SFO: Splendid Music for a Cryptic Narrative

If San Francisco Opera (SFO) opened its 2023 Summer Season with one of the most popular works in the repertoire of grand opera, Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, yesterday afternoon presented the first of five performances of one of the most cryptic. Richard Strauss’ Die Frau ohne Schatten (the woman without a shadow) is seldom presented for a variety of reasons, including massive instrumentation and extensive vocal resources. Much of it was composed in the midst of World War I, meaning that it was not performed for the first time, at the Vienna State Opera, until October 10, 1919.

Here in the United States, it was not presented until September 18, 1959, when it was performed here by SFO. Yesterday saw the seventh SFO production, the most recent of which dates back to 1989. My guess is that the frequency of stagings is just as modest elsewhere in the United States with the “primary contender” being the Metropolitan Opera (which is where I saw Die Frau ohne Schatten for the first time). That was back before opera productions had supertitles, and correlating what I saw with the synopsis in the program book was no easy matter.

My guess is that, even with titles, the narrative is still a perplexing morass of symbolism with heavily obscured denotations and connotations. That symbolism begins with the title. A “woman without a shadow” is a woman that cannot bear children. Such a woman is identified in the cast listing only as “The Empress,” sung in the current production by soprano Camilla Nylund. Her father is Keikobad (whom we never see); and he declares, through his Spirit Messenger (bass Stefan Egerstrom), that, if she cannot “cast a shadow” (i.e. achieve pregnancy) within three days, her husband, The Emperor (tenor David Butt Philip) will turn to stone.

This royal couple is complemented by a peasant family led by Barak (bass-baritone Johan Reuter), who makes his living as a dyer. He has three brothers, one having only one eye (bass-baritone Philip Skinner), one having only one arm (bass-baritone Wayne Tigges), and one a hunchback (tenor Zhengyi Bai). He also has a wife (soprano Nina Stemme) who has not yet given him any children. Over the course of three acts, both of these couples struggle with the same frustration; and one might accuse the librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal of overburdening them with those struggles. By way of compensation, however, Richard Strauss summoned up some of his richest instrumentation techniques; and, as interpreted by conductor Donald Runnicles, there were several episodes in which passages for four trumpets and four trombones came from beyond the orchestra pit.

The not-quite-parallel encounter of The Empress (Camilla Nylund), Barak’s wife (Nina Stemme), Barak (Johan Reuter), and The Emperor (David Butt Philip) in the final scene of Die Frau ohne Schatten (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)

I think it would be fair to say that Hofmannsthal’s libretto does not follow a particularly well-defined narrative path. Ultimately, however, we, as observers, are drawn more to the paths that the two leading couples find themselves following. These are not quite parallel lives, but there are what might be called parallel challenges. Bringing the four of them together in the final scene may strike some as contrived. However, Hofmannsthal’s libretto suggests that they all face an uncertain future with struggles to be overcome. At the very end there is a chorus of unborn children, but one comes away with the feeling that both of the marriages will soon see the results of consummation.