The MET’s Die Frau ohne Schatten
Although I’m writing from Berlin (after a fast journey from New York), I’m still basking in the glow of another remarkable performance at the Metropolitan Opera. And—not surprising anyone who knows me—I’m happy to share a few thoughts and my enthusiasm here. At last Wednesday’s performance of Die Frau ohne Schatten, I found myself in one of those music-related situations that satisfy all our expectations and needs. And with an experience like this, it’s easy for New Yorkers to be especially thankful for what we have from “our own” opera company.
There are two more performances this season, on December 14 and December 19, and listeners who tuned in last Saturday to this season’s first radio broadcast were able to have at least a musical preview. I couldn’t listen, as I was travelling, but I expect it came very close to what my friends and I experienced at the opera house. I hope I’ll get to hear the repeat of the broadcast and I want to do that, since the splendid musical efforts of the performance will be matched with between-acts commentary that, quite likely, will bring equal satisfaction.
In any case, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s work that Zachery Woolfe at The Times refers to as their “most opulent creation” offers musical challenges that are, yes, opulently met. And if we want to dive deeper, there are challenges that are definitely intellectual (and they don’t change the pleasure one bit).
Woolfe notes that for many listeners the opera seems “dense and ponderous.” But I don’t agree. In my opinion, the complications of the plot combine with the music. And they do so in a way that asks much of me, but at the same time the complications are offered with music that I’ve heard referred to as Strauss’s “most beautiful.” I agree. And it’s that synergy—that working together—that makes this opera such a rewarding experience.
And it’s one I’ve experienced several times since this production entered the MET repertory in 2001. I had even heard several performances of the previous production, created I think in 1981, and that beautiful production was equally rewarding.
As I say, with this opera, it all comes together. But it was the late Andrew Porter, in the essay included in the opera program, who said it better:
Beneath Hofmannsthal’s elaborate imagery there lies a simple natural tale and a simple moral: One person’s happiness cannot be bought at the price of another’s. Strauss may have been led into symbolic mazes where he felt lost; yet, on one level, he decked the poet’s most ambitious flights with music of exquisite grace, charm, and lyricism; and on another even more important level, he made warm and human what might otherwise have seemed artificial and contrived. As William Mann says in his book on Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten “is the most pretentious of all these Strauss-Hofmannsthal operas: it is perhaps the most pretentious in operatic history. And yet, it is possibly the most moving and beautiful of them all.”