Volume 28, Number 14 · September 24, 1981
The 'Shadow' and the Substance
By Robert Craft
Die Frau ohne Schatten by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss: An Analysis of Text, Music, and Their Relationship
by Sherrill Hahn Pantle. German Studies in America, No. 29, edited by Heinrich Meyer
Peter Lang (Bern, Frankfurt am Main, Las Vegas), 256, 71 music examples pp., $36.00
Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow)
English version of the libretto by Eric Crozier
Welsh National Opera, 48 pp.
Richard Strauss: The Staging of His Operas and Ballets
by Rudolf Hartmann
Oxford University Press, 280 pp., $39.95
Gide's 'Victor Hugo, hélas' expresses an attitude toward the French poet similar to that of many musicians about Richard Strauss. Yet the omnipresence of his operas on European and American stages is a phenomenon of the last decade as conspicuous as the failure to enter the repertory of any music by the far more influential and revered Arnold Schoenberg. Almost all of Strauss's operas have been successfully revived,[1] while Die Frau ohne Schatten has taken its place with Salome, Elektra, and Der Rosenkavalier, if not a higher one, in current critical opinion. The New Grove quotes Strauss's estimate of it as 'Hofmannsthal's finest achievement,' adding that 'some think that it is also Strauss's,' and the recent Mondadori volume, L'Opera: repertorio della lirica dal 1597, generally balanced in its criticism, ranks the opera with Tristan and Don Giovanni. Moreover, these views are neither cultist nor elitist, as the sold-out tour of Die Frau in Britain last winter showed.
Review, 3170 words
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