Hugo Shirley

The Royal Opera House’s Die Frau ohne Schatten – a dream solution to Strauss’s problem opera?

Conductor and cast deliver near ideal performances but the staging needed more focus

Emily Magee as Empress; Johan Botha as Emperor © ROH / Clive Barda 
issue 22 March 2014

If ever an opera was weighed down by its creators’ joint ambition, it is Die Frau ohne Schatten. Richard Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal quickly began to imagine their third true collaboration, produced during the 1910s but not premièred until 1919, as their masterpiece. But it turned into a complex and unwieldy embarrassment of riches, albeit a glorious one.

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