LOVE THAT COLORS AND TRANSFORMS Die Frau ohne Schatten How does an opera lover who knows no Freud or Jung or Joseph Campbell find a way through the labyrinth of symbols in Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow)? One way is to see this twentieth-century opera as a variant of a much older opera everyone knows—Mozart’s Die Zaub- erfléte (The Magic Flute). When Hugo von Hofmannsthal first broached the subject of Die Frau, excitedly, to Richard Strauss, he said that it would be their Magic Flute, much as the Rosen- kavalier they had written was their Marriage of Figaro. Hofmannsthal knew that he and Strauss could not recreate what he called Mozart’s “enchanting naiveté.” In The Magic Flute Mozart had made a childlike wonderland from the myths of many civilizations. Hofmannsthal wanted, with Strauss’s music, to make a mythic universe for adults, a great symbolic drama with epic yearnings. A new Magic Flute, yes, but, as the librettist said, it would be a matter not of imitation but of analogy.220 + Strauss So, as The Magic Flute has two loving couples—a prince and princess, and a bird-man and bird-woman—Die Frau ohne Schatten also has two couples—the lordly Emperor and his Empress, and the lowborn Dyer and his wife. As the action in The Magic Flute is spun on by the patriarchal Sarastro, so the strange events in Die Frau are manipulated by the unseen but always present father, Keikobad. As The Magic Flute in the end consigns the matriarchal Queen of the Night to perdition, so Die Frau banishes a similar figure, the malignant Nurse. And as the last half of The Magic Flute is a series of ritualized tests for its two couples, so, with the second act of Die Frau, Hof- mannsthal said of his two couples, “Now the testing begins, and all four must be purified.” To make his vast drama of world mythology, Hofmannsthal borrowed not just from The Magic Flute but, to cite only a few examples, from the Bible (the opera’s characters paraphrase bits of the Gospels and the Apocalypse), from the Roman poet Ovid (the woman without a shadow has the power of meta- morphosis), from the Koran (the woman with a shadow is tempted by an Efrit, a genic in the form of a young man), from the Arabian Nights (the spirits of humans sing through the fish frying in a pan), and from world folktale (the man wedded to a spirit will turn to stone if his wife does not in twelve moons bear a child). Hofmannsthal also culled features from Omar Khayyam (who provided the character of Keikobad), from Gozzi’s Tur- andotte (which contains both Keikobad and the dyer Barak), and from Goethe’s Faust (Hofmannsthal himself remarked on the similarity between his evil Nurse and Goethe’s Mephi- stopheles). The librettist added further symbols of his own, most notably the shadow itself. So complex did his story and symbols become that he felt the need eventually to expand and explain them in a novella. (Incredibly, only one chapter of thisDie Frau ohne Schatten + 221 indispensable parergon has been translated into English—and that’s a word to a wise publisher somewhere.) The characters of Die Frau ohne Schatten are defined in some of the most enigmatic poetry written in this century, and in some of Strauss’s most challenging music. First, there is the spirit-king who never appears but who is so important to the action that his name is announced instrumentally three times in the opera’s opening measures—Keikobad. This father-god presides over a three-part world. There is, first, the “spirit world” above the moon mountains, in which Keikobad lives with those not yet born (this pre-existence of the soul was a Platonic idea that haunted Hofmannsthal all his life). Then there is the “middle world” in which the opera be- gins, a kind of limbo halfway between heaven and earth, an island set in a lake surrounded by the moon mountains, where the privileged Emperor may hunt (the Hapsburgs were still in power when the opera was written). And finally there is the “earth world” far below, a place of struggling humanity, of grinding poverty and unhappiness, of passion and compas- sion. From his spirit world, Keikobad predestines all that happens in the middle and lower worlds. He also, with the same seem- ing contradiction that besets most theologies, allows lower creatures the acts of free will that eventually save or doom them. When their crises are past, he calls them to judgment with ringing fanfares. But first he issues commands that ap- pear fearful: he will allow his fairy daughter to learn the mean- ing of human love, but, if she does not find a shadow, the man she loves will be turned to stone. Our second figure, the daughter of Keikobad, is a fairylike creature. Her mother (about whom we hear tantalizingly little) has given her a tender feeling for the lower forms of life. And so her father has let her descend to the middle world, with a222 + Strauss talisman whereby she can assume, in sky or lake or land, any shape she pleases—bird or fish or animal. So it was as a white gazelle on the moon mountains that she was caught by the Emperor. And when she left the gazelle’s body and turned again to fairy form, the Emperor loved her and made her his Empress. But then the falcon that brought them together flew off with the talisman, leaving her stranded in the interworld. She remains a spirit creature in that middle world, a woman without a shadow. As her music often suggests, light passes through her as if through rock crystal. Strauss is famous for his operatic portraits of women. But with Die Frau ohne Schatten he was amazed that, for the first time, he found it easier to characterize the men in his story. Our next figure, the passionate Emperor of the South East Islands, gets the most memorable theme in the score: Richard Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten © Copyright 1916, 1919 by Adolph Fiirstner; Copyright Renewed, Copyright assigned to Boosey & Hawkes, Ltd. for all countries except Germany, Danzig, Italy, Portugal, and the U.S.S.R. Reprinted by permission of, Boosey & Hawkes, Inc. © 1916 by Fuerstner, for Germany, Italy, Portugal, and the former countries of Russia, That ardent love is, however, without issue. The Emperor sel- fishly keeps his fairylike Empress far from the human race she so longs to know. And he has wounded the falcon that brought them together. A year later, the blood still drips from its wings, and it weeps as it sings to him. The Emperor cannot hear the words in the falcon’s cry, the warning that if his wife does not find a shadow, he will soon turn to stone—a mythic symbol of his selfishness. But the Empress, with her spirit na- ture, can understand the song, and descends from the middle to the lower world to find the shadow that will save her Em- peror.Die Frau ohne Schatten + 223 The longest role in the opera is that of the Nurse, sent by Keikobad to accompany his daughter in her search for a shadow. A demonic figure with magic powers, the Nurse owes something to the witches and evil stepmothers of folk- lore. But she is more complex than they. Like Goethe’s Meph- istopheles, like Milton’s Satan, she becomes the unwitting in- strument of good, allowed by Keikobad to do evil so that the human race may progress toward understanding. The search for a shadow in the lowest world brings us to our last two characters, the Dyer and his wife. He, the only character in the story who knows human love, is also the only human character with a name—Barak, a Muslim word for “saint.” His occupation is important, too, though the English word “dyer” doesn’t convey the full force of the German “Far- ber”—that is to say, “one who imparts colors.” Hofmannsthal casts man on earth as a dyer in order to illustrate what is per- haps the most recurrent theme in all his poetry and prose— what he called the “allomatisches,” the transformation that can be worked in any of us through the influence of another. Each of us colors the lives of those with whom we live. The saintly Barak has: the power, through love, to transform. Hof- mannsthal made this clear in his novella, where we see, in a vision of what a world transformed by saintliness might be, the three maimed brothers of the Dyer freed of their defor- mities. And Strauss, once again surprisingly more at home with his male than with his female figures, shows the trans- forming power of the Dyer’s love by giving him a third-act aria of unparalleled eloquence, “Mir anvertraut.” He chose for this his most expressive key, D-flat, the key of the trio in Der Rosenkavalier, of the lullaby in Ariadne auf Naxos, and of the violin-accompanied soprano solo, “Und die Seele unbe- wacht,” in the Four Last Songs. But even Barak needs the testing that Keikobad will send. His love has not yet transformed the most remarkable charac-224 + Strauss ter in the opera, the one called simply the Dyer’s Wife. “A strange woman,” Hofmannsthal first said of her, “with a very beautiful soul, incomprehensible in her anguish, yet sympa- thetic.” She is the flawed human figure most of us can identify with. She is what most of us are. Strauss gives this woman no real theme of her own. Mostly he shows her, through childlike motifs, tormented by her husband’s yearning for the children she does not want, and tormented too by the voices of the unborn children themselves, crying out from the world be- yond. That brings us to the opera’s central symbol, the shadow. Clearly in the narrative it signifies the ability to bear children. The shadow is the potential child in the womb. But as the opera gathers force, the shadow comes to mean something more, something close to what André Malraux called “the hu- man condition.” Suffering, vulnerability, love, guilt, death— those are what the woman without a shadow, the Empress, does not know, and wants to learn, and what the woman with a shadow, the Dyer’s Wife, knows all too well, and is ready to give away. When the crystal Empress comes to know firsthand the hu- man condition, and to respect it, when in the last act she cries, “Ich will nicht!” (“I will not”—I will not take the shadow from that other woman if it means the loss of her humanity), then Keikobad, like all father-gods who will their children into hu- man flesh, takes pity on her. He sends her the shadow she has earned by her selflessness. In a shaft of light it floods across the stage to touch the crystal Empress, a symbol not just of the children she will have but of her awareness of pain, guilt, death, and love—all of the things in human nature she wanted to understand, all the things the shadow means. Her Emperor, saved by her selflessness, sings, “When the crystal heart shat- ters in a cry, the unborn come hurrying, shining like stars”—Die Frau ohne Schatten + 225 and we hear the voices of the children he and his wife will have. The colorer and his wife too are united by an act of love. Her shadow, symbol of her humanity and of the children she now will willingly bear, becomes a golden arc spanning the distance between them. The final meaning of this mythic op- era is stated as early as the closing measures of the first act, when three night watchmen send a song across a slumbering earth: “You husbands and wives, who lie in each other’s loving arms, you are the bridge across the chasm, whereby the dead can live again. Blessed be your work of love.” I’ve spoken here as if it were Keikobad alone who was prov- identially arranging for the two couples to realize this. But in Hofmannsthal’s novella it gradually becomes clear that the un- born children who live with him are a force in the drama too, at its heart, giving it meaning. In the novella the Emperor is even allowed to speak with his unborn children, three boys and a girl. By the time Die Frau ohne Schatten reached the stage, in 1919, it had become a poem of hope after a whole genera- tion of young men had been lost, on both sides, in the Great War—a war in which Hofmannsthal was still young enough to be called up for military service, if not quite to the battle- field. In 1919, the hope of Europe and of the world lay in the children through whom those young dead would live again, to build the peace. There are some who say that this symbolic opera can have no meaning today, in a world dangerously overpopulated. But Die Frau is not concerned with mere propagation. Its meaning is that any hope for the future rests in our children learning from us what it is to be human, and how to love one another. Hofmannsthal was, as Patrick J. Smith says in The Tenth Muse, “the greatest librettist of love: love as understood in its widest sense as a blend of compassion, friendship, and understand-226 + Strauss ing ... expressed at its most perfect in the marriage union between mature individuals and in the consequent creation of a family,” love “with its roots . . . in the ethic of Die Zauber- fléte.” So, Mr. Smith notes, in Hofmannsthal’s other librettos, Chrysothemis sings of the blessings of marriage and children, and the Marschallin regretfully accepts the sadness of love out- side marriage, and Arabella tells her sister, “You have taught me a great lesson. That we shouldn’t keep anything back, but keep giving and loving always.” Have we time, then, for one last enigmatic symbol? The falcon. At the end of Hofmannsthal’s novella (required reading for a full understanding of this remarkable opera), the Dyer and his wife return to earth in a boat illuminated with all the colors of creation, and the falcon reappears to circle benignly over the Emperor and his Empress. The second or the third time you make your way through the opera, see if you agree with me that the compassionate, wounded, weeping falcon just might be, in metamorphosis, that highest of all the figures in this opera’s vast mythology: Keikobad himself, leading his subjects onward to meet their destinies, Keikobad, not, as we might at first have thought, a tyrant fearful in his omnipotence but, rather, a loving father stricken with sorrow for us in the world below, weeping for us who have wounded him and must suffer so in order to find what true happiness is.