San Francisco's Pennant

"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 the last 40 years.

Poet von Hofmannsthal's libretto, embroidered with the common myths of half a dozen cultures, concerns a beautiful empress who is unable to cast a shadow and hence to bear children. In search of a shadow, she persuades a dyer's wife to surrender her own, and thus renounce her power to bear children, for luxuries and an imaginary romance. In a mirage of symbolism about human and superhuman love, selfish and selfless love, the dyer's wife eventually realizes that she loves her husband, and the empress sees that she herself cannot buy love in exchange for another's misery. Moving between the human and the spirit world, the opera blazes with magic effects: a sword swinging from nowhere, fish conjured from the air into a frying pan, a chorus of "unborn children."

To bring Strauss's vision to the theater, opera designers decked the cast in blazing costumes, filled the stage with striking Daliesque sets. Standouts of a superb cast were California-born Mezzo-Soprano Irene Dalis as a malevolent nurse and German Soprano Marianne Schech as the dyer's wife. Conductor Leopold Ludwig whipped his orchestra through the complex, luxuriant score with a fine sense of surging lyricism, a deft feel for the opera's shadow-flittery moods. "No matter what may happen to the Giants," glowed the Chronicle's Alfred Frankenstein, "San Francisco won the pennant Friday night."

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