Richard Strauss

* Die Frau ohne Schatten

Domingo (Emperor), Varady (Empress), Runkel (Nurse), Dohmen (Spirit
Messenger), van Dam (Barak), Behrens (Barak's Wife), Jo (voice of the falcon)
Vienna Philharmonic/Georg Solti
Total Time: 65:28 + 64:21 + 65:39
London 436 243-2

Summary for the Busy Executive: Despite cast problems, I suspect it may
turn out a classic.

Okay, I might as well admit up front that I'm not an opera type.  I don't
follow the singers' careers.  I can't tell you all the times Tebaldi sang
La Boheme or how much better Callas sang in the Teatro Colon than at the
Met.  I might leave the house to see slightly under a dozen operas, almost
none of them in standard repertoire.  I regard opera, at least in the
United States, more as a vocal roller derby than as, ideally, drama.  Most
big-name opera singers don't sing all that well compared to most big-name
Lieder singers, even though the opera artistes can make your ears ring or
sail on the high Cs.  Very few divas of either sex even can sing Lieder
convincingly, while only the size of the airplane hangars in which most
"first-rank" companies choose to stage their pageants limits the Lieder
singer.  Still, despite experience and common sense, opera continues to
attract major composers and poets - certainly no greater pair than Richard
Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

I also admit that, in music, I'm a hedonist.  I mainly like the pleasure
it gives me, not its power to make me a better person (highly doubtful,
anyway, in my case).  For this, Strauss simply gives me a lot of bang for
my listening buck.  Thinking of Strauss's music, especially his operas and
especially Die Frau ohne Schatten (the woman without shadows), puts my
salivary glands into the kind of overdrive they usually rev into at a great
New Orleans Italian-Creole restaurant.  The opera began as the follow-up
to that great success of the Strauss-Hofmannsthal collaboration, Der
Rosenkavalier.  However, despite Hofmannsthal's initial rush of enthusiasm
for the project, it took him almost six years to come up with the libretto,
and he resisted Strauss's proddings to hurry up.  Certainly it counts as
one of their most ambitious products, both musically and poetically.  Yet
it had a relatively hard row to hoe.

Hofmannsthal stuffed the plot full of parable and symbol, so much so that
he spent most of his time trying to figure out exactly what he had.  In
fact, he worked simultaneously on a prose version - an Erzaehlung - to help
him clarify the implications of plot and image.  He published this as well.
Strauss himself had troubles deciding what Hofmannsthal was getting at,
and, from the correspondence, often the poet couldn't tell him.

And these are the creators.  Imagine the problems of audience and critics.
In his standard three-volume study of Strauss, the conductor Norman Del
Mar states his opinion that the work should never be presented without
Hofmannsthal's prose explanation.  In fact, he considers the opera
ultimately a failure.  On the other hand, Ernest Newman considered the work
the finest opera since Die Meistersinger, which means he preferred it to
Rosenkavalier.  Even so, Newman admitted rough going with the meaning of
it all.  The work seems to have garnered very few performances until the
production for Birgit Nilsson in the Sixties, a period which after all (if
we consider early Bob Dylan) had an affinity for high-falutin' symbolism.
I take the attitude "don' worry about it." Grand opera - even Wagnerian
grand opera - deals in large, as opposed to detailed, meanings.  The story
itself is mostly clear, and that's what matters.

In large outline, Hofmannsthal tells a story of temptation, with large
chunks of Zauberfloete thrown in.  The Emperor and the Empress are madly
hot for each other, but childless.  In the symbols of the play, the
Empress, the daughter of the spirit king and now caught between the spirit
kingdom and the human realm, has no shadow; that is, she can't bear
children.  The relation between husband and wife is completely sexual.
The Emperor makes love to his wife every night, but in the morning leaves
her to go hunting all day.  He also is jealously possessive of her.  The
spirit king puts a curse on the Emperor: if the Empress does not acquire
a shadow, the Emperor will be turned to stone in three days.  The Nurse
(a sinister, Mephistophelian figure who has followed the Empress from the
world of demons) tells her that she will have to take a shadow from some
mortal.

Disguised as servants, the Nurse and the Empress enter the home of Barak
the dyer.  Barak - kind, patient, and long-suffering - has married a
beautiful shrew.  This couple is childless as well.  The Nurse entices
Barak's thoughtless young wife - mainly by harping on the girl's throwing
her beauty away on a lout like Barak - into forfeiting her shadow (and her
unborn children) in exchange for tchotchkes and boys on the side.  The
exchange will be fulfilled in three days.

The opera's second act concerns the purification trials of the two couples.
Barak's wife is tempted with a phantom in the shape of a beautiful boy.
Although she keeps saying how much she despises her husband, she can't
bring herself to betray him.  For his part, Barak becomes weighed down by
an increasing sense of threat and fancies he hears the cries of his unborn
children.  In the meantime, the Empress dreams of her husband slowly
turning into stone and realizes that she indeed loves him.  However, her
contact with Barak has begun to "humanize" her.  She has misgivings about
robbing Barak and his wife of something so precious.

During the course of the act, Barak's wife defiantly reveals her bargain
to her husband.  In the firelight, she no longer throws a shadow.  Barak's
patience dissolves, and a sword magically appears in his hand.  He raises
it against his wife, who throws herself at his feet and begs forgiveness.
The sword disappears.  At this point, the earth opens up and swallows Barak
and Mrs. Barak.  The river overflows its banks into the house, and the
Empress and the Nurse leave on a magic boat.

The scene changes to some realm beneath the earth.  Barak and his wife lay
imprisoned in separate cells, unknown to each other.  Each calls out to the
other.  They manage to leave the cells but, maliciously misdirected by the
Nurse and still calling, wander off in different directions.  Meanwhile,
the Empress comes to trial before an unseen judge, the Emperor as it turns
out, now almost completely petrified.  Even his heart has turned to stone.
In his eyes, however, she reads his plea to save him.  The Emperor is
forced to regard her as more than a possession and indeed counts on her
love.  With the silent plea, he recognizes that he wants to love her - that
is, he wants his heart back.  The Empress is told that if she drinks from
the water of life, she will possess the shadow of Barak's wife once and for
all and free the Emperor from the curse.  This is her temptation.  In a
wonderful dramatic moment, she softly replies, "I will not." Despite her
great love, she can't harm the Baraks.  With this act of renunciation, the
Emperor becomes free, and the Empress gains her own shadow.  She is now
fully human.  The trial turns out to have been Solomonic.

Many feminists go ape over the story because they probably take the
message as "women become fulfilled only by children." In fact, I've read
well-meaning attempts to excuse Hofmannsthal and Strauss as products of
their time.  I think it a serious misreading.  First, the opera takes place
in a fairy-tale world.  In this world, only couples who love each other
fully can have children.  The children represent that love and, in their
role as posterity, the triumph over death.  Second, the hero of the opera
is, after all, the Empress, on whom the fate of everyone hinges.  If we
consider the immensity of those fates and the nobility of the Empress in
the face of, we think, a Catch-22, her act must be one of the bravest in
opera.

The music sings gloriously.  Strauss adopts a leitmotiv structure as
complex as anything in Wagner outside the Ring and creates an orchestra
of many colors and great flexibility.  Strauss, as he grew older, leaned
toward the clearer, more chamber-like textures of Capriccio and the oboe
concerto, as opposed to the massiveness of the tone poems.  I'm convinced
that the necessity of clarifying Hofmannsthal's texts so listeners could at
least hear them over the instruments helped to move him in that direction.
Furthermore, Hofmannsthal, a great lyric and dramatic poet, had the sheer
good luck of finding a composer as fine a musical dramatist as Strauss
(even though he thought Strauss's taste dreadful and regularly told him
in so many words he considered him his artistic inferior).  This opera has
more than its share of gorgeous tunes, but it's all to dramatic effect,
unlike - say - "The Song of the Indian Merchant" from Rimsky's Sadko,
simply a lovely tune which advances neither plot nor character.  As you can
probably tell from even my bare recital of both the story and the symbolic
argument, this isn't the easiest libretto to set.  Yet Strauss manages to
create an opera which wrings every dramatic drop from the text.

If Elektra represents Strauss at his most harmonically "advanced" (indeed,
close to no tonal center at all), Die Frau lags only a little behind.
What strikes the listener immediately - and I mean from the very first
measures of the opera - is the genius of Strauss as one of the greatest
orchestrators ever, the creator not only of daring, powerful, and beautiful
new sounds, but of sounds dramatically right.  Stark chords hammer out the
cruel world of fairy tales, of Munch and Klimt, as well as of Puccini's
Turandot.  The Emperor's falcon gets some marvelous bird-music.  Some
charge Strauss with having solely a pictorial imagination, and certainly
one can't deny the visual inspiration of much of his music.  For example,
one can practically see the falcon hovering and wheeling about, just by
what one hears.  But in almost every Strauss work, one finds a
transcendental, mystical layer, as well as great psychological probing
in the operas.  Despite his own quite misleading statements, he ends up
no more a musical realist than Mahler.  The brutish, mechanical world
of Barak's house (represented dramatically by Barak's three brothers -
One-eye, One-arm, and Hunchback) comes to lumpish life with music which
reminds us that Stravinsky's Le Sacre wasn't all that long before, even as
the passage obviously lies around the corner from Wagner's Nibelheim.  The
self-pity and the genuine love that stand side by side in Barak's wife find
their counterpart in the love-music she sings to the harsh words she hurls
at her husband.  The work has both drama and breathtaking beauty.  The
chorus of the unborn children speaking through fish frying in the pan
(don't ask) sings to appropriately finny, shimmering music.  The finale of
the first act as the Watchmen raise a hymn in praise of loving couples may
owe something of its origin to Wagner, but Wagner never managed to sound
sensual and spiritual at the same time.

Strauss makes such demands on his singers that few can make it through
this score.  That said, the recording suffers from most of its cast.
The Emperor is a Heldentenor.  Domingo's voice (the recording comes from
1989-91) sounds alternately dull and bleating, rather than ringing and
heroic.  Fortunately, he hasn't all that much to do.  Varady suffers pitch
problems.  These also afflict to some extent Behrens as the Dyer's Wife.
Runkel, the Nurse, can't get rid of the Great Opera Alto Wobble, although
her voice certainly has the heft for the part.  As Barak, van Dam - also
past his prime - easily takes top honors.  A slight huskiness brushes the
voice, dramatically appropriate to the character, but van Dam remains
master of the role - one of the few Baraks who comes across as the best of
humanity, rather than a sanctimonious drip.  He and Varady also have hands
down the best diction of the lot.  You can actually understand them without
recourse to the libretto.  The others sing with hot potatoes in their
mouths.  Despite all this, however, and excepting Domingo, the major parts
can all act with their voices.  The appropriate dramatic qualities
continually appear at the fore.

Solti and the Vienna nevertheless give us most of the thrills and
the drive.  I've always thought Solti at his best in Wagnerian and
post-Wagnerian opera.  His Ring I consider one of the great recordings
of the century, although you should remember that I don't know very many
recordings before 1950.  His Frau stands pretty much in the same class.  He
not only clarifies Strauss's at-times fussy texture, but he never forgets
that opera is drama and action.  The music constantly moves forward.  The
Vienna Philharmonic players give one of their finest performances -
gorgeous, rich tone, transparent ensemble, and a rhythmic sharpness I don't
normally associate with them.  In all, a vast improvement over the only
other recording I know - Sawallisch and the Bavarian State Opera.

London's recording team has come up with a sound worthy of comparison to
the glory days of Culshaw.  In short, a winner.

Steve Schwartz