Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Andreas is a novel of violence and naivety, pathos and melancholy. Set in the eighteenth century, it tells the story of a young Viennese aristocrat who intends to travel alone to Venice as the first stage of his “Grand Tour”. On his journey, he acquires an unsavoury servant who unleashes a trail of destruction and violence which taints and corrupts Andreas’s first experience of love. Andreas’s loss of innocence takes place in the misty alleyways and gloomy palaces of Venice, whose masked inhabitants confuse and entice him, the women either madonnas or whores indistinguishable behind their masks.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Andreas
