This was going to be part of the Met's Live in HD series this coming year, but I'm pretty sure it, along with many others, has been cancelled, as the first half of the Met's season isn't happening--and, let's be real, not the last half either, even if they haven't made it official. I was waiting to see this for that reason, but now, might as well. I'd been curious about it; I had zero idea what it was about, and that title ("the woman without a shadow") didn't tell me anything. It is, however, probably one of the better-known operas that I still hadn't seen, so hey. A few people on the Met facebook group were saying that it was kind of inaccessible and a bit of an acquired taste, but was that going to stop me? Are you STUPID er sumpthin'?
Well...people said that with reason, I'll say that much. This is a very strange opera; not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but it's still kind of difficult to see what Strauss and Hofmannsthal were trying to accomplish. I don't know how well I can summarize it: there are definitely things that happen in it in a certain order, but it's often very unclear why these things are happening, or how one leads to another. So: there's this legendary, mystical realm of some sort. The Empress doesn't have a shadow, which in some way signifies her inability to conceive children. The Empress' father, Keikobad, sends a message to her that if she doesn't find herself a shadow, her husband the Emperor will be turned to stone (see? I can tell you that these things happen, but if you respond "what? why?" I have no answer). The Empress and her Nurse go down to the human world where they meet Barak the dyer and his wife (who is only known as "Barak's Wife"). He wants to have children, but she doesn't. They offer to buy Barak's wife's shadow, and she agrees to sell it to them, but for unknown reasons, they first have to stay there for three days. Some other weird stuff happens that I don't understand, and Barak's wife tells him that she's sold her shadow. He gets mad at this and is going to kill her, but then they get sucked into the mystical realm. They're separated, but they both sing about how they love each other. The Empress is encouraged to go ahead and take the wife's shadow, but she refuses, and as a reward, Everybody Gets a Shadow, and the women can have kids, apparently.
Um...yeah. At one point, Barak accurately sums up how I felt about what was going on:
You and me both, brother. Apparently Hofmannsthal compared this to Die Zauberflöte, which is appropriate in that both that and this have weird, alienating plots, but Mozart's opera at least makes sense on its own terms, and I'm not sure this does (though in fairness, this also lacks the explicit misogyny, Barak's Wife's lack of a name notwithstanding). It's certainly not inconceivable that I could warm to it in time, but, well, that hasn't happened yet. The music is, you know, fine; it's Strauss. Quite varied. And yet, I feel like if the characters are all singing sheer madness, it takes away from the overall effect.
This production is pretty good, though some complain in comments about the Russian singers mangling the German libretto; I couldn't really speak to that. It's from the Mariinsky Theatre, though, and the production is predictably spectacular: the "mystical realm" parts take place in a glittery fairyland, and the "real world" parts (as you can maybe tell from that screenshot) in Barak's ratty-looking, working-class residence. There's some predictable whining about this in the comments, but good god, people. Opera would be so boring if it were preserved in amber like you want. This isn't even Eurotrash, and it seems to me to be perfectly faithful to the spirit of the thing. The standout among the singers is definitely Olga Sergeyeva as Barak's Wife.
I dunno. As I say, I could warm to this, but I really cannot adequately emphasize how fucking nuts the whole thing is. It's my seventh Strauss opera, and nothing in any of those first six would have led me to anticipate something like this.
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