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

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. The charge that this enormous fairy tale represents the librettist and composer at their most pretentious and overblown is difficult to refute, and such charges are compounded by the fact that the surface message of its plot — in which a shadowless and infertile spirit Empress learns compassion and gains humanity, a shadow and fecundity — can be read as a kind of pro-procreation parable.

One of the virtues of the Royal Opera’s new production — first seen at La Scala in Milan in 2012 — is that it precludes such a simplistic interpretation. The German director Claus Guth, a well-known name on the continent but here working in the UK for the first time, frames the action as the Empress’s fevered dream. But this dream dissolves precisely as the final act reaches its apparently happy ending with a scrunching, overburdened musical climax — a moment patiently prepared by conductor Semyon Bychkov, before being unleashed to shattering effect.

Such a framing device might seem like an old trick, or even a cop-out, a kind of carte blanche to play fast and loose with the plot. And in the first act it did occasionally feel that way, with Guth superimposing his own symbols over those already in the opera: whose story was being told, I wondered, Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s, Guth’s, or a muddled mixture of both? It felt cluttered and confusing early on, especially with the addition of a double for the Empress (in half-gazelle form) and her normally absent father, Keikobad.