260. Die Frau ohne Schatten (Strauss)

• Opera in 3 acts
• Composer: Richard Strauss
• Libretto: Hugo von Hofmannsthal
• First performed: Vienna State Opera, 10^th October 1919, conducted by Franz Schalk

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Characters

THE EMPEROR	Tenor	Karl Aagaard Østvig
THE EMPRESS	High dramatic soprano	Maria Jeritza
THE NURSE	Dramatic mezzosoprano	Lucie Weidt
The Spirit Messenger	High baritone	Josef von Manowarda
The Guardian of the Threshold of the Temple	Soprano or countertenor	Sybilla Blei
The Apparition of a Youth	High tenor
The Falcon’s Voice	Soprano	Felicie Hüni-Mihacsek
A Voice from Above	Alto	Maria Olczewska
BARAK, the Dyer	Bass-baritone	Richard Mayr
His WIFE	High dramatic soprano	Lotte Lehmann
The One-eyed Man	High bass	Viktor Madin
The One-armed Man	Bass	Julius Betetto
The Hunchback	High tenor	Anton Arnold
Six Children’s Voices	Three sopranos / three altos
The Voices of the Town Watchmen	Three high basses
Imperial Servants / Foreign children / Serving spirits / Spirit voices

TIME: The mythical past.

SETTING: The South Eastern Islands, a mythical region.

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“Based on a novella by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, it tells the story of the fairy empress unable to fulfil her husband sexually until he is encased in concrete and she receives a golden shower. The rôle of the nurse was famously created by Hattie Jacques, while the character of the dyer’s wife was based on Strauss’s own wife, apparently because every moment he spent in her presence made him want to die.”

Uncyclopedia

Die Frau ohne Schatten is Strauss’s biggest and most ambitious opera, and one of his strangest: part fairytale, part marital relations counselling. It is a work of Wagnerian proportions: a complete recording lasts 3hrs 15, while a performance (including intervals) would last four or five hours.

The opera was Strauss and von Hofmannsthal’s fourth operatic collaboration. It would, the Viennese playwright declared, “be related to [Mozart’s] Zauberflöte [The Magic Flute] as Rosenkavalier is to Figaro”. But there are also elements of Wagner’s first opera, Die Feen. The story concerns two couples (one high-born, one common), an overprotective mother figure, a father figure who seems evil, and ordeals in a temple complex.

Briefly, an Emperor goes hunting, and shoots a deer, which turns out to be a supernatural being: the daughter of Keikobad, ruler of the spirit world. (Keikobad is never seen, but his presence is felt from the start of the opera, in a growling tuba phrase, like the motif for Agamenon in Elektra.) At the end of the year, she has not cast a shadow, so Keikobad declares the Emperor must be turned into stone. (They have made love, nightly, but not apparently communicated as a mature couple.)

Desperate to save her husband, the Empress and her witch-like Nurse travel to the world of the mortals to find a shadow. The Dyer’s unsatisfied Wife (never named) agrees to the bargain: she will renounce motherhood, in exchange for a life of riches, pleasure, and dalliance with hot young men.

(The Dyer’s Wife was modelled on Strauss’s own wife, the disagreeable Pauline. “Anyway,” Hofmannsthal wrote, “she is a bizarre woman with a very beautiful soul, au fond, strange, moody, domineering and yet at the same time likeable.” But she is a not very empathetic portrait of a frustrated woman who wants more than to be a Hausfrau; most of her music is shrill and petulant.)

When Barak finds out, he threatens to kill his wife; magical powers transport the couple, the Empress, and the Nurse to the spirit realm of Keikobad. After much soul-searching, the Empress gains a shadow through an act of empathy: she refuses to take the Dyer’s Wife’s shadow and doom the lowborn pair to unhappiness. The Emperor is freed from his statue form. The Dyer’s Wife, too, learns the lesson that she must submit to her husband: “Placed in your care, so as to attend to you, serve, love, and bow to you … and give you children, best of men!”

The opera ends with the two couples standing near a golden waterfall; they rejoice that the two women have been “blessed with children and chosen to be mothers”. The moral (one most people would dispute today): Women’s purpose is motherhood, and their not having children is selfish.

Hofmannsthal proposed Frau to Strauss in March 1911; the composer completed the first two acts in 1914, but, realising the difficulty of producing such an ambitious work in the middle of World War I, left off; he completed the opera in June 1917. Strauss at first was enthusiastic – he called the Act I libretto “simply wonderful” – but was unsatisfied with Act III. Much to Hofmannsthal’s disgust, he insisted that he wanted to write “an entirely modern, absolutely realistic domestic and character comedy” (which he did in his next opera, Intermezzo, 1924); “some amusing piece of love and intrigue”, perhaps set in the Vienna Congress; or operetta in the line of Offenbach (“I’m the only composer nowadays with some real humour and a sense of fun and a marked gift for parody”). He was concerned that Die Frau was not relatable. “Characters like the Emperor and Empress, and also the Nurse, can’t be filled with red corpuscles in the same way as a Marschallin, an Oktavian or an Ochs.”

Unsurprisingly, then, the character who comes most to life is Barak, the main male rôle, and easily the most sympathetic character in the work: a portrayal of humble but honest goodness. His music is often characterised by great tenderness, such as “Ich preise die Seltsamkeit”, his desire for children, and his praise for his wife’s strange and different character, in D. (His Wife expresses her refusal to have children in D minor, to which Barak replies in D flat major that that he is content to wait.) On the other hand, the other male rôle, the Emperor, is a small but challenging part for a tenor; most of it lies high in the voice. His first aria, “Denn meiner Seele”, is more remarkable for the ardently passionate orchestral passage at the end.

For this fairy tale work, Strauss used one of the most gargantuan orchestras in all opera: 164 instruments (some 50 more even than Elektra’s) – including 32 violins, 12 violas, 12 cellos, eight double basses (as in Wagner’s Ring), 10 trumpets, wind and thunder machines, two celestas, a battery of drums, sleigh bells, whips, glockenspiels, and five Chinese gongs.

Some of the music is cacophonic (the Empress and Nurse’s descent into the mortal world at the end of the first scene), or drowns out the voices (notably the end of Act II), but Strauss often achieves a chamber music-like quality for the spirit world, with obbligato passages for instruments. Besides Keikobad’s theme at the start of the opera, Act I features the Falcon’s piercing cry (ostinato C#, an octave apart, on piccolo, oboes, and clarinet); the Nurse’s magic (in Act II) is accompanied by the celesta; and the glass harmonica features at a pivotal moment in Act III. Some of the loveliest music is at the start of the opera, in the palace of the Emperor, halfway between the spirit and mortal worlds, or in the visions summoned for the Dyer’s Wife. There are impressive orchestral depictions, too, such as the Empress’s dream vision of her husband passing through the bronze door in the cave (Act II). One of the most magical moments in the score is also one of the simplest: the offstage Watchmen’s Call at the end of Act I (“Ihr Gatten in den Häusern dieser Stadt”), in A flat major. Also notable is the Empress’s big scena “Vater, bist du’s?” in Act III, when she refuses to drink from the golden fountain (rippling harps) and seize the Dyer’s Wife’s shadow.

But sometimes the music does not quite come off, or the scene is bizarre. Most infamously, the scene in Act I where the voices of unborn children sing from the frying pan! Strauss himself was aware of the problem, as a letter to Hofmannsthal shows:

“No matter how I rack my brain – and I’m toiling really hard, sifting and sifting – my heart’s only half in it, and once the head has to do the major part of the work you get a breath of academic chill (what my wife very rightly calls ‘note-spinning’) which no bellows can ever kindle into a real fire.”

The opera ends badly, too: Strauss tries valiantly to make Hofmannsthal’s scenario work – there is a duet, a chorus of unborn children, the full orchestra plays the Emperor’s theme from Act I, a quartet  but the result is unconvincing: an attempt to write a choral symphony in the vein of Mahler’s Eighth. I think the word is “glurge”. Pauline Strauss, for one, was not convinced. “It’s got verve and a great upward sweep,” Strauss told Hofmannsthal, “but my wife finds it cold and misses the heart-touching, flame-kindling melodic texture of the Rosenkavalier trio…”

Die Frau ohne Schatten was performed in Vienna in 1919 – a moderate success there, but it had trouble entering the repertoire both there and in Germany, as the composer recalled. “Its way over the German stage was fraught with misfortune. In Vienna itself, owing to the strain imposed by the vocal parts and to the difficulties over the sets, the opera had to be withdrawn more often than it was performed. … It was a serious blunder to entrust this opera, difficult as it was to cast and produce, to medium and even small theatres immediately after the war. When, on another occasion, I saw the Stuttgart post-war production (on the cheap!) I realised that the opera would never have much success. But it has succeeded nevertheless and has made a deep impression, especially in the Vienna-Salzburg performance … and finally in Munich… Music lovers in particular consider it to be my most important work.” (quoted in Osborne) It was not performed in France until the 1950s, and in New York or London until the 1960s.

Michael Kennedy describes Frau as “the most problematical and most tantalising of Strauss’s operas”. Despite “passages which rank as the greatest music [Strauss] wrote”, it is an unsatisfying opera because of “the labyrinthine complexity of Hofmannsthal’s plot and libretto”; its themes “are camouflaged amid such a forest of obscure and pretentious symbolism, prolonged to Wagner proportions, that the majority of the audience leaves the theatre baffled by the meaning of it all…” Charles Osborne considers it Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s masterpiece: “Hofmannsthal never wrote a more fascinating and complex libretto, and Strauss’s score is not only his most lavish but also his most exciting… Strauss and Hofmannsthal never exhibited higher powers than in this work…” Piotr Kaminski considers it a fascinating but unsuccessful attempt to sum up and add a summit to the German repertoire; instead, the opera. And my colleague Phil hates it.

For my part, I like it more than I did a decade or so ago; then, I found it “boring and pretentious, with an air of solemn portentousness … submerged in heavy-handed symbolism and cryptic utterances. In fact, it’s the worst elements of Wagner.” I am not remotely convinced by the opera as a story, or by its chauvinist moral, but it does have some gorgeous music.

Strauss had had enough of Hofmannsthal’s pretentious mythological concoctions. “Let’s make up our minds that Frau ohne Schatten shall be the last romantic opera,” he urged in June 1916. In September, he said he wanted “to move forward wholly into the realm of unWagnerian emotional and human comic opera”. But he would have to do so alone. He wrote the libretto for Intermezzo (1924), a drawing-room comedy based on a misunderstanding with his wife, himself. And for their next collaboration, Hofmannsthal handed him Die ägyptische Helena, a farrago based on Euripides, populated by sheiks and omniscient singing molluscs.

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Recordings

Listen to: Plácido Domingo (the Emperor), Julia Varady (the Empress), José van Dam (Barak), Hildegard Behrens (the Dyer’s Wife), and Reinhild Runkel (the Nurse), with the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Sir Georg Solti; Vienna, 1989–1991. Decca.

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Works consulted

• Michael Kennedy, The Master Musicians: Richard Strauss, London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1988
• Kurt Wilhelm, Richard Strauss: An Intimate Portrait (Thames & Hudson, 1989; English translation of Richard Strauss persönlich, 1984)
• Charles Osborne, The Complete Operas of Strauss, London: Victor Gollancz, 1992
• Piotr Kaminski, Mille et un opéras, Paris : Fayard, 2003