Katherine Syer, ‘Die Frau ohne Schatten’: A Wagnerian Succession Story

When Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s opera Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow) reached the stage for the first time, in October 1919 in Vienna, the locally published journal Moderne Welt introduced the opera to its readers through two short articles: a synopsis of the story written by Hofmannsthal, and the summary of an interview with the composer at Strauss’s villa in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 90 km south of Munich. As noted in the second article, Strauss had completed the score in the summer of 1917, but delayed its performance ‘because the mood of the war did not seem a favourable one for confronting the public with a large-scale [große] work’.