Met Casts a Lavish, Long Shadow

NEW YORK--Three months after it was attacked, New York appears on the surface pretty much back to normal. But there are signs that it isn’t, and one indication of that was the audience at the Metropolitan Opera on Thursday night.

On stage, the company unveiled an ambitious new production of Richard Strauss’ most lavish opera, “Die Frau ohne Schatten” (The Woman Without a Shadow). A world of its own, this is the kind of entertainment in which you can lose yourself for the nearly five hours it keeps you in the building. Written during the first World War, the music is a last extravagant blast of uninhibited Romanticism, bounteous in its opportunities for ecstatic singing. The batty, convoluted plot in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto should keep even the most metaphysical minds thoroughly occupied; if not, there is always a field day’s worth of Freudian symbolism to ponder.

The Met added its own attractions. Powerful voices were plentiful, including one of the company’s favorite dramatic sopranos, Deborah Voigt, in the title role. A controversial and colorful conductor, Christian Thielemann, was in the pit. The production, set and costume designs were all by Herbert Wernicke, a German director with a reputation for grandeur, who was new to the house. There was also the rarity of the opera itself.

This is but the second production of “Die Frau” in the Met’s history. Yet the company sold only slightly more than half the seats for opening night. Even after the standees had scurried into empty seats, there were enough vacant spaces everywhere to have made the coat check a waste of money.

The are probably many causes for this. The company depends on tourists, especially from foreign countries, and tourism has not fully come back. Ticket prices are rising precipitously. Not that long ago, good orchestra seats nudged the $200 barrier, and already $300 is in sight. Met audiences, never known for their sense of adventure, still may find “Die Frau,” 80 years after its premiere, a bit exotic. And it may be that traumatized New Yorkers are simply not in the mood for grandiose spectacle.

Wernicke does not help that mood with his icily industrial production. The story in “Die Frau,” which Strauss and Hofmannsthal envisioned as a sort of “Magic Flute” on steroids, contends with the interaction of three realms--the pure spirit world, an in-between world and then the lowly Earth with its grubby humans--and two couples whose love needs mystical purification.

Wernicke gives the higher beings dazzlingly impersonal vast empty mirrored spaces, harshly lighted. Humans squat in a decrepit commercial loft. As scenes change back and forth, mirrors and broken windows monotonously rise and fall on the slow Met elevator.

The upper world is the Emperor’s land. He hunts by day and makes love by night. The Empress is a spirit being, who after a year of passionate nights in the Emperor’s bed must attain a shadow to remain with him. Without one, she will cause him to turn to stone. Accompanied by her evil Nurse, she goes shopping for one among the humans. A Dyer’s Wife seems a likely prospect. If the wife sells, she gets wealth untold and release from a weary life. But without a shadow she cannot have children, and the unborn have voices in this opera. A cosmic struggle ensues.

For all the struggle on the Met stage, this cold, massive set and dull direction suggest more a sense of stasis. Barak, the Dyer, wonderfully sung by Wolfgang Brendel, and his conflicted wife, given a vividly nuanced interpretation by Gabriele Schnaut, bring a certain vitality when they can be located among all the garbage in their loft.

Even before turned to stone, Thomas Moser is an inert Emperor, foppishly dressed and hounded by an irritating falcon, a small dancer in glowing red feathers who flops around the stage.

Voigt makes a magnificent sound. Although the Empress and the Dyer’s Wife are the two characters who undergo spiritual change in the opera, Voigt is a calm presence next to Schnaut’s more antic one. The final transformation of both at the end, however, is gloriously realized. With the Nurse (more pedant than meany as sung by Reinhild Runkel) banished, the theater is illuminated by ranks of bare lights lowered from the stage, and the two couples stand at the lip, face the audience and pour forth with rapt ardor.

The pouring forth was ideally underscored by the fabled Met orchestra. If Thielemann’s conducting proved less effusive than it sometimes is, he erred at all times in the favor of supporting singers and keeping the performance together, his command ever impressive. This is an interpretation that could deepen as the run continues. But as is the case at the Met more often than it should be, the best way to appreciate the performance may well be through the national radio broadcast on Jan. 5.

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“Die Frau ohne Schatten,” Metropolitan Opera, New York, through Jan. 17. (212) 362-6000.