“You imagine you have me at home like a trapped bird, bought for a few coins in the market … but I have decided to escape you and uproot myself, and now I know the way!”
These passionate, embittered words are strange ones to put into the mouth of a fictional character modelled on your wife, aren’t they? When Richard Strauss composed Die Frau Ohne Schatten (“the woman without a shadow”), written with playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal during the First World War, he apparently modelled a key role – named simply as the wife of Barak, the Dyer – on his notoriously fiery, complicated spouse Pauline de Ahna.
The 150th anniversary of Strauss’s birth is now upon us, and this bizarre and underperformed but beautiful work is getting another moment in the spotlight. As of this month, a production at London’s Royal Opera House in Covent Garden is currently earning sparkling reviews and full houses.
The opera’s relatively low profile isn’t hard to explain. Die Frau Ohne Schatten’s plot is one of those perplexing tangles only operas or fantasy novels can really get away with. Set in the mythical Southern Islands, it follows a spirit woman married to a human emperor who is unable to bear him children, a lack symbolised by her inability to cast a shadow. Forced to find one to prevent her husband being turned to stone, the empress and her nurse try to coax a dyer’s wife into relinquishing her shadow, sowing discord in her marriage as they do. Things turn out all right in the end, though the empress’s demonic nurse comes off badly. Oh, did I mention that the empress was also once a gazelle, transformed after being shot while hunting?
It’s a little obscure, but Covent Garden’s production manages to make this strange symbolic soup eminently palatable. Rather than skipping between fairyland and the human world with whole set changes, alternative settings are suggested with projections that transform the dark wooden walls that bracket the action. In one projection, the whole stage wriggles with swimming fish, dazzling, silvery shivers of light that shift the action from real to dream world briefly before fading.
This works, mainly because the unlikely scenario is blessed with music whose colour and variety would make a dramatisation of the telephone directory seem gripping. The orchestral score in particular is unusually rich. It has thrillingly sombre brass reminiscent of Strauss’s most famous work Also Sprach Zarathustra (best known from the soundtrack for Kubrick’s 2001), but also the sort of sweetly pastoral, melodic strings that sound partly like a vision of heaven and partly like the soundtrack to a muesli commercial. The woodwind section becomes appropriately ethereal and strange, like unusual birds hidden in the trees, making the piece feel like a late burst of romantic nature poetry.
This is no backward-looking work, however. Granted, Strauss comes across here as less avant-garde than he had in his spiky earlier works Salome and Elektra, works which shook the European cultural scene before the First World War with their gestures in the direction of atonality. Since composing Der Rosenkavalier in 1912 – probably the most popular opera of the 20th century – Strauss had moved on to show more romantic influences, arguably nostalgic but incorporated with great imagination.
That doesn’t mean that Die Frau Ohne Schatten doesn’t make the audience’s ears work. The female roles in particular sing music that takes unexpected byways, passing down secret passages and jumping unannounced through windows in twists that surprise without quite breaking away from tonal obedience. And with five almost equally scored major roles filling the stage for three-and-a-half hours – the length of Covent Garden’s cut version – the sung music’s athletic lyricism is something to behold.
What saves the drama is the prosaic but recognisable human world of Barak, the Dyer and his wife. In Covent Garden’s production, for example, there’s something undeniably poignant about the single beds they migrate to as their marriage crumbles. Barak’s wife is nonetheless a singularly barbed portrait: perverse and capricious, she humiliates and shuns her husband in a way that, even eliding the piece’s latent misogyny, makes you feel rather sorry for him. The resemblance to Mrs Strauss, Pauline de Ahna, is unmistakable. A skilled and successful soprano herself, she was also notoriously complicated, rude and prone to making scenes, swearing at waiters and alternately disgusted with and devoted to her husband. It’s likely that shocked contemporary reports of de Ahna’s character partly reflect the restrictions on women in her time. Any spirited woman would have struggled with constraints that men of similar background and talent would never face, while their eccentricities would attract less notice. She still comes across as a bit of a nightmare.
Not a nightmare to Strauss, however. Their marriage continued for more than 50 years and the composer was clearly inspired by his wife time and again. His Symphonia Domestica, a tone poem of 1903, explored a family’s day through music in a way that’s arguably a little sugary. Later, a thinly veiled portrait of the couple’s domestic difficulties populated another opera, 1923’s Intermezzo, while the composer’s haunting last work Four Last Songs of 1948 was also reportedly inspired in part by de Ahna. If Strauss’s wife could be difficult, he apparently relished it, or at least responded creatively to the pressure she exerted on him.
Then again, autobiography crops up quite often in Strauss’s work as a whole. In fact, the composer once remarked to the writer Romain Rolland that he found himself “no less interesting than Napoleon”. His work partly mirrors this conviction, as Strauss presented the world with a grand vision (fairly obviously himself) of the conquering artist in the 1898 tone poem Ein Heldenleben (“a hero’s life”). While more nature poetry than self-description, there’s also an autobiographical bent to his towering Alpine Symphony, which coincided with his move in 1908 to the Bavarian mountain town of Garmisch.
Towards his life’s end, Strauss explored his emotions at the destruction of Germany’s cities in the haunting string chamber piece Metamorphosen, while his Four Last Songs come across as his wife talking to him (peacefully this time) about their impending deaths.
Despite the grandeur of Ein Heldenleben, the actual details of Strauss’s career were more compromised and complicated than obviously heroic. Strauss’s conduct as a composer working under Nazi rule in particular has been critically scrutinised. Weighing hard against him is his acceptance of an appointment as president of the Reichsmusikkammer, the Nazis’ state music bureau, justified privately as a way of reducing Nazism’s potential harm to German music.
Rebalancing the scales in his favour, however, is Strauss’s protection of his Jewish daughter-in-law (which may have motivated his collaboration) while he was ultimately sacked from his post for continuing to work with a Jewish opera librettist, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. As he drove to the doors of Theresienstadt concentration camp to plead (unsuccessfully) for the freedom of relatives incarcerated there, it’s impossible to paint Strauss as an entirely willing Nazi collaborator.
Strauss’s conduct nonetheless suggests a monstrous degree of self-absorption in keeping with his self-likening to Napoleon, an anti-heroic level of quietism. Visiting Strauss shortly after the war, Klaus Mann (son of Thomas) found that the composer’s most bitterly expressed resentment towards the Nazis was that they had suggested billeting bombed-out city dwellers in his Alpine villa, while the composer praised the musical taste of Nazi figures already partly known to be involved in mass brutality.
The picture this anecdote paints is ugly, but if we have learnt anything from Wagner’s example, it is that it’s a grave mistake to assume that possessing a genius for musical invention makes any composer a model for emulation. The details of Strauss’s life help to anchor the airiness of Die Frau Ohne Schatten in lived experience that the audience recognises. The brilliance of this, however, lies not in its effective dramatisation of the composer’s life, but in Strauss’s ability to wring something deathlessly beautiful from the mundane.
Feargus O’Sullivan is a regular contributor to The National.
