Strauss - Symphonic Fantasy on “Die Frau ohne Schatten” (1948)
The Woman without a Shadow is an interesting opera. I’ll admit, I haven’t seen it, I’ve only been listening to it while reading the story. It is written to be like a fairy tale, the librettist using stories by the Brothers Grimm and from the 1001 Arabian Nights for inspiration. The fairy tale is comparable to Mozart’s The Magic Flute, but here the fantastical story is given an early 20th century twist, focusing on symbolism and psychology. The story is about a goddess who is the daughter of the King of the Spirit Realm. She had the power to transform into any animal she wanted to. But as a gazelle, she was captured by an Emperor, and he made her his wife. Now she is stuck in human form, and yet she cannot produce a shadow. Her father, the King of the Spirit Realm, promises that, unless she can gain a shadow in three days, he will take her back to the Spirit Realm, and turn the Emperor into stone. But she has fallen in love with the Emperor, and so she wants to gain a shadow to save the both of them. It is a fun story with folktale tropes, but it is also a deeper look into love and desire. The idea is that the shadow represents the ability to bear children, and so the subtext is the desire to solidify the love between a man and a woman through conceiving a child of their own. Strauss struggled with the opera because of the first World War, and its 1919 premiere left audiences indifferent, but it ended up as a personal favorite of his and later in his life he rearranged some of the music into this symphonic fantasy. Immediately we are hit with the main motif, sinister horns blasting three notes. But that shifts into the more velvety orchestra writing that we expect, full of beautiful melodies and dessert like textures.
Conductor: Zubin Mehta Orchestra: Berliner Philharmoniker