Metropolitan Opera Archives

Die Frau ohne Schatten received five performances this season.
At the time of her debut, Batyah Godfrey Ben-David was billed as Batyah Godfrey; the name was changed in 1985.

Review 1:

Review of Douglas Watt in the Daily News

'Die Frau' Returns to the Met

"Die Frau ohne Schatten" returned last night to lend some special distinction to the Met season. And it is to be hoped that this curious and fanciful product of the mature imaginations of Richard Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal will never be too long away from the house. A strange masterwork and one enormously difficult to stage, it was heard here for the first time two seasons back but was omitted last season.

Troupe Intact

This is, with one or two minor exceptions, the same company heard earlier. Karl Boehm is again in the pit to conduct a luminous reading of the score, and the principals, excellent all, are James King and Leonie Rysanek as the Emperor and Empress, Irene Dalis as the Nurse, and Walter Berry and Christa Ludwig as the dyer, Barak, and his wife. The performance left little to be desired, and Robert O'Hearn's magical and sumptuous sets and costumes once more delighted the eye.

A Complex Piece

But "Die Frau" is, for all its beauties, so complex a work, so full of symbolism and plain mumbo-jumbo, that one doubts it will ever gain a permanent place in the repertory. The authors considered it their major achievement together (this from the writers of "Salome," "Elektra," "Rosenkavalier," and "Ariadne") and it is not hard to understand why. Yet to one listener it represents, in many respects, the Germanic aesthetic, with its often odd mixture of naiveté and solemnity, carried to extremes. And worse, so befuddled that the music too often has trouble making dramatic points. Still and all, that music is many times breathtaking all by itself, and "Die Frau" belongs with us as long as we care to study its complexities.

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