Although the music of “Die Frau ohne Schatten” (“The Woman Without a Shadow”) is often transcendentally beautiful, it is among the least performed of the Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal operas at the Metropolitan Opera. Its relatively rare appearance on the Met stage is, I believe, in large part because of its weird, somewhat incomprehensible, and to some contemporary tastes offensive, libretto. The opera compounds the felony by being (at over four hours) the longest of all the Strauss-Hofmannsthal operas. Only “Der Rosenkavalier” comes close, but as “Rosenkavalier” is the best loved of all the pair’s operas, the length of “Frau” cannot be the only culprit.
It’s the libretto. Any summary immediately brings to mind Anna Russell’s satire on the convoluted plot of Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” which she excused by remarking, “But that’s the beauty of Grand Opera: you can do anything so long as you sing it.”
The “Frau” libretto concerns the Empress, the daughter of the invisible spirit god Keikobad and a mortal woman, who has married the Emperor (a mortal man) but cannot bear children. The sign of her defining lack is that she has no shadow; because she is part spirit, she doesn’t have enough substance to generate a shadow or a child.
Many Strauss aficionados have long been uncomfortable with the opera’s strange emphasis on childlessness. But the return of “Die Frau” to the Met’s stage (through Dec. 19) comes at a fraught moment when audiences are dealing with abortion and transgender issues, not to mention concerns over a declining birthrate. They might be apt to criticize it for what they see as a natalist stance. Men and women, however, have been caught up in the convoluted dance of mortality and fertility since the dawn of history, and “Frau” draws upon that tradition, allowing us to see our present preoccupations in both the ancient wisdom and the ancient folly that still bedevil us.
Mortality and fertility become real issues when the Empress learns that unless she gets a shadow within three days, her father, the god, will turn her husband, the Emperor, to stone. So she goes to the world of mortals to try to buy a shadow from the malcontented wife of a very nice but very poor man who wants children. He is named Barak, and he’s a dyer, which can be heard, for those listening in English translation, as “a dier,” one who dies, which is the defining characteristic of the dyer and his wife.
The wife denies her husband her bed and his hope of children; the Empress offers her jewels and young lovers in exchange for her shadow (thus equating childlessness with the temptation of promiscuity, which the dyer’s wife resists). In the end, the Empress, overcome by compassion for the human couple, refrains from taking the wife’s shadow, at which Keikobad decrees that the Emperor can be released from his suffering and reunited with his wife. Barak and his wife are also reunited. The curtain falls.
In a review of the Met’s production in 2001 in The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini suggested that the opera was “set in a vaguely Eastern locale,” somewhere long ago and far away. We can excavate a pervasive mythical Orientalism in this libretto (the Austrian writer Hermann Broch spoke of its “Oriental pomp”), beginning with the name Keikobad. No such name appears if you round up the usual suspects in the history of religions, but “keiko” is a Japanese word for “lucky child” or “happy child,” and “bad” is an Arabic suffix for “city” (as in “Islamabad,” or “Hyderabad”), which makes Keikobad a kind of Japanese-Arabic bastard word for “city of blessed children,” a perfect deity to preside over this opera.
The basic plot, the story of a woman who has lost her shadow, signifying her ability to bear children, does come from what we used to call the “Orient” — from India, from a story first told in a Sanskrit text, the Rig Veda, composed around 1,500 BCE, and retold in India countless times right up until the present day. This is one telling of the story:
Saranyu, the daughter of the divine artisan of the gods, was immortal, but she married the Sun, who is mortal (for he dies and is reborn every day). She gave birth to a son who became the god of the dead, but then she left her husband and her son; she transformed her Shadow into an identical female, whom she left in her place. The Sun, who did not notice the change, accepted the Shadow and begot upon her Manu, the ancestor of the human race.
In this myth, the immortal woman married to a mortal husband rejects their son (who becomes a force for death, not life) and any future children (including the human race) by abandoning her own fertile shadow or mirror image. We humans are therefore the doomed, mortal children of a mere shadow.
The many Indian retellings suggest that Saranyu left her husband because he was mortal or deformed, or was not able to stand her brilliance (she may have been the first too-bright woman in history), or was sexually inadequate. But she is always depicted as the rejecting mother.
The Indian mother who abandons her husband and children and leaves a look-alike substitute in her place was reincarnated with another twist in a Greek variant of the story of Helen of Troy, which inspired the Strauss and Hofmannsthal opera “Die Aegyptische Helena” (1928). According to this telling of the myth, the gods spirited away the real Helen to Egypt before Paris ever saw her, so that the Helen that Paris stole from her husband Menelaus was merely a shadow Helen.
Pieces of the Indo-European myth are scattered around the libretto of “Die Frau” like wreckage from a plane crash. In Hofmannsthal’s telling, the myth becomes a folk tale, and the cosmic images are reduced to simpler human values. The Indian mare becomes a German gazelle, as the Emperor, out hunting, encounters a white gazelle that casts no shadow; he attacks her with a spear, whereupon she turns into a woman — Keikobad’s daughter. But Hofmannsthal rewinds the myth to give it a happy ending that it does not have in India.
Analyses of the opera tend to project metaphysical rather than human values upon the Empress’s shadow. The Met synopsis states, “She has sold her soul, her shadow.” The shadow has a range of meanings, but here it stands primarily for humanity, mortality and fertility. Broch speaks of the moment when the Empress “feels herself with child and will in this way have earned a human shadow.” The plot here argues that only by bearing a child can a woman — or a goddess — fulfill her destiny.
But the shadow of a man differs from the shadow of a woman, as we know from other operas and other texts. The shadow represents the man’s soul in Jules Barbier’s libretto for Offenbach’s “The Tales of Hoffmann” (1881), based on E.T.A. Hoffmann magical and mythical stories. A courtesan (bribed by jewelry) helps an evil musician to steal a man’s soul by stealing his shadow or mirror reflection. The ungendered (or, usually, male) shadow or reflection is the soul; for Peter Pan, who loses his shadow, it represents his inability to grow up. But the gendered (or female) shadow is her fertility.
The Viennese Hofmannsthal could have reached into his own culture’s Jewish and Christian sources for texts supporting the idea that a woman must have children, that childbearing is very literally her soul. Broch suggested that what he regarded as the “Oriental” (or we might call “Orientalist”) veneer of “Frau” “conjures foundational concerns from Jewish and Christian traditions,” concerns that we find expressed in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles in the stories of the birth of Isaac to Sarah and of Jesus to Mary.
“Die Frau ohne Schatten” premiered in 1919, in the wreckage of World War I, so the argument for the importance of children made very good sense in its time and place. But by introducing the theme of the shadow soul, which is not central to the Jewish and Christian stories, Hofmannsthal might have intended to universalize it precisely in order to distance it from his own tradition.
The opera’s myth of a different sort of transition, from nonhuman (or inhuman) to human, adds another layer of meaning to natalism. And the tragedy of the shadowless woman could be read as her lack not of children but of freedom, or equality, or power. That might at the very least serve to coat the ideology so that contemporary listeners can simply settle down to enjoy the music.
Strauss’s final opera, “Capriccio” (1942, with a libretto by Strauss and Clemens Krauss), centers on a debate about the relative importance of words and music, embodied in a poet and a composer who are competing for the love of a Countess. The debate remains unresolved in “Capriccio.” But were there such a contest in “Frau,” the composer would win, hands down. Though the poetry in the libretto is often quite wonderful, transcending the plot, the words are just the shadow of the music.
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