Die Frau ohne Schatten, The Woman Without a Shadow, may be the most convoluted plot in all opera, but it also, at the hands of Strauss, won some of the most marvellous music, and offered directors with imagination a canvas for superb colour and design. Here’s the opening to an excellent review of the 2014 ROH production:
With a running time of more than four hours, an enormous orchestra, unwieldy scenic transformations and an unfathomably complicated plot, Richard Strauss’s “Die Frau ohne Schatten” has long ranked among opera’s whiter elephants. That it seems to celebrate the old Teutonic “Küche, Kinder, Kirche” (kitchen, children, church) notion that a woman’s place is in the kitchen, preferably making babies, doesn’t sing so beautifully to modern ears.
Check out the images for the current Berlin/ROH modern production here.
Approaching the opera
Don’t risk meeting this opera without reading a good synopsis. (Only then can you tackle some of the moral issues along the way. Interestingly, few of the reviews and discussions on line do so. More below!)
It’s another libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, this time not a straight take from classical sources, but a twentieth century Freudian amalgum of stories and legends - tales from the Arabian Nights and Grimm Bros, Indian, Persian and Chinese fairytale motifs and spirits and message that are hard to trace to a straight storyline.
The Met provides a straight-faced detailed synopsis here.
And if you’re up to travelling, SF Opera has an all star performance coming in 2023 and are providing a synopsis and thoughts about the work. Details here.
And listening
The story invites dramatic music, and Strauss provides it in one of his most monumental of scores. Marinsky, introducing their production, the first in Russia, describe it as having ‘one of the most sophisticated scores for the orchestra’.
That is why we decided to stage it only after we devoted nearly a decade to exploring the Western European repertoire in order to grasp the style and the tradition of the most eminent composers of the XIX and XX centuries. This opera features a bright, blooming, colourful orchestra, whilst large and melodic arias are complemented by recitatives in a number of unusual ways. In this opera, Strauss had reached some extraordinary depths of sonority and expression.’ Read more here.
Ready? Andrew Clements in the Guardian warns,
Die Frau ohne Schatten, The Woman Without a Shadow, may be the piece that marks out the real Richard Strauss fans from the mere admirers. To fully paid-up Straussians, his longest stage work is the summit of his achievements as an opera composer, a score of sumptuous invention married to a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal of satisfying intricacy, while to non-believers it’s the most overblown and overlong of fairytale operas, a concoction of faux orientalism that’s hopelessly overloaded with symbolism. The magnificence of much of the score is undeniable, even if in the end it’s a work that after three-and-a-half hours of music sometimes fails to repay the investment by audiences and, especially, by singers whose vocal resources are pushed to the limit by the demands Strauss makes of them.
So which side are you on?
Our production
An extraordinary hybrid, this production by Bavarian State Opera in Japan, with a Japanese director, in 1992. An entertaining review here.
Ennosuke Ichikawa, the director, is a Kabuki actor, and he uses the symbolism of Kabuki to distance mankind from the supernatural characters “above”. The German conductor is Wolfgang Sawallisch. It was recorded by Japanese television, but banned from broadcast it in Japan not, because of the weird moral messages about women, but because the Dyer’s brothers are portrayed – in the libretto - as hunchbacks. More here.
Cast: Peter Seiffert (Kaiser), Luana DeVol (Kaiserin), Alan Titus (Barak), Janis Martin (His Wife), Marjana Lipovsek (Amme). Conductor: Sawallisch.
There’s a detailed review of this production here, emphasis on the meeting of two theatrical cultures.
In many ways this celebration of marital bliss suits what the director, Professor Ennosuke Ichikawa, chooses to do with it. The fairy-tale setting, replete with allegory and rather dense symbolism, lends itself quite well to the highly stylized world of kabuki theatre, and the sumptuous costumes and lavish yet basically simple designs give the scene changes an effortless flow, something which has foiled many opera houses mounting this opera. How do you tackle stage directions such as ‘the earth opens and the river pours in through the fractured walls’? Or ‘a flaming sword flies from the air into Barak’s grasp’? Or best of all ‘the fish fly through the air and land in the frying pan’? Well, I guess it’s rather like tackling Wagner’s Ring; the director has to decide what will be staged as ‘naturalistically’ as possible and what will be done with lighting effects or mere suggestion. Ichikawa doesn’t short-change us in this department, and the sword scene is brilliantly effective, as is the earthquake which ends Act 2. I suspect the notoriously picky librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), who acknowledged a debt to influences from the Far East, would have approved.
This is not a feminist plot!
Now, about those moral messages. It’s not surprising that Strauss and his librettist accepted the messages about humanity and particularly the female human. But more surprisingly, the current discussions of the opera seem to slide past the complex portrayal of women’s purposes, the locus of their souls and the achievement of their happy endings (spoiler alert!) Perhaps the complexity of the plot and the wonders of the music distract reviewers from the weird story?
To balance, take a dip into the plot from a female bloggist’s view;
Die Frau Ohne Schatten is a fairytale of love blessed through the birth of a child. As lovely as this sounds and despite the absolutely breathtaking music, this opera is a feminist’s nightmare. You see, a woman without a shadow is a woman who can’t have children…making her not a real woman and therefore, not human. Throw in a little domestic violence and the belief that women are chattel and you have three hours of anti-woman fun.
At the beginning of the opera we learn that the Emperor of the Southeastern Islands will be turned to stone unless is wife, the daughter of the King of spirits, becomes human and gains a shadow. Of course, it is hard to feel sorry for the Emperor when we learn that he captured the Empress and believes that she is “for my soul and for my eyes and for my hands and for my heart. She is the booty of all booty without end.” Despite being captured and married against her will, the Empress goes in search of a shadow so her husband won’t be petrified. The Empress and her nurse meet a human woman who resents her life as a domestic slave to her husband and doesn’t want to be a mother because she fears children will further enslave her. Long story short, the nurse convinces the woman to sell her shadow to the Empress. When the woman’s husband finds out, he threatens to kill her because without her shadow, without the ability to bear children, she is useless to him. Luckily for the wife, the Empress refuses the shadow, saying she will not save her husband at the expense of another man’s happiness. This act of self-sacrifice allows the Empress to gain her own shadow. The opera ends with the two couples united and fertile, singing the praises of their humanity.
Full opera online?
If you want to decide for yourself if you are a Strauss fanatic, (and can ignore the links to Putin) that extraordinary production from Marinsky theatre is in full on YouTube here.
And there's a thoughtful review here, praising the imagery and performance.
Lyn, 20 March
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