No
offense to Puccini, whom I adore, Richard Strauss’s Die Frau Ohne Schatten is
the greatest opera of the twentieth century. Its rich Wagnerian score and
intensity of passion put it on a par with Wagner’s creations, but, of course,
Wagner was half-a-century before Strauss, and he was the original driving force
inaugurating the music of the future. It is safe to say that aside from
Strauss, Wagner had no successors, and nor had the music of the future.
As
far as the music of Die Frau Ohne Schatten is concerned, there is only
one way to do it justice, which is to hear it performed by a great orchestra
under a great conductor and necessarily with a stellar cast. I would recommend
the classic 1977 Karl Böhm recording and the 1964 Karajan recording, the latter
being my personal favorite.
Having
paid this tribute to Strauss the composer genius, I must comment on the more
bizarre element of the opera: its literally fantastic and terribly convoluted
libretto, written for Strauss by his longtime collaborator, the Austrian playwright
poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Let us first have its briefest possible summary.
Der
Kaiser captures a gazelle while
hunting, and when she assumes a human form, marries her. But being a
supernatural creature, die Kaiserin has no shadow, which means that she
can’t bear children. Her fearsome father Keikobad, der Geisterkönig,
declares that unless his daughter gets herself a shadow before the end of the
twelfth moon of her marriage (which date is near), she will be reclaimed back
into the spirit world, and her husband will be turned into stone (the
petrifaction process has actually already begun). With the help of the scheming
Amme she finds a couple of mortals, where the wife (Die Färberin)
whose worst nightmare is having children agrees to sell her shadow. Her husband
Barak, Der Färber, the best person in the opera (he is kind,
loving, generous, and selfless), is horrified by his wife’s action, and wants
to kill her, but he cannot. His wife, realizing only now how good and loving
her husband has been all the time, falls in love with him, at long last, but it
is too late, the shadow is no longer hers. Her fate is now in the hands of die
Kaiserin who is, however, struck with a pang of conscience that her
happiness is bought at the price of another couple’s destruction, and mortified
she relinquishes her claim to the shadow. Her goodness is then properly rewarded
by the gift of a shadow of her own, Die Färberin’s shadow is returned to
her, and both couples celebrate the kind of happiness which does not rest on
other people’s misery.
The
heavily symbolic tale is an obvious allegory, but neither the composer nor the
librettist have let their cat out of the bag. I have read several
interpretations of it, all of them surprisingly silly, completely missing the
central point, which would be very hard to miss, if only it is put in the
opera’s historical context.
Hofmannsthal
started this project in 1911, originally based on works of Goethe, Arabian
Nights and Grimm Fairy Tales, and comparing it to Mozart’s Zauberflöte.
There were constant revisions, and the work process was carried into World War
I, which Germany lost. It is inconceivable that when the work had been finally
finished, with the first staging taking place in 1919, such a cataclysmic event
would not find its echo in the final product. Even more convincing toward this
assertion is the fact that in 1946, a year after Germany had lost World War II,
Strauss would come up with the orchestral piece Die Frau ohne
Schatten-Fantasie, as if to reveal the secret of his opera, namely, as my
wife Galina has suggested, that Die Frau ohne Schatten had become an
allegory of the fate of his native war-afflicted Germany, the woman who had
tragically lost her shadow, but would no doubt get it back.
…Well,
in my wife’s words, the moral of this story is that you cannot take away what
is not yours, either by schemery or by brute force. Germany has learned this
lesson well by now, but many other great powers are yet to learn it,
willy-nilly…
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