"I realized," said Richard Strauss of the Meisterwerk of his middle age, "that the opera would never have much success." He was speaking of Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow), the huge complex of mythology and symbolism that he constructed with Librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal during World War I. Strauss guessed correctly: since its premiere in Vienna in 1919, the work has rarely been staged in Europe and never in the U.S. Last week Die Frau finally appeared on a U.S. stage in a San Francisco Opera production that made cheering audiences wonder where she had been for...
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