Die Frau ohne Schatten

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Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow) is an opera by Richard Strauss with a German libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. While not initially as popular as some of his other operas, many people today think it to be his finest work in the genre.

The opera has a magical, fairy-tale plot and potent, unsettling music. It begins with a messenger from Keikobad, King of the Spirits and father of the childless and hence shadowless Empress, giving her nurse the message that she must return to Keikobad after three days, and the Emperor will be turned to stone. The Empress then tries to acquire a shadow, and the setting turns to the hut of Barak the Dyer. She at first attempts to gain a shadow from Barak's wife, but in the end refuses to do so, as the human cost is too high. Because of her fidelity to goodness, something only Barak in this opera fully shares, in the end she wins her own shadow after all.

The opera is a paean to child-bearing and the shadow signifies fertility and what the composer and librettist consider the true virtue of marriage: giving birth. The opera ends with both couples happily professing to their ability to bear children and propagate humanity.

The five principal roles in Die Frau ohne Schatten border on unsingable in their extraordinary vocal demands, which perhaps contributes to the rarity of performances. The Empress requires a full dramatic soprano capable of trills and fexlible high singing up to an E-flat in her first aria. Similarly the Emperor has many high-flying passages, particularly his extended solo scena in Act Two. The nurse sits mostly in the contralto range but with frequent leaps above the staff, and the Dyer's wife also calls for a soprano with immense sound to sail over very heavy orchestration and very dramatic leaps. Barak is the most approachable of the leading vocal parts, but again the orchestration is very heavy and requires a singer with sufficient stamina to last the nearly five-hour long opera.

[edit] Roles

		Premiere, October 10, 1919 (Franz Schalk)
The Emperor	tenor	Karl Aagaard Oestvig
The Empress, Keikobad's daughter	dramatic high soprano	Maria Jeritza
The nurse, her guardian	dramatic mezzo-soprano	Lucie Weidt
Barak, a dyer	bass-baritone	Richard Mayr
Barak's wife	high dramatic soprano	Lotte Lehmann
The one-eyed, Barak's brother	high bass
The one-armed, Barak's brother	bass
The hunchback, Barak's brother	high tenor
A spirit messenger	high baritone
The voice of a falcon	soprano
The apparition of a youth	high tenor
The guardian of the threshold	soprano or countertenor
A voice from above	contralto
Voices of unborn children	three sopranos, three baritones
Voices of three nightwatchmen	baritones
Servants of the Empress, other children and beggar-children, spirit-servants and spirit-voices