more detailed version of that scene he refers us t