Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The dyer and his wife run a laundry; the red falcon is a stuffed toy which the Empress orders on Amazon. For his new production at Berlin’s Deutsche Oper, director Tobias Kratzer has transformed Richard Strauss’s monumental opera Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow) from a ponderous fairytale into a modern-day relationship drama. This both concludes and downgrades his Strauss cycle for the house.It is hard to find the right language today for this sprawling, problematic opera. When Hugo von Hofmannsthal penned his libretto back in 1917, his central construct — that women must bear children — had some context. By the time the opera was premiered two years later, the first world war had robbed some 15mn souls of their lives, and babies were needed. But even in 1919, women were also human beings. Today, stagings struggle to frame the story of an empress who casts no shadow (and is thus barren) and a dyer’s wife willing to sell hers (because she does not want to bear her working-class husband’s offspring). Claus Guth’s 2017 staging for Berlin’s Staatsoper found an appealing psychedelic visual language for the piece; Lydia Steier’s 2023 version for the Berliner Philharmoniker in Baden-Baden was a gut-wrenching re-examination of the fates of unwed mothers in hidden convents. Kratzer gives us couples therapy, washing machines and surrogacy.By erasing the metaphysical layers of the tale, this new production achieves a level of grinding banality. Four and a quarter hours of tedious realism later, the dyer and his wife have seen a divorce lawyer, and the Emperor has sobered up to regret some bad behaviour. Conductor Donald Runnicles could have supplied some of the missing mysticism in the orchestra pit, but instead he delivers a by-numbers account, at times bombastic, never subtle, seldom transparent. If he has a position on the piece, or something to communicate through the music, it is not apparent. Like Kratzer, he earned a number of enthusiastic boos at the curtain calls, alongside applause.Nor can the cast save the evening. Two last-minute replacements for key roles could not have hurt the outcome significantly — Clay Hilley, stepping in for David Butt Philip, brings vocal stature and dramatic power to the role of Emperor, and Daniela Köhler (for Jane Archibald) is his convincingly impassioned Empress. Marina Prudenskaya plays the Nurse as a kind of neurotic high-society grandmother. Jordan Shanahan’s Dyer is unimposing but honey-toned, while Catherine Foster acts up a storm but sounds increasingly frayed as his wife.At a time when many of the US’s new ruling elite are entirely on Hofmannsthal’s page about women as child factories, Kratzer could have used the opportunity to take a political stance — or at least strike a blow for feminism. Instead, he loses himself in trite details, and fails to face any of the work’s big questions. The first-act chorus of unborn babies singing in a frying-pan? Here they are fish fingers, which the dyer tosses straight into the bin. And that, frankly, is where this staging belongs.★★☆☆☆To February 11, deutscheoperberlin.de
