A Resonant Centenary for Strauss at the Vienna State Opera
In Die Frau ohne Schatten, the conductor Thielemann finds a work fundamentally consonant with his conservative values—both in the late Romantic tonalities of Strauss’s music and in librettist Hofmannsthal’s sacral vision of marriage and child-rearing as the answer for social ills. One of the opera’s most haunting moments, at the conclusion of the first act, is when a trio of nightwatchmen is heard enjoining in ceremonious unison husbands and wives to love each other, entrusting them with the seed of new life. Читать дальше...