Metropolitan Opera Archives

Die Frau ohne Schatten received five performances this season.

FUNDING:
Revival of Die Frau ohne Schatten is dedicated to the memory of Karl Böhm

Review 1:

Review of Peter G. Davis in New York Magazine

THAT OLD MET MAGIC

"...Most people came to cheer the return of Nilsson in Die Frau ohne Schatten; in Eva Marton they found a new star..."

"At last the Met has managed to stir up a little excitement!" an elderly lady exclaimed-nay, shouted-above the din, as the curtain fell on the Metropolitan Opera's first "Die Frau ohne Schatten" of the season. Originally planned as a showcase for Birgit Nilsson, the evening turned into something better-a great night at the opera.

First of all, there was the potent attraction of the opera itself. Lofty in tone and spectacular in its scenic and vocal requirements, the Strauss-von Hofmannsthal work is inexhaustibly inventive, colorful, and moving, a festival event whenever it is staged, no matter what the quality of the performance. The Met's production, one of the company's glories over the past fifteen years, avoids italicizing the opera's already heavy symbolic content, instead conjuring up an exotic fairy-tale atmosphere.

Robert O'Hearn's glistening sets seem to take on a life all their own as they appear from above and below, recede, move forward, dissipate into the air only to reassemble again, always in a way that enhances, complements, and clarifies the involved plot. The Emperor and Empress move through a spirit world of dazzling beauty, a series of fantastic stage pictures whose cool, blue-greet oceanographic decor contrasts startlingly with the sun-baked reality of the drab hut inhabited by their earthly counterparts, the dyer Barak and his wife. Nathaniel Merrill directs the singers through these complex designs sensibly and smoothly, stressing human conflicts but never obscuring the opera's otherworldly vision or impeding its dramatic flow. With a work of such baroque complexity, no production will be perfect in every particular, but this one aims high and achieves much.

Most people came to cheer Birgit Nilsson as the Dyer's Wife, a role she had never before sung at the Met. Once regarded merely as a phenomenon of nature, Nilsson at 63 is now held in awe as a geriatric miracle. Most singers her age prolong their careers by making discreet adjustments in repertory to accommodate declining vocal resources. Not Nilsson. The Dyer's Wife is a killing assignment that keeps a soprano trumpeting at the top of her lungs for most of the evening.

Yes, there were rocky moments. Passages at peak volume in the upper register are no longer effortlessly sustained, and under stress the tone is apt to degenerate into a piercing siren-wail. No matter, Nilsson still gets over the major hurdles honorably, and for most of the time she is recognizably the same brilliantly clarion singer she has always been-honest, unstinting, and direct, with an astonishingly durable vocal musculature that one day must surely be left to science. True, there were few shades of detail in either her singing or her acting-interpretive niceties have never been a facet of this artist's healthy, no-nonsense temperament and head-on approach. The majority of Nilsson's admirers over the years have gladly done without the subtleties and simply basked in the sound of her voice, understandably so in these lean times.

The surprise of the evening was Eva Marton as the Empress. Her stratospheric role has been the property of the indestructible Leonie Rysanek for the past quarter century, but Marton gave no one cause to regret the substitution. In contrast to the Dyer's Wife, the dignified Empress expresses her agonizing dilemma in purely vocal terms, a tortured lyricism at a pitch of fevered intensity. It is essentially a stand-and-deliver role, and while Marton's measured singing may have seemed a trifle placid compared to Rysanek's whiplash phrasing, the Hungarian soprano unflinchingly rose to every challenge, often with thrilling results. She hurled forth one ravishingly beautiful note after another with incomparable power, security, and total sheen, capping it all with a stunning high D-flat in her dream sequence. At the end, Nilsson received the respect due an old favorite, but Marton was greeted with the tumultuous approval of an audience that had unexpectedly discovered a star.

As the malevolent Nurse, Mignon Dunn cut an unusually giddy figure, but she handily matched Nilsson and Marton when it came to sheer volume. Franz Ferdinand Nentwig as Barak and Gerd Brenneis as the Emperor tended to pale alongside this high-powered trio, although both gave highly creditable and sympathetic performances. After his deadly conducting of the two Ring operas earlier this season, Erich Leinsdorf partially redeemed himself with a crystalline presentation of Strauss's luxuriant score.

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