It isn’t often that opera-goers have the chance to see Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s 1919 fairy-tale opera Die Frau ohne Schatten, a work that many consider to be the composer’s masterpiece. It features one of the largest orchestras of any opera: 164 instruments, including an organ, Chinese gong, and ten trumpets, as well as castanets, two celestas, and a glass harmonica. It also lasts longer than three hours. No wonder that even the Metropolitan Opera, where it is playing through December 19, hasn’t put it on for more than a decade.
Frau’s musical complexity is mirrored in its rich symbolism and often fantastical plot. The titular “woman without a shadow,” the Empress of the mythical Southeastern Islands, is unable to bear a child—that is, she can’t “cast a shadow.” Her father, the mysterious (and unseen) Keikobad, threatens to turn her husband the Emperor into stone unless she manages to do so. Guided by a Mephistophelean Nurse, the Empress leaves her pleasure palace and ultimately ends up in the grimy hut of a kindly dyer named Barak, whose querulous Wife neglects a “shadow” of her own, disappointing her husband. A series of magical, dreamlike events follows: fish sing from their frying pan, riches materialize out of thin air, shadows appear and disappear as eerie voices of the unborn waft onto the stage and address their would-be parents.
That last element gives Frau a particular weight in 2024, two years after the fall of Roe. Back then, in anticipation of a revival of the work at the San Francisco Opera, music critic Joshua Kosman argued in the San Francisco Chronicle that Strauss’s opera, despite never mentioning abortion, “speaks to the current moment in the history of abortion more clearly than any other in the standard repertoire. And unfortunately, it stands on the wrong side of the issue.”
Kosman is partly correct. Frau is an opera of its era, both in its sexual and imperial politics, especially in the way it humanizes the powerful couple at its center. (The work originally premiered just as the Habsburg dynasty was approaching its twilight at the end of World War I.) Furthermore, the opera betrays an indifference to the physical, psychological, and material difficulties of childbirth and child-rearing, revealing the limits of the opera’s upper-class male imagination. Like the Emperor and Empress, Die Frau ohne Schatten seems to sing from on high.
But I can’t help but feel that critiques of such a complex piece on these grounds—like critic Robert Commanday’s judgement that Frau amounts to “nothing more profound than an anti-choice statement idealizing the subservient, child-bearing role of women”—are both too sweeping and too simplistic. The predicament of the childless Emperor and Empress, through whose body light passes “as though she were made of glass,” has a foil in the plight of the dyer Barak and his Wife. When they are intercepted by the Empress and the Nurse, their two-and-a-half-year struggle to become pregnant has wearied the Wife of any desire for children, erecting a barrier between them. While Barak’s warm melodic lines signal an unflagging, if painful, devotion to his Wife, she remains downtrodden and overworked, charged as she is with minding Barak’s testy brothers. At the Nurse’s offering, she comes close to surrendering her shadow in exchange for riches, servants, and an attractive young man—on the condition that she reject her husband’s advances for three days.
Yet the Wife is soon haunted by her choice. As she contemplates her decision while preparing a meal of fried fish, those voices of children start singing to her, tormenting her from the pan: “Mother, mother, let us come home! We are in the dark and we are frightened! Oh mother, alas for your hard heart!” The voices wail in eerie polyphony while the Wife’s agitated responses—“What is that horrible whining noise coming from the fire?”—are supported by dense, arpeggiated chords in the strings and the brass.
The motif they sing is a minor-key iteration of the music sung by the neighborhood children that flood into the house during the next act at Barak’s invitation. Perhaps they are hallucinations brought on by guilt—they, too, explicitly call her “mother”—but the Wife’s lack of response here reveals her reluctance to engage with anyone beyond herself. More drama will soon ensue—the Wife’s revelation that agreed to sell off her shadow prompts Barak to draw a sword on her, then an earthquake swallows their hut—but in this poignant moment Strauss invites us to ponder the Wife’s suffering, caused not just by infertility, but also by poverty and a fraying relationship.
After a series of complicated trials for its protagonists, Frau, in part modeled on Mozart’s The Magic Flute, concludes jubilantly, with both couples reunited and recommitted as an offstage chorus of children sings with them in concert: “Would there ever be a feast if we were not, secretly, at once the guests and also the hosts?” Embedded in these lines is an articulation of the moral duty of mutual care—for spouses, children, relatives, and communities.
What makes Frau an extraordinary opera is also what makes it a challenging one. Here, as in several other of Strauss’s operas—like Salome, which will arrive at the Met next spring—the creator frustrates our desire for a clear division marking where a voice ends and an embodied character begins. The “children” represented in Strauss’s opera may at first sound like forlorn, vacant voices, beings with a lower ontological status than the principal characters that actually appear on stage, and perhaps even “pre-characters.” But might we not also hear these voices—and the characters proper—as co-participants in a larger economy of dependency and empathy, individual elements that Strauss’s music seeks to unite in a larger, more harmonic, more communal whole?
For Strauss, children can’t come into being unless there is mutual respect between partners and genuine understanding across social classes—generosity is the key. Kosman’s contention that the opera doggedly “confers personhood on the unborn” seems blind to Strauss’s universality, deaf to the skillful way he weaves emotion, responsibility, and care into the vocal parts. A singing voice, whether of a potential child or parent, is not necessarily a marker of personhood—that depends on a character’s free and active participation in the caring relationships that surround them.
In the end, the Empress decides that saving the life of her husband cannot depend on destroying the life of a less privileged woman. Her climactic—and, notably, spoken, not sung—exclamation “Ich will nicht!” (“I do not want to!”) is hardly an “anti-choice” statement about women’s duty to bear children. Instead, it’s a free, personal response, an expression of care for another person arrived at only after a long journey of reflection during which the Empress has learned to think beyond herself. That’s what ultimately persuades the all-powerful Keikobad to revoke his curse, turning the Emperor back from stone and giving this fairy tale a happy ending.
In his article, Kosman recounts a story in which critic Mark Swed described a 2004 revival of Frau in Los Angeles as “pro-life,” only to have a punctilious copyeditor change Swed’s descriptor to align with his paper’s style guide as “anti-abortion.” As the rare opportunity to revisit Die Frau ohne Schatten returns, we shouldn’t conflate the two at the expense of deep engagement with Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s work. “Pro-life” and “pro-choice” cannot describe the sweep and complexity of Die Frau ohne Schatten. Only “pro-humanity” can.
