Die Frau ohne Schatten at Staatsoper Berlin
The production at Staatsoper Berlin is a Lars von Trier-esque fever dream fairytale: Think hyper realistic animal masks, dream-like dance sequences, emotional turmoil, haunted protagonists, and surreal asleep-or-awake ambivalence.
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🎭 Die Frau ohne Schatten
🎶 Richard Strauss
🏛️ Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin
🗓️ 03.11.2024
Sometimes, geopolitical developments can be so mentally occupying that it takes a few days to find a moment for this—realistically, in the grand scheme of things inconsequential—opera introspection. And yet DIE FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN offers just the right distraction from reality by making us question the very fabric of it within this opera.
The production at Staatsoper Berlin is a Lars von Trier-esque fever dream fairytale: Think hyper realistic animal masks, dream-like dance sequences, emotional turmoil, haunted protagonists, and surreal asleep-or-awake ambivalence, which more than once made me think of the night-time slo-mo spooky scenes in some of von Trier‘s films (Melancholia!).
This production offers a captivating scenery giving otherworldly glimpses into a realm beyond the stage with monumental rotating and moving walls, and eerie but cute animal head masks that underline the story’s surrealism. The performance was powered by SPECTACULARLY powerful vocals, grounding the viewer in the plot which in and of itself is incredibly complex and multilayered. The result is a story that is not always possible to follow without contextual knowledge of the mystical world built by Strauss and von Hofmannsthal.
At its core, DIE FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN tells a story about two women grappling with (in)fertility and motherhood, represented by the titular shadow. This theme of fertility becomes intertwined deeply as part of the human condition, where its absence suggests severe consequences for the women of the mystical fairytale world in which the opera is set: the lack of a shadow diminishes a woman‘s humanity.
Moral dilemmas for both women create the main conflicts of the plot. The Empress, in her attempt to gain the shadow from another woman (a woman far below her social standing, at that), must decide between the survival of her cursed husband and the happiness of another couple—one can only come at the cost of the other. The other woman (referred only as “the dyer’s wife”, to give an idea about her level of self-determination) battles with her position in a seemingly unhappy marriage in which she is more servant than equal partner (1919 calling). Initially delighted to pass on her “shadow”, she ultimately embraces the idea of motherhood after confronted with the potential loss of her husband.
In a time of political retrenchment, where reproductive rights for women are back on the line, I find the plight of the dyer’s wife particularly tragic: initially discovering and enjoying her agency throughout the plot, she ultimately falls back on line into her given societal role of dutiful wife and expecting mother.
Above these moral conflicts, the production adds a Russian doll-like theme of dream vs. reality, where seemingly both characters and audience navigate multiple levels of storytelling, never quite sure what is real and what is imagined. At the end, it is implied that after all the mysticism and nightmarish dreaminess, the Empress awakes from restful slumber, having only dreamt the entire plot.
Turning back to my own reality, I can‘t help but wonder when I will be woken from this fever dream we are living through.
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