Lights, colour and projections also define the divisions between reality and fantasy, with plenty of objects that serve literal and symbolic purposes - a bed, an elevator, a fish tank - and supernumeraries wearing animal and falcon heads. Led by a witch-like nurse, played as a flame-haired terror by Michaela Schuster, the Empress disguises herself as a servant and infiltrates the earthy world of the Dyer. It's a disappointing reading of the work, particularly when we have recently had such a radical interpretation of this opera from If Warlikowski's interpretation doesn't engage the mind and the imagination quite as much, the Munich production nonetheless is at least a feast for the eyes and the ears, and it's not without some bizarrely surreal imagery and a few characteristically clever touches. First performed in 1919, Die Frau ohne Schatten is a collaboration between Strauss and the librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Animals representing characters or aspects of them haunt the stage – their symbolism is explained in the programme, which you will definitely need to make any sense of what's happening on stage. Even the most basic idea behind the opera - a woman who doesn't cast a shadow - is not an easy thing to … Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow), Op. There's nothing wrong with Die Frau ohne Schatten retaining some or much of its enigma - you can say much the same about the model it aspires to Mozart's Die Zauberflöte - but the opera's huge message of the unifying force of love and brotherhood should be made more explicit. But he still loves her even after his rejection, as expressed in the wonderful aria “Mir anvertraut” (at the beginning of act three). Warlikowski gives them context to bring these elusive characters to life, but the singers still have a considerable amount to bring to the production as well. At the end both couples are on stage surrounded by a sweet chorus of children (an echo of the Papagena/Papageno ending from The Magic Flute?) The Empress and the Dyer’s Wife are shadows of each other – their movements mirrored, dressed in half-black, half-white dresses. Die Frau Ohne Schatten is about restoring the Empress’s psychic wholeness, oneness and unity so she can become fertile. However, it is now a standard part of the operatic repertoire. It was written between 1911 and either 1915 or 1917. But the sexual wounding and animal imagery of a work premiered in Vienna make it ripe for a psychoanalytic-inspired production, which was exactly what we got here.

This article calls The Dyer’s Wife is unhappy with her husband and seems happy to give up her shadow – and therefore her unborn children – to the Empress in exchange for money. Our heroine then wakes from her dream cured of what has ailed her. Perhaps in this dream world they are two halves of the same personality. When two colleagues urged me not to miss it, though, I decided to give it a go. Michaela Schuster as Nurse and Emily Magee as the Empress in Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten They had worked together previously on the Mozart pastiche The Empress (Emily Magee) is a daughter of the spirit world who was wounded by the Emperor (Johan Botha) while in the form of a white gazelle; half-human and half-spirit she cannot cast a shadow – a symbol of her incomplete humanity, and her infertility. Die Frau Ohne Schatten is about restoring the Empress’s psychic wholeness, oneness and unity so she can become fertile. Too much of the opera remains obscure however and it's meaning impenetrable. The sets are extravagant in terms of their being so much going on. Directing Richard Strauss's epic work for the Bavarian State Opera, Krzysztof Warlikowski is not a director short of ideas, one who can always be relied upon for creative and unconventional approaches to opera staging, particularly for a work as rich in imagery and ideas as Perhaps more surprisingly for this director is the fall-back onto one of the old familiar tricks that are commonly used when a dramatic situation appears too exaggerated to depict literally. As becomes clear in the later part of the production - and in keeping with the psychologist's couch origin - Warlikowski goes for the asylum option, with the Nurse eventually being the one put into a straight-jacket.
Die Frau ohne Schatten is notoriously one of the most difficult works to stage, the fairytale setting having some directions that are near-impossible to depict conventionally, including frying fish that lament with the Voices of Unborn Children, earthquakes and magically appearing fountains. It turned out to be one of the strangest nights at the opera I’ve spent.