Berlin 13-12-2009
Barak, the dyer or tanner, is the actual hero of Richard Strauss’s masterpiece opera, ‘Die Frau ohne Schatten’ which the Deutsche Oper staged yesterday evening in Berlin.
This last performance of the opera for the 2009/2010 season was conducted by Axel Kober, with vocal soloists Robert Brubaker, Manuela Uhl, Jane Henschel, Eva Johansson and Johan Reuter as Barak.
The orchestra, conductor and both Ms Henschel and Ms Johansson got the most applaus by the enthusiastic audience.
Musically and scenically it is a demanding and challenging work that few opera houses are capable of staging successfully. It requires 5 top vocal soloists in the demanding lead roles , and very good singers for its secondary roles, a very large orchestra with exceptional violin and cello principals -who play concerto like solo parts -along with elaborate sets and effects.
The work was first performed in 1919 Vienna. Critics and audiences were at first unenthusiastic – which had more to do with Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s complicated and heavily symbolic libretto than with Strauss’s mercurial musical score.
Not as convoluted and epic as Wagner’s stories, there is something lacking in the story-line to make it a popular masterpiece like Strauss’s earlier dynamic works Elektra or Rosenkavalier.
As a librettist, von Hoffmanstahl had no equal and Strauss respected him and his work as no other - along with being a close personal friend. Had von Hoffmanstahl but taken a classic Greek play, something by Shakespeare or another by Oscar Wilde for his subject matter the problem with this opera would have looked after itself.
The ‘problem’ – if one can call it that – is that the empyrean music completely dominates.
The musical score is so glorious, so sublime, so very alluring that the corresponding story – which is a bit light on substance – takes away instead of adding to the complete work.
Work on the opera began in 1911 when Strauss was living in Berlin as Kapellmeister of the Court Opera .
[ Read mini-bio of Richard Strauss- http://blog.ota-berlin.de/composers/2008/05/21/biography-of-richard-strauss/]
The opera is sort of a fairy-tale about love being blessed through the birth of children.
Hofmannsthal, wanted it to be like and compared it with the Magic-flute by Mozart – one of Strauss’s favorite works. Hofmannsthal’s libretto is based on a piece by Goethe, but also draws on such works as the Arabian Nights and some of Grimms fairy tales.
Like many opera stories one needs a lot of imagination to follow the plot;
A mythical emperor in a time-less empire out hunting with his favorite falcon captures a deer who is turned into a woman who later becomes his empress. She is ‘ without a shadow’ – that is, unable to bear children. Unless the empress gains a shadow she will be reclaimed into being a deer spirit and the Emperor will turn to stone.
The lowly dyers wife, is supposed to become the emperors’ child’s surrogate mother but this would involve betraying her own husband – which she is loathe to do.
At the opera’s end an act of renunciation frees the empress and the dyers wife – she receives a shadow, [meaning she is again bearing a child] and the Emperor is “de-stoned” and restored into his human state.
Barak and his wife are reunited and she regains her own shadow. Both couples sing of their humanity and praise their unborn children and the opera ends with a childrens chorus representing ‘unborn children’ .
