Die Frau ohne Schatten review: Nina Stemme stars in a superb recording of Strauss's mad, thrilling epic
Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s madly ambitious and viscerally thrilling extravaganza marks one of the Everests of opera, and this superb recording scales all its immense musical challenges.
The opera's germ was the idea of producing a modestly scaled fairy-tale that might constitute a homage to (or reflection of) Die Zauberflöte, but during its gestation between the cataclysmic years of 1911 and 1919, it mushroomed into a complex allegory of the need for fertility within marriage – a theme that became urgently topical in the light of the carnage of the First World War.
Although Strauss threw everything but the kitchen sink at it, using a huge orchestra and breaking all the sound barriers through a score lasting three and half hours, the score contains many passages of sinuous lyricism and intimate tenderness alongside its thunderstorms, fireworks and downright heavy-metal bombast.
Not surprisingly, conductors often take the licence to show off, and whip the orchestra and singers into a frenzy. So it is greatly to the credit of Christian Thielemann that he resists any temptation here to vulgarise or exaggerate: instead he keeps an iron grip on the explosive climaxes, explores all the delicately intricate instrumental detail and allows the singers to articulate the vocal lines without screeching or roaring. It helps, of course, that his cohorts include the peerless orchestra of the Vienna Staatsoper (from whose ranks the Vienna Philharmonic is drawn) and a fabulous cast.
Camilla Nylund and Nina Stemme take the twin leading soprano roles of the childless Empress in search of a shadow and the poor Dyer’s Wife who is being persuaded to sell hers – both of them are at the top of their game, producing singing of staggering intensity and power. Evelyn Herlitzius is marvellously insinuating as the sinister Nurse who pulls the strings, and Wolfgang Koch immensely sympathetic as Barak the dyer caught up in the middle of the intrigue. Stephen Gould struggles manfully with the punishingly demanding role of the Emperor – evidence of Strauss’s vindictive dislike of tenors.
There are some fine performances recorded in the studio of this amazing opera – notably those conducted by Georg Solti and Wolfgang Sawallisch. But this one (like the legendary 1966 version from the Metropolitan Opera conducted by Karl Böhm) has the additional excitement of having being taken live from a staged performance last year. It offers an emotionally overwhelming experience that made me ache to be back inside an opera house.
Die Frau ohne Schatten is released as a three-CD set on the Orfeo label
