Abstract
In The Shadow of the Empress: Fairy-tale Opera and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, Larry Wolff traces the genesis and production of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ‘last Romantic’ opera (p. 161), Die Frau ohne Schatten [The Woman without a Shadow] (1917) through the twentieth century. Wolff simultaneously maps the opera’s development onto the biography of the last Habsburg Empress, Zita of Bourbon-Parma, while interweaving his own family’s Habsburg heritage into the text to create a narrative which contextualises the fairy-tale opera within a very specific time and place. In so doing Wolff considers how the opera’s ‘meaning in performance was transformed by changing cultural and political contexts across the twentieth century’ (p. 7).
The book takes a tripartite form, focusing on three periods in both the opera and the empress’s lives. Beginning with the pre-war era, Wolff reflects on how the idea of an opera about an empress longing for a shadow in order to become truly human, came to fruition in fin-de-siècle Austria. The second section examines the 1914–1918 period, detailing how Strauss and Hofmannsthal continued to work on the opera during the First World War, when the certainty of empires and more traditional structures of power were crumbling. This second section also includes Empress Zita’s brief period as empress from 1916 to 1918 before her husband Emperor Karl was forced to abdicate and leave Austria. The final part looks at the post-war reception of both the opera, its changing significance in a world no longer ruled by emperors and empresses, as well as the circumstances of Empress Zita’s life in exile.
Wolff’s meticulously researched book engages lucidly with Austrian cultural history of the period, entering into conversation with academics such as Carl Schorske and Michael Steinberg, in their endorsement of the significance of Hofmannsthal and his cultural legacy, particularly with regard to the Salzburg festival, for the Austrian nation. Wolff conducts incisive musical analysis of Strauss’s score, as well as textual analysis of Hofmannsthal’s libretto, while contextualising both its initial creation and its consecutive reinventions by different conductors, performers and companies through the opera’s parallels with Empress Zita’s own biography. Examples include the comparison between the fictional empress’s arrival in Act Three on a magical boat and Empress Zita’s ‘extraordinary odyssey by boat’ into exile (p. 279). Art here not only imitates, but occasionally foreshadows life in this book.
Wolff examines how the wartime period impacted upon Hofmannsthal and Strauss as they created Die Frau ohne Schatten and how the opera was originally conceived for an alternative future, an Austria which had won the First World War. Instead, by the time of its premiere in 1919, the opera had become a ‘problem child’ (p. 298) for its creators, struggling to resonate with audiences for whom the time of fairy-tale emperors and empresses had so recently and so abruptly ended. The opera’s waxing and waning in terms of popularity throughout the twentieth century, as well as the changing opinions of Empress Zita and her plans to reinstate her son Otto to the throne, nevertheless, demonstrate how an appetite for nostalgia has reemerged and how the opera’s reception over the previous century has been shaped by wider cultural factors.
Due to Wolff’s position as both a prominent Habsburg historian and a ‘member of the historical commission for Zita’s beatification’ (p. 337), his focus on Empress Zita can be appreciated. The parallels between the play’s unnamed empress and the historical figure of Zita, do occasionally, however, feel somewhat tenuous. Other Habsburg empresses such as Empress Elisabeth (1837–1898, more commonly known as Sissi) appear a more fitting inspiration for Hofmannsthal and Strauss than Empress Zita, who was not in fact empress at the time of the opera’s creation. Even the cover illustration of the set-designer Alfred Roller’s 1919 sketch for the opera, featuring the character of the empress in a state of undress with long flowing dark hair, bears more of a resemblance to Empress Elisabeth than the later Habsburg empress, a fact Wolff himself acknowledges within the book (p. 93). Given that Wolff argues that the fictional emperor in the opera is based on Emperor Franz Joseph, Elisabeth’s husband (p. 80), the opinion that the more famous Austrian emperor’s wife would form the inspiration for the fictionalised empress could perhaps be expected. Even the significant metaphor of the bird speaking to the empress in the opera conjures up images of Empress Elisabeth, who famously describes herself as ‘eine Möwe’ (a seagull) in her own poetry. It is, however, Empress Zita, who is compared with the operatic empress searching for her shadow and pursuing her humanity.
In spite of this, Wolff is successful in situating this work within a uniquely Austrian tradition. His frequent references to other notable and prominent Austrians, such as Stefan Zweig (p. 17), Sigmund Freud (p. 353) and Gustav Klimt (p. 148) are only eclipsed by insights into the author’s own Austrian family members, such as his grandmother Hencze ‘Lucy’ Erber who he proudly describes as ‘born a subject of Franz Joseph’ (p. 237). This intertwining of the myth and the personal allow this text to participate in Claudio Magris’ conception of the ‘Habsburg Myth’. The significance of the Habsburg past and one’s personal connection to an idealised golden age, in which empresses were more than simply the stuff of fairy tales, still seemingly possesses great power within the Austrian context.