The restless, alienated spirit of turn-of-the-century Vienna is brilliantly caught in these tales – hitherto not readily available together in English translation – by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, one of the major writers of the Early Modernist period and Richard Strauss’s librettist.

Powerful issues and emotions lie below the surface of these narratives – of a young aesthete’s crack-up as he wanders through a terrifying psychic landscape (The Tale of the 672nd Night); of an insubordinate soldier’s brutal nemesis during Field Marshal Radetzky’s 1848 campaign against Italian insurgents (A Cavalry Tale); of love and death in time of plague in seventeenth-century France (Marshal de Bassompierre’s Adventure). The celebrated Letter from Lord Chandos, a fictional epistle addressed to Francis Bacon, records a young writer’s crisis over the mismatch between words and truth. Finally, in the delightful comedic gender-reversal story Lucidor, the nucleus of the later libretto of Strauss’s Arabella, the cloud of sexual repression and violence hanging over the characters in the other tales is lifted.