Die Frau ohne Schatten, ROH, review

Pity any poor director, confronted with the allegorical convolutions of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, an opera which meanders along a fault-line between Goethe’s Faust and Barrie’s Peter Pan as it tells of a supernatural Empress, unfulfilled by marriage to a mortal Emperor, who attempts to buy a shadow from a working-class woman and thereby secure her fertility.

The production I saw most recently – Christof Loy’s in Salzburg – bypassed the logistic problems by setting the staging in a Fifties recording studio, where two neurotic divas were grappling with the leading roles. For a previous version at Covent Garden, David Hockney provided tableaux of enchanting chinoiserie, but the characters made no impact and the plot never registered.

Claus Guth has more success here, cutting a swathe through the psychological undergrowth and ignoring incidental flora and fauna. He frames the action by resorting to that trope familiar to audiences of Dallas – “it’s all a dream”, dreamt by a sexually frustrated young wife in a wood-lined room, which revolves at the rear to accommodate changes of scene. The baffled can find the remaining imagery meticulously decoded in the programme.

Most of the fancier stage effects (flying fishes, collapsing houses, magic fountains) are left to the mind’s eye, and the staging offers a visually monochrome view of what was conceived as a fabulous spectacle. A stronger contrast between the human and superhuman worlds is needed, but at least Guth keeps a broad narrative coherence.

The opera’s pretentious grandeur is more vividly felt in the pit, where the orchestra and Semyon Bychkov (front-runner to succeed Antonio Pappano as the Royal Opera’s top banana) weave a sumptuous tapestry from Strauss’s colourful threads. Sometimes shimmeringly exquisite, sometimes bombastically thunderous, always chromatically restless, this is a profoundly decadent score: when played with this level of intensity, it’s a mesmerising one too.

Strauss wrote for an age in which big voices were in abundance: that is no longer the case, and Covent Garden is to be heartily congratulated on assembling a cast which can sing all the notes both loudly and accurately: Elena Pankratova (Dyer’s Wife), Emily Magee (Empress), Johan Botha (Emperor), Michaela Schuster (Nurse) and Johan Reuter (Barak) give their all to the vocal assault course. Full marks to David Butt Phillip and Ashley Holland in minor roles too. The sum of it is a very exciting if exhausting evening.

Until April 2. Tickets: 0207 845 9300; (www.roh.org.uk)

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