It is not easy to summarize the life of Count Harry Kessler without touching a sensationalist tone.
From a wealthy, independent family, with a range of first-line contacts, the Count was one of the most brilliant figures of the end of Siècle. As a patron he supported such important artists as Edvard Munch or Aristide Maillol, their houses were designed by Henry van de Velde and together with Hugo von Hoffmannsthal he wrote the libretto for the opera Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss. He died on November 30, 1937, alone and without financial resources in a clinic in Lyon.
Among his closest partners and collaborators are Rainer Maria Rilke, Gerhard Hauptmann, Auguste Rodin, Richard Strauss and Max Reinhard.
Count Harry Kessler left an extensive work in his diaries, although practically unknown in Spanish, except for a selection of them gathered in Journal (1893-1937), with edition of Jose Enrique Ruiz Domènec and published by Books of vanguard ( 2015).
The first work that Harry Kessler published was one of his journals and was treated no less than that corresponding to the notes of his trip to Mexico in 1986. Among other aspects, Apuntes sobre México (Notizen über Mexiko, 1898), was a A book very influential in its environment for its beautiful design and typography, as well as being a relevant testimony about Mexico at the turn of the century.
Editorial Herder México presents these Notes for the first time in Spanish. In them, the Count, with exquisite writing, describes his impressions of Mexico as the keen observer and interpreter of the daily life that he was. In his words, his greater office is legible to compose seductive narrative sketches. A noteworthy passage is found in Chapter IV (Yucatan), since it tells of one of the most exciting and less documented episodes of Mexican cultural history of the late nineteenth century: the meeting between Kessler and Teobert Maler, explorer, archaeologist And photographer in the Yucatan peninsula and one of the main investigators of the Mayan culture.