Spectacular, if pretentious Frau

The Berliner Philharmoniker dazzle under Petrenko

The “doll factory” in Paul Zoller’s set for Lydia Steier’s staging with the Girl (Vivien Hartert) on the bed. Picture by Sigmund Rittershaus

Time was when Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Shadowless Woman) was regarded as their most challenging opera, a piece so demanding of its executants, and baffling in its textual complexity, that few opera houses – and then only the most generously endowed – could attempt it.

Today, that has changed. Even medium-scaled Stadttheater (municipal theatres) regard it as an operatic “Everest” to be scaled because it is there. Nevertheless, the most rewarding way to encounter the work has always been — and still is — when it is performed under festival conditions by a top-flight cast and conductor.

At this year’s Baden-Baden Easter Festival, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra tackled the work for the first time in its history under the baton of its music director, Kirill Petrenko, though he is something of a Frau veteran, having conducted it at Munich’s Bavarian State Opera a decade ago.

Strauss’s opera fell out of the repertoire of the Berlin Philharmonic’s famed “conductor for life”, Herbert von Karajan, after his brief and turbulent period (1957 – 1964) as artistic director of the Vienna State Opera. His much-criticised edition, re-ordering some scenes and severely cutting the score, was his last production in the post, and the hostile reaction to it may have contributed to his departure. Whatever the truth, he never conducted Die Frau ohne Schatten again, ceding the opera at Salzburg (where he was director of the festival) to his older colleague, Karl Böhm.