[Met Performance] CID:350232
New Production
Die Frau ohne Schatten {43} Metropolitan Opera House: 12/13/2001.
(Debuts: Reinhild Runkel, Sandra Piques Eddy, Angela Gilbert, Erico Villanueva, Herbert Wernicke
Review)
Metropolitan Opera House
December 13, 2001
New Production
DIE FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN {43}
R. Strauss-Hofmannsthal
Empress.................Deborah Voigt
Emperor.................Thomas Moser
Dyer's Wife.............Gabriele Schnaut
Barak...................Wolfgang Brendel
Nurse...................Reinhild Runkel [Debut]
Messenger...............Eike Wilm Schulte
Falcon..................Julia Faulkner
Hunchback...............Allan Glassman
One-Eyed................Timothy Nolen
One-Armed...............James Courtney
Servant.................Lyubov Petrova
Servant.................Yvonne Gonzales Redman
Servant.................Sandra Piques Eddy [Debut]
Apparition..............Mark Schowalter
Unborn..................Angela Gilbert [Debut]
Unborn..................Lyubov Petrova
Unborn..................Beverly O'Regan Thiele
Unborn..................Jennifer Check
Unborn..................Jane Shaulis
Unborn..................Diane Elias
Watchman................Richard Fracker
Watchman................Franco Pomponi
Watchman................Kamel Boutros
Voice...................Jane Bunnell
Guardian................Jennifer Welch-Babidge
Falcon Mime.............Erico Villanueva [Debut]
Violin Solo.............David Chan
Cello Solo..............Rafael Figueroa
Conductor...............Christian Thielemann
Production..............Herbert Wernicke [Debut]
Designer................Herbert Wernicke [Debut]
Lighting designer.......Herbert Wernicke [Debut]
Die Frau ohne Schatten received nine performances this season.
The production a gift of a Managing Director and his wife
Review of Leighten Kerner in OPERA NEWS of March 2002
Wernicke's new "Frau ohne Schatten" featured an abstract, light-show spectacle, an uncut score and Voigt's best Met performance ever. The chief virtue of the Met's dazzling, but debatable, new production of "Die Frau ohne Schatten," which opened on December 13, is that it presents, for the first time here, every note and word of Richard Strauss's score and Hugo von Hofmannsthal libretto. "Here," in fact, gives hardly a hint of the whole situation. Uncut performances of the most beautiful, complex, poetic, profound and, yes, lengthy of the Strauss-Hofmannsthal collaborations have been almost universally unheard of over its eighty-two-year career. Christian Thielemann, general music director of Berlin's Deutsche Oper, who conducted the new Met "Frau," stated in this magazine his utter belief in presenting the work complete. In contrast, Karl Böhm, Strauss's protégé who led the 1966 premiere of the Met's only other - and legendary -"Frau" production, and whose cuts have been gospelized, told me that he had opened those cuts once, in Dresden, but that the rarely heard portions "weren't very good." Ha!
First, a quick plot summary for uninitiated readers. The Emperor of the South-eastern Isles has been married for nearly a year to the daughter of the Old Testament-type god, Keikobad. Being of the spirit world, she casts no shadow, which means literally that she can't bear children and, symbolically, that she has no human instincts. The marriage is a carefree routine of love-making by night and, by day, sleep for her and hunting for him. Keikobad's messenger informs the Empress's nurse that if the Empress hasn't acquired a shadow in three days, the Emperor will be turned to stone. The Empress and Nurse descend to the human world to bribe a human woman to give up her shadow. The quarry is the discontented wife of the great-hearted dyer, Barak. The Empress gradually gains human pity for him, and Keikobad tests the two couples with threats of doom. The tests are passed, the duplicitous Nurse is condemned to live with humans, and a shadow is given to the Empress.
To hear the complete opera is to appreciate more fully how Hofmannsthal and, clearly, Strauss could manage crucial transitions between poignant intimacy of the drama and delicacy of a chamber-sized, but still virtuoso, orchestra (for example, the modern-day kitchen-sink realism for Barak's live-in, dye-in little factory. More important for the factory scenes, he emphasized convincing action for Mr. and Mrs. Barak, such as the man's resigned recourse to beer from the fridge, and her hiding a jeweled headband (given her by the Nurse) under her pillow. It was also fun to watch the Empress-turned-servant's first try at washing dishes. But crucial scenes needed more specificity. The Empress's sunlit terrace looked no different from the Falcon-house, where she has nightmares of conscience. There was no hint of possible doom when the Emperor walked, not through a Keikobad-fortress-door, but through a small op****g in a multipurpose mirrored wall. Also, there was not the absolutely required sense of the Empress's new shadow, except for Deborah Voigt's waving her arms balletically The ever-present mirrored walls and floor that gave one prisms in duplicate or triplicate, and the Nurse's "magic hand-mirror" that hit the audience with blinding reflected light, proved to be annoying distractions from important matters of music-drama. Wernicke, moreover, deleted any sense of Keikobad's destroying Barak's town and spiriting away those to be tested (end of Act II). The director also (beginning of Act III) put the Barak couple at home in separate spaces, she reading a newspaper, instead of isolating them from each other in separate dungeons for their anguished duet.
Amazingly, Wernicke was quoted in this magazine's January issue as saying about the 1966 "Frau," directed by Nathaniel Merrill and designed by Robert O'Hearn, "With all those set changes and props, I'm sure the audience didn't get what the show was all about. It's not about spectacular, fairy-tale sets, but about the development of people." Yes, that 1966 production, the Met's first, which appeared a mere two weeks after the company's Lincoln Center premier, was a mighty assemblage of gigantic stages that moved up and down. O'Hearn's sets and costumes specifically adhered to Hofmannsthal's legendary time and places and gave audiences a much clearer idea of the story than the new production does. And because the scene transformations never could have happened in the Met's old house, the production became the principal artistic justification for the Met's move to Lincoln Center. In many minds, the theater at Lincoln Center was the house that "Frau" built.
More to the point is that the 1966 show, for all its magnificent stagecraft, was more essentially "about the development of people." It could hardly have been otherwise, considering the intensity, warmth, power and growth of character projected by Leonie Rysanek as the Empress, Christa Ludwig's boiling temperament as Barak's wife, Walter Berry's velvety singing and warm acting as Barak, James King's impetuous but lyrical Emperor and Irene Dalis's diabolical Nurse. There were surely no dry eyes in the house when Berry sang of marital devotion throughout the opera, or when Rysanek used her hands to play along with her first sight of her shadow, in the penultimate scene.
Wernicke, for all his criticism of the old production, gives one perhaps half the story, thanks to a hard-working cast. Voigt's Empress, to begin with, is her best Met performance ever. The first scene's coloratura (up to high D) was flawless on [the first] night; her wonted power unfurled when needed, and there were none of the pitch problems heard in her "Ariadne" last season. She expressed a bit more emotion than usual. Gabriele Schnaut, as Barak's Wife, sometimes tended to shout, but most of her singing was on target, without her customary wobble. Replacing the ill Hanna Schwarz as the Nurse, Reinhild Runkel made a vivid Met debut, her lovably rolypoly figure pouring out incisive, well-colored bursts of dramatic-mezzo sound. Wolfgang Brendel's Barak had strength and warmth over the long evening's first half but weakened into a just passable Act III. Thomas Moser's Emperor began like a tenorial house afire, ringing top notes entertainingly elongated, but later thickened slightly into a decent if unremarkable finale. Eike Wilm Schulte rightly chilled his bass-baritone as a powerful Messenger, and the rest of the big cast performed honorably and well. Those mirrored walls, however, unduly blocked off most of the sound of the Falcon and the Unborn Children. In the old production, the kids-to-be were over-miked from backstage, but the Falcon's voice poured down clearly from a lighting booth in the auditorium's ceiling, with Walter Taussig's baton up there with her.