Teldec - 3 CDs - 0630-13156-2 - (p) 1997

Richard STRAUSS (1864-1949)





Die Frau Ohne Schatten
184' 21"
Oper in drei Akten (Libretto: Hugo von Hofmannsthal)






Compact Disc 1
67' 55"
ERSTER AUFZUG 1. "Licht überm See" - Amme, Geisterbote 5' 42"


2. "Amme! Wachst Du?" - Kaiser, Amme 5' 34"


3. "Ist mein Liebster dagin" - Kaiserin, Amme 3' 52"


4. "Wie soll ich denn nicht weinen?" - Stimme des Falken, Kaiserin, Amme 2' 19"


5. "Amme, um alles, wo find ich den Schatten?" - Kaiserin, Amme 5' 10"


6. Verwandlung: Erdenflug 1' 40"


7. "Dieb! Da nimm!" - Einäugiger, Einarmiger, Buckliger, Frau, Barak 2' 30"


8. "Sie aus dem Hause" - Frau, Barak 8' 14"


9. "Dritthalb Jahr bin ich dein Weib" - Frau, Barak 5' 35"


10. "Was vollt ihr hier?" - Frau, Amme, Kaiserin 6' 42"


11. "Ach Herrin, süße Herrin!" - Dienerinnen, Kaiserin, Jüngling, Frau 3' 37"


12. "Hat es dich blutige Tränen gekostet" - Amme, Frau 6' 04"


13. "Mutter, Mutter, laß uns nach Hause!" - Kinderstimmen, Frau 2' 33"


14. "Trag' ich die Ware selber zu Markt" - Barak, Frau 3' 01"


15. "Ihr Gatten in den Häisern dieser Stadt" - Stimmen der Wächter, Barak 5' 22"


16. "Du bist verflucht" 5' 08"


Compact Disc 2
57' 02"
ZWEITER AUFZUG 1. "Komm bald wieder nach Haus, mein Gebieter" - Amme, Frau, Kaiserin, Frauenchor 4' 16"


2. "Was ist nun deine Rede, du Prinzessin" - Barak, Brüder, Bettelkinder, Frau 4' 08"


3. Verwandlung 0' 52"


4. "Falke, Falke, du wiedergefundener" - Kaiser 13' 38"


5. "Es gibt derer, die haben immer Zeit" - Frau, Barak, Amme 3' 26"


6. "Schlange, was hab' ich mit dir zu schaffen!" - Frau, Jüngling, Amme, Barak 3' 12"


7. "Ein Handwerk verstehst du sicher nicht" - Frau, Barak 5' 42"


8. "Ich, mein Gebieter" · Verwandlung - Kaiserin 5' 16"


9. "Zum Lebenswasser!" - Männerchor, Stimme des Falken 2' 08"


10. "Wehe, mein Mann!" - Kaiserin 3' 49"


11. "Es dunkelt, daß ich nicht sehe zur Arbeit" - Barak, Brüder, Amme, Kaiserin, Frau 1' 49"


12. "Es gibt derer, die bleiben immer gelassen" - Frau, Barak 3' 27"


13. "Sie wirft keinen Schatten" - Brüder, Amme, Barak, Kaiserin 1' 52"


14. "Barak! Ich hab' es nicht getan!" - Frau, Brüder, Amme 3' 27"


Compact Disc 3
59' 24"
DRITTER AUFZUG 1. "Schweigt doch, ihr Stimmen!" - Frau 8' 05"


2. "Mir anvertraut" - Barak, Frau 3' 43"


3. "Auf, geh nach oben, Mann" - Stimme von oben, Frau, Dienende Geister, Geisterbote 5' 02"


4. "Fort von hier" - Amme, Kaiserin 6' 20"


5. "Aus unsern Taten steigt ein Gericht!" - Kaiserin 3' 18"


6. "Wehe, mein Kind" - Amme, Sopranstimmen, Geisterbote, Stimme der Frau, Stimme Baraks 2' 07"


7. Verwandlung - Kaiserin, dienende Geister, Frai, Barak 2' 23"


8. "Vater, bist du's?" - Kaiserin, Hüter der Schwelle, Stimme der Frau, Stimme Baraks 8' 47"


9. "Mein Liebster starr!" - Kaiserin, Unirdische Stimmen, Hüter der Schwelle, Stimme der Frau, Stimme Baraks 3' 33"


10. "Wenn das Herz aus Kristall" - Kaiser, Stimmen der Ungeborenen, Kaiserin 5' 12"


11. Verwandlung 1' 33"


12. "Trifft mich sein Lieben nicht" - Frau, Barak, Stimmen der Ungeborenen 2' 29"


13. "Nun will ich jubeln" - Barak, Kaiser, Stimmen der Ungeborenen, Kaiserin, Frau 4' 39"


14. "Vater, dir drohet nichts" - Stimmen der Ungeborenen 2' 13"






 
Horst HIESTERMANN, HERODES, Tetrarch von Judäa CHOR DER SÄCHSISCHEN STAATSOPER DRESDEN
Leonie RYSANEK, HERODIAS, Gemahlin des Tetrarchen Matthias Brauer, Chorus master
Deborah VOIGT, Die Kaiserin STAATSKAPELLE DRESDEN
Ben HEPPNER, Der Kaiser Roland Starumer, Solo violin
Hanna SCHWARZ, Die Amme Jan Vogler, Solo violoncello
Hans-Joachim KETELSEN, Der Geisterbote Sascha Reckert, Glass harmonica
Ute SELBIG, Ein Hüter der Schwelle des Tempels Giuseppe SINOPOLI
Werner GÜRA, Die Erscheinung eines Jünglings Musical assistance: David Miller
Sabine BROHM, Die Stimme des Falken

Nadja MICHAEL, Eine Stimme von oben

Franz GRUNDHEBER, Barak, der Färber

Sabine HASS, Sein Weib

Des Färbers Brüder

Andreas Scheibner, Der Einäugige

André Eckert, Der Einarmige

Roland Wagenfèhrer, Der Bucklige

Die Stimmen der Ungeborenen

Roxana Incontrera, Claudia Kuny, Helga Termer, Elisabeth Wilke, Nadja Michael
Die Stimmen der Wächter der Stadt

Hans-Joachim Ketelsen, Matthias Henneberg, Andreas Scheibner
Die Dienerinnen

Christiane Hossfeld, Barbara Hoene, Angela Liebold
 





Luogo e data di registrazione
Semperoper, Sächsische Staatsoper, Dresden (Germania) - novembre/dicembre 1996

Registrazione: live / studio
Based on live performances

Executive producer
Renate Kupfer

Recording producer
Wolfgang Stengel

Balance engineer
Michael Brammann

Assistant engineers
Tobias Lehmann, Peter Weinsheimer, Jens Schünemann/Niels Müller

Digital editing
Jens Schünemann, Stefan Witzel

Prima Edizione LP
-

Prima Edizione CD
Teldec | 0630-13156-2 | LC 6019 | 3 CDs - 67' 55", 57' 02" & 59' 24" | (p) 1997 | DDD

Note
-













Die Frau ohne Schatten
Or, A Fairy-Tale by Two Intellectuals

The journey taken by Strauss and Hofmannsthal from their first joint reflections on the subject in 1911 to the completion of the whole opera some six years later was long, tortuous and not a little fraught with difficulties. Die Frau ohne Schatten - this phantasmagorically complex parable about the way in which love is blessed with the birth of children - was itself the product of a painful birth. The Great War was still in progress when Strauss completed the score in 1917 and so he decided to delay the first performance until the guns had fallen silent and peace was restored to the world. it proved a lengthy wait, with the opera finally being staged in Vienna on 10 October 1919. The fact that Strauss had considerable difficulties with his literary libretto and that Hofmannsthal, too, had problems with the often obstinate and pernickety composer, who appealed to musical logic in support of his arguments, was very much in the nature of the material, so dense is its literary content. The voluminous correspondence that passed between the two collaborators on the subject of the opera (good-humouredly referred to by Strauss by the shorthand title of “Fr-o-Sch” [frog]) throws revealing light on the special character of the piece, on its obscure and sometimes barely penetrable passages, on its rampant textual and musical symbolism and on the effort involved in ensuring that libretto and musical imagery intermeshed as closely as possible.
Also reflected here are the difficulties that mount up for any composer faced by a text that is like a finely woven fabric, the dense textures of which are less pervious to music than, say the librettos of the great italian operas with their generally simple parole scenicbe. Hofmannsthal provided a libretto of immense linguistic refinement, drawing upon so many disparate epic and dramatic sources that the result is a text that teems with manifold allusions to other works, for all that the librettist handles those allusions in a highly discreet and subtly veiled manner On the one hand, therefore, we have a libretto with ambitions to fashionable and cultured allusion, on the other a composer whose task would have been much simpler if the libretto were to have contained as many “open” passages as possible, leaving the composer to breathe life into them with his music.

Understandable Misunderstandings
Hofmannsthal had something quite specific in mind, he told Strauss in a letter of 20 March 1911, something
which fascinates me very much and which I shall certainly do, either for music or as a spectacle with accompanying music [...]. It is a magic fairy tale with two men confronting two women [...]. The whole idea as I see it suspended before my eyes [...] would, incidentally stand in the same relation to Die Zauberflöte as Rosenkavalier does to Figaro.
Strauss’s reply was as matter-of-fact as it was pragmatic:
I want to inquire how Frau ohne Schatten is doing: can’t I get a finished draft or maybe even a first act to look at some time soon? (15 May 1911)
That Hofrnannsthal had great difficulty imposing any sense of coherent order on such refractory material became clear, not least, when the intendants of the Court Operas in Dresden and Berlin, Count Nikolaus von Seebach and Count Georg von Hülsen, announced that they could make neither head nor tail of the scenario for the first two acts, which had been sent to them for their perusal. But such difficulties still lay ahead when Hofmannsthal wrote to Strauss on 15 May:
The fact is that with so fine a subject as Die Frau ohne Schatten, the rich gift of a happy hour, with a subject so fit to become the vehicle of beautiful poetry and beautiful music, with a subject such as this all haste and hurry and forcing of oneself would be a crime. [...] Had you made me choose between producing this work on the spot, or doing without your music, I should have chosen the latter.
Hofrnannsthals mood veered cyclothymically between euphoria and self-tormenting brooding. On some occasions we find him announcing that he has finally been able to organise all the scenes right down to the very last detail, but on other occasions he is simply incapable of making a start:
It is a terribly delicate, immensely difficult task and more than once I have been in profound despair. I have now rewritten the first half of Act I no less than three times, from the first word to the last, and even now I have not got the final version (5 June 1913).
Finally, on 28 December 1913, Hofrnannsthal sent Strauss the opening act, but his covering letter continues to convey the disquiet of a man still groping to find his way:
Or the five main characters in the piece, the Emperor is the least conspicuous [...]. What the music will have to give him is not so much pronounced characterization as a more truly musical element; he is to be the sweet and well-tempered voice throughout. Of the threefold nature of the Empress, part animal, part human and part spirit, only the animal and spirit aspects are apparent in this scene; these two together make her the strange being she is. [...] I have written in the margin of the text occasional notes about the dual facets of the Nurse, who vacillates between the demoniac and the grotesque (28 December 1913).
Strauss was pleased, but found the length of the acts problematical:
The first act is simply wonderful: so compact and homogeneous that I cannot yet think of even a comma being deleted or altered (4 April 1914).
Hofmannsthal agreed, while at the same time asking Strauss not to forget that
the Empress is, for the spiritual meaning of the opera, the central figure and her destiny the pivot of the whole action. The Dyer’s wife, the Dyer are, admittedly the strongest figures, but it is not on them that the plot is focused [...]. You should never for a moment lose sight of it, for otherwise the third act will become impossible, where it can and ought to be the crowning glory of the whole work (22 April 1914).
From now on the points of contention grew ever more detailed, each being fought over with mounting vehemence and tenacity. Strauss demanded to know whether Barak was to eat the five little fishes or not: they were, after all, equated with the voices of the Unborn Children. Hofmannsthal responded by insisting on the “wonderful smell of fish frying in oil”, arguing that this passage expressed a sense of naïve delight. Strauss, who approached the text from the standpoint of rigorous logic, clearly had difficulty making sense of it:
What happens to the shadow which the Dyer’s Wife has lost in Act II and which the Empress does not want to accept? Surely the Empress sings: “Ich will nicht den Schatten", etc.
The shadow therefore hangs in the air [...] It would thus be most important to have the Empress once more, in Act III expressly announce her decision of renouncing the bloodstained shadow (5 April 1915).
Hofmannsthal delivered Act Three in April 1915, and although Strauss was delighted with it, he continued to harbour the same reservations regarding the logical construction of the plot. The motives behind the characters’ action, he went on, should be more immediately plausible and intelligible:
Your third act is magnificent: words, structure and contents equally wonderful. Only in its quest for brevity it has become too sketchy: for all the lyrical moments: Duet between Barak and Wife, the Nurse's exit aria, duet between Emperor and Empress, final quartet, I definitely need more text. No new ideas, just repetitions of the same ideas in different words and at a higher pitch (15 April 1915).
Hofmannsthal conceded the point:
Your musical treatment of the Emperor is for me the clearest possible pointer how I am to deal with this character in Act III; after he is woken from his petrification, he must have his aria, his (totally different) “Gralserzählung” (14 May 1915).
Strauss remained a hard taskmasten above all when the point at issue was operatic effectiveness and the pace at which the music must move:
Today I have a request again: I am as determined as ever to treat the whole passage of the Empress, after she has caught sight of her petrified husband until her outcry “ich kann nicht”, as a spoken passage.
Only I don’t want to lose, as a tune, that beautiful passage you wrote for me additionally - and I have now found a very good place where I can fit it in earlier. [...] Now the former passage, unfortunately, is very short and is over so quickly that it could do with considerable expansion: just before there is therefore a wonderful opportunity for inserting the great, beautiful melody of “mit dir sterben, auf, wach auf". You would merely have to be good enough to adjust it to the slightly altered situation by re-fashioning it again (18July 1916).
Hofmannsthal sighed and once again gave way. It was not the last time that the differences between him and Strauss, who thought and worked in a totally different medium, were to surface:
It is a great relief to me to know that you intend to reduce the last part of this grave, sombre work to secco recitative! Even so: are we really to have yet another spinning out of the original passage? More and more! Must that be? My dear Dr. Strauss! [...] I enclose the new text. But do remember: once a melody seeks to dominate the scene, and the scene dominates the act, instead of the other way about, that is invariably the beginning of the end (24 July 1916).

Primale parole, dopo ... ?
These few excerpts from the extensive correspondence between Hofmannsthal and Strauss show how close the two collaborators came on more than one occasion to talking at cross purposes. Hofmannsthal was too much of a poet, Strauss too much of a musician for them to be able to understand one another fully. The sense of unease caused by the impenetrability of what Hofmannsthal termed this “grave, soinbre work” remained right up to the time of the première. The poet suggested preparing audiences by means of an introduction to the libretto. It was to have been written by Max Mell, but Mell failed to complete the task in time, and so Hofmannsthal himself took up the gauntlet, producing an outline of the opera’s contents that turned out to be far more than a mere synopsis but is, rather a poetically ambitious account of the text’s many intertwined motifs. And it is here, more than anywhere, that we may begin to fathom the reasons why this opera is such a tremendous challenge to directors on the one hand and, on the other, to listeners and audiences attempting to follow the piece and to empathise with its characters.
The Empress is caught up in a complex plot that embroils her in guilt although she has done no wrong. She is not yet indissolubly bound to humankind. She has no shadow in other words, she is childless. (Just as our shadow represents, as it were, an extension of ourselves, so children enable us to prolong our lives beyond death.) The symbol and what it symbolises are interchangeable, sign and concept coincide. In order to prevent the Emperor from turning to stone, the Empress must acquire a shadow yet here, too, there are problems of understanding. Whg in fact, is the Emperor threatened with petrifaction? As a punishment for forcibly turning a child of the spirit world into a human being? As a punishment for his inhuman treatment of a woman, whom he demeans by reducing to an object of the male instinct to pursue and possess? It remains unclear what the answer is, and it is this psychoanalytical ambiguity that makes the libretto so puzzling.
The Nurse finds a dissatisfied woman ready to relinquish Iier shadow in return for affluence and the fulfilment of her physical desires. The Empress thus descends to the level of the Dyer’s Wife and at the same time gains an idea of human dignity as a result of Barak’s goodness. She finally becomes human by voluntarily refusing to have any truck with adultery and infidelity and by renouncing all thought of her own happiness out of pity for Barak and his wife.
What is so confusing about this concept, in terms of both the plot and the characters themselves, is the interchangeability of the individual couples. On the one hand, the Emperor and Empress are the “high-born couple” and, as such, represent the opposite of the more “lowlyborn” couple of Barak and his wife. (To that extent, it is entirely legitimate to draw parallels with the two couples in Die Zaubeflöte, with the qualification, of course, that in the trials through which they have to pass, Barak and his wife are on exactly the same conceptual and linguistic level as the Emperor and Empress.) At the same time, however, a chiastic relationship exists between the two couples, with the rapaciously acquisitive and possessive Emperor paired with a Dyer's Wife willing to renounce the proverbial joys of giving in return for wealth and the gratification of her sexual instincts. Meanwhile, the Empress - for much of the opera apparently altruistically concerned to save her husband - is obscurely related to Barak, the altruistic philanthropist who personifies pure love, a love that is both understanding and forgiving. The Nurse has no such counterpart: she is the embodiment of evil pure and simple and, to a certain extent, an extension of Keikobad. But the characters all appear less clear-cut in the libretto, since they are so divided. The Dyer's Wife is only half guilty: her sexual obsessions are given free rein only in her imagination. However great her frustration at what she regards as her unfulfilled marriage, she lacks the courage to take the decisive step that would allow her to break free. She lacks the radicality of a Tosca or a Lulu, a Marie or a Salome. In the deeper layers of her consciousness, she is a petit bourgeois housewife. No less striking are the contradictions in the psychological make-up of the Empress, although in her case they are the result of her gradual development from insecurity and ignorance to a woman in full possession of her intellectual and moral powers. She develops from the state of “having” to one of “being” - to borrow terms from Erich Fromm.
These few brief remarks may suffice to indicate why Strauss was bound to have such problems with a libretto of this kind. A closer examination of the text reveals a wealth of different layers, each of which calls into question the layers above it. The composer simply came up against a brick wall, a solidly built divide, neatly and thoughtfully erected, with almost hermetically sealed gaps between the bricks and with nary a window or door in sight.
The reasons for this are no doubt to be sought in what might be termed Hofmannsthal's network of cultural coordinates, with the poet piling source upon source and, on the basis of his wide reading, compiling a libretto thatis a compendium of literary models. In the fifth of the Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade tells of the gazelle wounded by a falcon. The hunchbacked brother makes his appearance on the thirty-first night, the oneeyed brother on the thirty-second. For fifty-four nights, Scheherazade tells of a jeweller who catches a birdlike maiden and makes her his wife. The magic fountain of golden water gushes forth on the 756th night, and on the 699th night the Emir Hasan Sharr al-Tarik reproaches his wife for her infertility.
The Grimm Brothers’ fairy-tales likewise served as a source-book: in Rumpelstiltskin we have the fatal deadline, in Snow White the desperate desire for a child, and in Faithful Johannes and The Two Brothers we read of characters turned to stone (the same motif of a petrified prince occurs in the eighth of Scheherazade's tales). Comparisons with Eduard Mörike`s Tale of Fair Lau also come to mind: here we are told how the beautiful Lau is half human on her mother's side. Nor should we forget Adelbert von Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl, who gets into trouble when he sells his shadow to the Devil. According to popular belief, the shadow is synonymous with a man's soul and with his inner life force. Even in the New Testament, the Virgin Mary is “overshadowed” - in other words, impregnated - by the Holy Ghost. In short, the shadow can also mean the promise of an m yet unborn existence.
A further factor here is Hofmannsthal's lifelong obsession with the problem of what he termed a “fatal link” between the generations. in Der Tor und der Tod, it is the hero's mother who first upbraids her son for his lifeless egocentricity; Die Frau in Fenster adumbrates Die Frau ohne Schatten; and the motif of the child is already found in Der Kaiser und die Hexe. Motherhood and magic, finally are linked in Die Hochzeit der Sobeide and Das Bergwerk zu Falun.
These are by no means the only sources on which Hofmannsthal drew in fashioning his libretto - he even quotes word for word from the final scenes of Parts One and Two of Goethe's Faust, with the Nurse, as a female Mephistopheles, echoing the latter’s peremptory “Hither to me” - but they may serve to indicate the range of literary references with which the libretto resonates. The subject-matter bubbled up beneath his hands and had to be made more dense and compressed. It is this - and its motivic ambiguity - that makes it so complex and so unprecedentedly complicated.

Music as the Word’s Disobedient Daughter
A glance at the secondary literature on Die Frau ohne Schatten reveals the curious fact that writers have given a wide and embarrassed berth to analyses of its music. The reasons for this may be sought, perhaps, in the music's relationship to its disproportionately complex text. Strauss's music may be seen as an attempt to gain a purchase on so impenetrable a text and, where this is simply not possible, to circumscribe and draw a veil over its complex literary forms. But what does this music achieve - in addition to its obvious function of clothing the characters, plot and scenes in the most powerful, radiant and glowing colours? In the first instance, the music helps each of the characters to express him - or herself in his or her own distinctive language, ensuring that they emerge as recognisable types. Strauss is most successful at this in the case of his two most extreme characters, the Nurse and Barak. A maliciously mephistophelean figure, the Nurse is typified by it musical language located on the very threshold of New Music. She is denied an even melodic line: instead, her vocal writing is notable for its wide intervallic leaps, its rhythmic shifts and extreme range. Equally unstable is the harmonic framework, which more than once draws close to atonality. Strident orchestral timbres, eruptive dynamic contrasts and sudden changes of tempo all play their part here. The Nurse's musical language abounds in shimmering chromaticisms, feverish rhythmic restlessness, dynamic instability and volatile modulations, and it continues to do so until she disappears amid tempest, thunder and lightning halfway through the third and final act. Musically, too, the Nurse is intractable and immutable.
Diametrically opposed to this is Barak's musical world. His melodic lines, in the main, are diatonic, their rhythms based on regular metres, their harmonies solidly grounded on clear-cut, tonal foundations. Their melodic range is relatively small: a man like Barak does not get worked up. He is even-tempered, losing his composure only once, when he is confronted by his wifes apparent infidelity and he steps outside his rhythmically and metrically preordained role. His vocal writing has a woodcut-like simplicity to it, occasionally approaching the hymnlike tones of the three Night-Watchmen’s chorale at the end of the opening act, not least when he broods on women's capricious ways and nevertheless retains his composure (“Aber ich trage es hart”).
There is a gulf, too, between Barak and his wife, a gulf that is fully exposed in their opening scene. As always, Barak is gentle and resolute, his progress through life reflected in his four-square musical values, notably in the scene early in Act Two where he feeds his brothers and the beggar children. In contrast, the musical gestures of his wife are not unlike those of the Nurse - irritable, highly strung melodic prose, restless rhythms and sudden and violent changes of dynamics. Her musical portrait is painted in primary colours of passionate hue, a passion that emerges above all in her great duet with Barak in Act Three (“Barak, mein Mann”). Strauss characterises her with snatches of text punched out with nervous haste and with dramatic vocal lines, tremulous tremolandos, whipped-up tempos and instrumental gestures that suddenly flare up in the orchestra, as the tempo grinds to a halt, then abruptly speeds up once again. In contrast to this is Barak's firm, resolute and imperturbable melos, a melodic ideal to whose straightforwardness his wife, too, slowly submits: it is clear from the music that she finally achieves the longed-for transformation from inner turmoil to the utter certainty of her love for Barak. The tone associated with the Nurse is lost, as she adapts her vocal line to suit Barak's simple musical characterisation.
The Empress, too, undergoes a complete transformation. She first appears in the opening act as a figure of light, an aspect nowhere more apparent than in her entrance aria, “Ist mein Liebster dahin” The music caresses her with its gentle accompanying figures, its pure harmonies and radiant instrumental colours, but, as the opera runs its course, it undergoes an immense change and comes to adopt a completely different tone: her great monologue in Act Three, “Vater, bist du’s?”, initially strikes a note of piety, then of awakening life and awakening passion. Musically too, she becomes human, a change that is finally complete when she, too, submits to Barak's simple songlike tone. And it is the Empress, finally, who retains the right to utter the most human of all sounds, the tormented scream of a suffering creature.
Musically speaking, the Emperor remains the most unremarkable figure, due to his literary model. In his opening scene, he strikes a heroic note, but other expressive devices take over in the process of inner change leading up to his great monologue in Act Three, with his vocal line assuming a more organic quality; the writing now becomes far less rigid and more sinuous, the articulation more lyrical and the tempi and dynamics more sustained. The Emperor, in short, acquires gentler and more romantic features.
With the exception of the Nurse, all the characters would appear to be influenced by Barak's musical language, a language that they all progressively adopt in the interests of a general musical synthesis and that emerges, as it were, as the opera's underlying tone, embodying a simplicity that ultimately emanates from a single point in the score, namely, the visionary chorus of Unborn Children whose vocal line, innocence incarnate, is permeated, on its first appearance, with sighlike falling semitones.
The music is not only able to flesh out the characters, it also paints portraits of picturesque power. For the confused Dyer's Wife it evokes images of “beauty beyond compare” with its elegantly synaesthetic themes, the Nurse's “alluring offers" striking a highly exotic note in the sparsely furnished Dyer's hut. The enchanted images of the five little fishes conjured up by the Nurse are likewise pastel-shaded, much as the apparition of the Young Man spirited out of the air by the Nurse is tenderly etched into the imaginative world of a woman's mind, suggesting both radiance and fragrance. When the scene changes to a romantic landscape and the Emperor calls out for his falcon, Strauss uses velvety brass textures to create a series of tender sinuous images of evocative immediacy. And the listener can literally hear the way in which it gradually grows darker in Barak's house in Act Two, in much the same way that the music descends into a cacophonous hell of cataclysmal force as Barak's hovel collapses in ruins at the end of the act. The three-dimensionality of the subterranean vault in Act Three, the plunge into chaos, the bubbling fountain of golden water and the note of transfiguring radiance on which the opera ends - on each occasion Strauss draws on appropriate tone-painterly devices to conjure up images in the imagination of even those listeners obliged to forgo a production on stage.
Thirdly, the music provides fluid transitions in the form of transformation scenes. When the Empress and Nurse descend into the world of men in Act One, the music depicts their stormy flight in an orgy of brutal discordancy - an example of programme music on the operatic stage that is repeated in Act Two when the scene changes from Barak's hovel to the Emperor's hunting reserves and, later, to the falconer's house, whither nightmare-like music bears the Empress. In keeping with the fairy-tale tone of Hofmannthal's scenario, these fluid transitions seem, as it were, to cross-fade and, at the same time, to fulfil an anticipatory function: it is already clear from the music here that the Empress's sleep will be disturbed. The sinking of the vaulted rooms, the parting of the clouds, the rocky terrace and the dark sound of rushing water - all these stage-directions are acted out in the music, with Strauss's transformation music describing the events that are taking place with graphic intensity and immediacy.
Fourthly, the music helps listeners to find their way round the score, which it does by means of numerous leitmotifs in the manner of those found in Wagner's Ring. Keikobad, the falcon, the falcon's prophecy, the human shadow, the Unborn Children - such motifs invariably put in an appearance where it makes sense for them to do so and where they can create a network of interrelationships. “Invocations were made to mighty names,” sings the Nurse and immediately we hear Keikobad's motif, just as we do when the Dyers' Wife exclaims that a mule can walk along the brink of an abyss, untroubled by its depths and by its mystery: the mystery the music tells us, is the evil mystery of Keikobad. At each point in the score, the music is better informed than the characters on stage. Just as Wagner intended, the music is a kind of Greek chorus that comments upon the action.
Space does not allow us to do more than sketch out these various functions of the music, but even this brief summary may help to throw light on a score in which, with the best will in the world, it is hard to find any conventionally “beautiful” passages. Indeed, it may not contain such pmsages since the poetic complexity of the text presupposes a similar degree of musical complexity in the form of a network of motivic, gestural and descriptive coordinates. The music does not end merely in order to start up again afresh: rather each musical phrase flows seamlessly into the next. Vocal styles are progressively transformed. The orchestra assumes the role of a commentator, demanding cognitive understanding rather than guaranteeing affective enjoyment.
It is this that makes the opera such a “grave, sombre work” (to quote from Hofmannsthal's letter of 24 July 1916) and one which, as the librettist admitted in his letter of 15 May 1911, he would rather have staged without any music at all. Seen in the cold light of day, Die Frau ohne Schatten is the work of two ambitious professionals, two highly educated individuals who had set themselves the goal of creating a work of art, while allowing no scope for simple theatrical instinct. Although it would be wrong to conclude from this that the piece is merely brain-spun, it would also be misleading to claim it as an example of a work inspired by the naïvety of a narrative art appropriate to the stage. In painting a musical portrait of Barak as a quasi-bourgeois, God-fearing and strong-minded type, Strauss failed to reflect the linguistic patterns of simple folk in the way that Humperdinck, for example, was able to do in Hänsel und Gretel, Barak's musical language is the product of a highly developed way of thinking that makes every attempt to express itself in simple terms. The problem of understanding Die Frau ohne Schatten - and the same problem bedevils all efforts to stage the work - is that it has to come alive without the assistance of theatrical naïvety. The offspring of this marriage between two intellectuals was a musically recalcitrant child, a vocal symphony of gigantic proportions, whose wealth of musical images, dense network of leitmotifs and kadeidoscopically colourful world of sound conjures up fairy-tale scenes inside the listeners head, scenes not so easily recreated on the boards of real-life opera houses. Die Frau ohne Schatten stands at a point in the development of music theatre at which the theatre's limited means of representation are transcended and where, as a result of the workings of a highly sophisticated artistic imagination, a world of boundless fantasy opens up.
Hans-Christian Schmidt
(Translation: Stewart Spencer)