It’s not easy to make “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” sound appealing.
Believe me, I’ve tried. But when you describe Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s most opulent creation, which opened on Friday in one of its infrequent, glittering revivals at the Metropolitan Opera, the piece always seems dense and ponderous.
Starting with the title: “The Woman Without a Shadow.” In this fairy tale, being without a shadow is both a literal condition and a representation of the inability to bear children. The idiosyncratic symbolism only deepens as the plot probes layers of fantastical realms, complete with a singing falcon, a choir of the unborn and the clock ticking down to an emperor’s transformation into stone. Two couples — one human, one demigod — face temptation but persevere through trials to achieve enlightenment and happiness. Oh, and fertility, too.
You might think a four-hour allegorical ode to pregnancy isn’t your thing. But I’m here to tell you: Just go.
With its formidable length and daunting vocal, instrumental and scenic demands, “Frau,” written around the time of World War I, has much in common with Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, to which it nods. And both tend to seem stilted and overblown when summarized.
But like the “Ring,” “Frau” comes alive in performance — its royalty and commoners, flashes of magic and heavy-handed symbols, ending up movingly real and relatable. Hofmannsthal’s elegantly stylized, exquisitely poetic (and, for some, pretentiously contrived) text is warmed by the intensity and compassion of Strauss’s music.
Last seen at the Met 11 years ago, “Frau” has always been an event for the company. The Met premiere, conducted by Karl Böhm in 1966, was a historic highlight of the first season in its Lincoln Center home.
Nathaniel Merrill and Robert O’Hearn’s lavish production marshaled all the technical resources of the new theater. Their staging wasn’t replaced until 2001, when the director and designer Herbert Wernicke created a vision more modern though still splendidly grand.
The first word sung in the opera is “light,” and Wernicke conceived the world of the noble Emperor and half-divine Empress as a stage-filling mirrored box, reflecting and refracting a kaleidoscope of glinting, gleaming color.
It’s a simple concept, but allows for spectacular, shifting effects of pattern, shade and incandescence. The shadowless Empress and her sinister Nurse travel from this crystalline space down to human lands to acquire a shadow for her before the god Keikobad’s prophecy is fulfilled and the Emperor is turned to stone. They target the dissatisfied wife of Barak, a kindly fabric dyer, whose home Wernicke depicts as a grim, present-day warehouse that rises and sinks as the characters move between the spiritual and earthly spheres.
The Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conducts an intimate, flowing interpretation of an extravagant score — a performance that feels most informed by Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s immediately previous collaboration, the sweetly chamber-scale “Ariadne auf Naxos.”
The danger with “Frau” is giving too much — too soon and too often — and Nézet-Séguin paces things patiently, keeping the huge yet agile Met orchestra at a light-textured, singer-assisting simmer. He unleashes, but doesn’t dwell on, a sumptuousness out of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s “Der Rosenkavalier” and expressionistic explosions that recall their savage “Elektra.”
To make its full impact, “Frau” requires five superb singers, and the Met’s cast is strong. As the Empress, the soprano Elza van den Heever shimmers with purity and throws spears at the top of her range. If her voice lacks some presence lower down, she’s affecting as her curiosity and empathy toward Barak and his wife grow.
Russell Thomas’s tenor is serenely steady and burnished in his role as the Emperor, its center of gravity deep but its top notes unforced and secure. The eloquent baritone Michael Volle, his tone tender and mellow, is a heart-rending Barak. As his wife, the soprano Lise Lindstrom has an unusually sympathetic presence, more disappointed and frightened than shrewish, but her reserves of steely power are pressed to their limits by the punishingly high music.
When Wernicke’s production was new, Christian Thielemann performed the score complete, but Nézet-Séguin has followed many conductors in adopting a version of the cuts that were advanced by Böhm and more or less sanctioned by Strauss.
The trims to the third and final act make it easier for the singers, especially the malevolent Nurse, sung at the Met by the veteran soprano Nina Stemme. Stemme’s high notes remain authoritative, as in the spine-tingling ending of Act II, even if her voice grays and wavers in the role’s mezzo-tending depths, suggesting this complex figure is merely querulous.
But when it comes to “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” quibbles often feel like exactly that. By the radiant ending, as the characters embrace all the messiness of life, love and childbearing, the opera feels, as usual, like more than the sum of its parts. Two months into the Met’s season, this is the company’s first must-see show.
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