Die schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman), Op. 80, is a 1935 comic opera in three acts by Richard Strauss with libretto by Stefan Zweig after Ben Jonson's Epicoene, or the Silent Woman. Composition history Since Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier, with only the exception of Intermezzo, all previous operas by Strauss were based on libretti by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who died in 1929. Stefan Zweig, who was then a celebrated author, had never met Strauss, who was his senior by 17 years. In his autobiography The World of Yesterday, Zweig describes how Strauss got in touch with him after Hofmannsthal's death to ask him to write a libretto for a new opera. Zweig chose a theme from Ben Jonson. Politics of the opera Strauss was seen as an important icon of German music by the Nazis, who had seized power in Germany in April 1933. Strauss himself was co-operating with the Nazis and became the president of the Reichsmusikkammer in November 1933. Zweig had gotten to know Strauss well through their collaboration and later wrote: to be co-operative with the national socialists was furthermore of vital interest to him, because in the national socialist sense he was very much in the red. His son had married a Jewess and thus he feared that his grandchildren, whom he loved above all else, would be excluded as scum from the schools; his earlier operas tainted through the half-Jew Hugo von Hofmannsthal; his publisher was a Jew. Therefore, to him it seemed more and more imperative to create support and security for himself, and he did it most perseveringly. The fact that Zweig was a Jew was causing potential problems for the performance of the opera: in the summer of 1934 the Nazi press began to attack Strauss on this issue. Zweig recounts in his autobiography that Strauss refused to withdraw the opera and even insisted that Zweig's authorship of the libretto be credited; the first performance in Dresden was authorized by Hitler himself. Subsequent research has shown that Zweig's account is largely correct. We now know that there was an internal power struggle going on within the Nazi government. Joseph Goebbels wanted to use Strauss's international reputation and was willing to relax the rule against works with non-Aryan artists. However, Alfred Rosenberg was more critical of Strauss's unsoundness on the "Jewish question" and wanted to remove Strauss from his position and replace him