What is Die Frau ohne Schatten actually about? The plot resists easy synopsis – as anyone who has ever attempted to summarise it for their non-opera friends will attest – but when one strips away the attendant complexity of its fantastic settings, arcane mythology and dense symbolism, one arrives at an uncomfortable realisation: the principal argument of the opera seems to be that childbirth is the only metric by which the success of a relationship can be judged. While such a wholesome moral may have been vaguely comforting to middle-class audiences of the early-twentieth century, it explains neither the opera’s unique fascination, nor its continued relevance for audiences of the present day.
Tobias Kratzer’s recent Strauss productions for the Deutsche Oper Berlin have made a point of interrogating their texts until they reveal their…
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