Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Shadow of the Empress: Fairy-Tale Opera and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy , by Larry Wolff

2024; University of California Press; Volume: 77; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/jams.2024.77.1.244

1547-3848

Charles Youmans,

Twenty-four years have passed since Alex Ross (or his editors at the New Yorker) pronounced Richard Strauss "the last emperor" and, indeed, "composer of the century."1 "What century?" asked a cheeky colleague, in a quip that boomeranged when two possibilities became three. Nowadays, Der Rosenkavalier (premiered in 1911) looks as prescient as Pulcinella—not a retreat from modernism, following the notorious Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909), but an alternate modernism, with, as it turns out, a longer shelf life. Strauss's lasting contribution, as Bryan Gilliam explained in the same year as Ross's essay, was to replace the "old-fashioned, decadent, fin-de-siècle Salome" with proto-postmodern eclecticism; tonality, reinventing itself as a forward-looking alternative to fetishized dissonance, grounded a new musical aesthetic that "lacks stylistic uniformity, . . . reflects a modernist preoccupation with the dilemma of history, [and] foreshadows the dissolution of the ideology of style in the late twentieth century."2 In 2024, these insights have been validated: Strauss was a beginning as much as an end.Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919) would be the third opera in Strauss's tonal/eclectic modernist vein, after Rosenkavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos (1912, rev. 1916). It has also been the least studied, with Larry Wolff now providing the first scholarly monograph devoted to this work alone (aside from a few thematic guides and a 1978 dissertation). Hofmannsthal and Strauss saw it as the most ambitious of their collaborations, destined to overshadow the "Komödie für Musik" Rosenkavalier and the experimental Ariadne as an event of epoch-making significance. Here, they finally took dead aim at a shared critical target. Hofmannsthal's 1902 Sprachkrise, elaborated in "A Letter [of Lord Chandos]," marked the obsolescence of a Romantic epistemological framework likewise challenged by Strauss in a series of tone poems that, whatever else they accomplished, obliterated the musical idealism stretching from E. T. A. Hoffmann through Schopenhauer to Wagner. Die Frau ohne Schatten's fairy-tale character is thus a form of taxidermy—beautiful but dead, dead but beautiful—situating the opera, as Wolff demonstrates, among the "shifting and contested models of twentieth-century modernism" (p. 60).A self-styled "pandemic book" (p. xi), The Shadow of the Empress moves at the relaxed pace of professorial life in 2020, when trepidation and Zoom-overload were offset in the lives of tenured faculty by the undeniable pleasures of compulsory isolation. Inefficiencies like accidental repetitiveness abound, but they feel curiously cozy when we remember how plentiful time was pre-vaccine; it is somehow a pleasant diversion to hear cyclically that Strauss and Hofmannsthal were never geduzt (pp. 44, 57, 301), or that Pauline Strauss was a model for the Dyer's wife (pp. 32, 65, 110), or that poetry was not a profession represented among Habsburg soldiers (pp. 148, 149). Assertive topic sentences, where authors throw down the gauntlet for themselves, are scarce in these 365 pages, replaced by statements of absorbing fact. But the leisurely style is Viennese through and through, a Sunday stroll through the Prater, and it reminds us that the finest historical writing on Vienna (in English) appears in trade(-ish) books by unforgettable writers who specialize in artfully arranging information and allowing it to speak for itself.One of the book's most welcome contributions is to take us patiently, sensitively, and voluminously through the collaborators' correspondence during the six-year gestation of their misunderstood magnum opus. It has never been done in print with this degree of scrutiny, and it deserved doing. Beyond describing the path from "masterpiece" to "Schmerzenskind" (Strauss's words, pp. 122, 166), and the vicissitudes and "inevitable frictions" of the problematic reception (Hofmannsthal, p. 243), Wolff recounts, exchange by exchange, the painstaking negotiation of dramatic nuances. In one example among dozens, he notes Strauss's worry that the Empress had a stronger bond with Barak than with the Emperor, then tracks, in the correspondence and the score, an attempted remediation in the Emperor's tonality (E-flat major), to which Hofmannsthal responded skeptically as to both the extension of the Empress's music and the use of the heroic key. "Think about our many conversations," Hofmannsthal wrote (p. 174). Wolff answers the call: the pair debate what happens to the shadow if one woman renounces it and the other will not take it; Strauss patiently educates the librettist on likely audience reactions—for example, to the frying and eating of fish who sing with children's voices; Hofmannsthal pleads for "light, flowing, ethereal" music over ponderous gloom (p. 80); and so on. Why has no musicologist taken this trouble? In part, it will be the hasty assumption that readers can do it for themselves by paging through the Briefwechsel, but perhaps also an awareness that such a project would involve forgoing an ostentatious critical-theoretical apparatus.Notwithstanding his disciplinary home (history), Wolff writes about the music itself, well and at length. His language of musical exegesis is not far from that of the fin-de-siècle feuilleton, a style sorely missed in current journalism and scholarship both. Indeed, the prose brims with subtle and eminently audible commentary on orchestration, melodic contour, dynamic and rhythmic channeling of musical energy, and the mysterious symbolic power (all-important for Strauss) of harmony, key, and even specific pitches:This passage could come from the pen of Julius Korngold, David Josef Bach, Heinrich Kralik, Ludwig Karpath, or any number of other skillful Viennese listeners circa 1900 who earned their living by translating aural experiences into words. We forget that evocative, eloquent musical explication (Erläuterung) was as integral to the feuilleton as saucy complaints and personality for its own sake. Wolff remembers, and his analysis of the reception highlights a tone deployed brilliantly throughout the book. Among these kindred spirits Wolff distinguishes himself by his feel for Straussian idiosyncrasies, especially the composer's tonal-associative predilections (for example, the significance of F-sharp for the Empress, right from her entrance), a crucial feature of his musico-dramatic technique, however off-putting it may be to Schenker-inclined, anglophone ears.More subtly, Wolff hints at a modernism in FroSch (Strauss's playful pun) based on aesthetically consequential engagement with the past—a counterpoint to Wozzeck (1925), the pair representing "completely different postwar visions of operatic modernism" (p. 149). Here, Wolff reveals an important set of dots, not always connected: Strauss, a "neo-Romantic modernist" (p. 307) like Erich Korngold, thematized his distance from the material he appropriated, in tactics familiar from earlier works but now with a heightened (neoclassical?) self-awareness: a stylized Mozartian atmosphere; ironic donning of the "Wagnerian musical armor" (p. 174); a pose as "the Offenbach of the twentieth century" (p. 169); provocative autobiography as a smokescreen (Pauline/the Dyer's wife). Hofmannsthal, too, is shown in a newly critical relationship with his prior artistic identity, in the transformation of the Empress. The opera thus establishes the character of the present by dramatizing anachronism, rebranding the bygone as a fairy tale.As the subtitle indicates, the book traces parallel stories, the second headed by Zita, the last empress of Austria and queen of Hungary (1892–1989). She and Emperor Karl (1887–1922) receive their own thick narrative, with Wolff arguing for the opera as "an inner psychological premonition of the crisis that was about to erupt in world affairs" (p. 123). I confess skepticism that the opera brings us much closer to the Habsburg couple; the perforations between chronicles remain apparent despite a lively defense of the conceit, no correlation being either too conspicuous or too fanciful to note: a statue of Franz Joseph is an Emperor turned to stone; in wartime and in FroSch, spouses miss one another and children are cherished; hunger pervades Barak's world and WWI Vienna; Zita's long exile converts her royal status to a fairy tale. Yet this pairing does much to help us understand the opera, with the empathetic rehearsal of Zita's epic saga eliciting and facilitating an eloquent, overdue, long-form appraisal of Strauss and Hofmannsthal's crowning achievement.