The following is an extract from Robin Holloway's essay on Die Frau ohne Schatten.

Die Frau ohne Schatten all too obviously sets out to take the heights and depths by storm. But when musical inspiration manifestly fails to equate with sublime aspiration the result is cold, even when executed with flawless technique, boundless energy and millions of notes. This aesthetic area where will is required to pass for deed, after its relatively ingenuous beginnings in Liszt and Berlioz, becomes disingenuous where the last romantics cross with the early moderns. Especially with Strauss and Mahler, the language is mined with parody, irony, deliberate banality; alienation and dislocation lie just round the next bend. But the problem is larger, located in the overlifesized ambitions of the entire post-Wagnerian generation except for Debussy and Fauré. One judges such high-flying curate’s-eggs-of-genius as Mahler 8, Delius’s Mass of Life, Scriabin’s Prometheus, and indeed Die Frau, by the fairest and most precise criterion possible—work by the same artists that is perfectly achieved, e.g. Mahler 4, Sea Drift, Le poème d’extase, Salome. There is vitality enough in Die Frau to ensure that it will always be revived. Not the vitality of Grieg’s Piano Concerto or Rhapsody in Blue (to name but two)—bad pieces, crammed with howlers, which nevertheless come up forever unquenched because of their naïve generosity. Strauss’s own Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel (though far from naïve) are of this order; but his operatic blockbuster is for the most part a mere discharge of duty, albeit with staggering energy and expertise. In Auden’s words (from another part of the famous letter to Britten, not quite so hackneyed as the rest) it is a ‘large unfeeling corpse’ whose infallible technique emanates from the bourgeois side of an artist’s make-up—the part subject to the pull of Convention and Order in its deadening sense.

Strauss himself said as much, with characteristic directness, in his equally-quoted letter wearying of the task, longing for characters of flesh and blood like Ochs and the Marschallin, longing to be released back into the world of rush and send-up he’s so happily stumbled into, interrupting his labours to write the new prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos. ‘I’m toiling really hard, sifting and sifting—my heart’s only half in it, and once the head has to do the major part of the work you get a breath of academic chill (what my wife calls “note-spinning”) which no bellows can ever kindle into a real fire’ (to Hofmannsthal, 28 July 1916). Perhaps he was wrong, as Tchaikovsky was so often about some of his very best works. But Strauss isn’t the type to be lacerated by self-destructive diffidence. He speaks here as confidently and knowledgeably as when he’s proud of his efforts.

I think he was right. So why do so many Strauss-lovers fall for the opera’s credentials rather than exactly appreciating its actualities? It is a perfect example of the wishful thinking that arises when a work’s subject-matter is so all-significant as to transcend manifest deficiencies in its realisation. If Strauss’s own claim that he responded best to parody and sentimentality is true, so be it. He should be allowed to work within this range and be his best. Die Frau is a mausoleum of high intentions, in which its apologists find what they need rather than what it holds.

As always, the chief culprit is Hofmannsthal. An inspired poetic vision, clothed in strong, lucent language, is then forced with difficulty into plot and people that cannot adequately carry it. The mythology is nouveau pauvre—fabricated and lacking resonance: this Keikobad, this Upper and Lower World, what are they to us? Unlike the gods, demons, superhumans and cosmology of The Ring, these inventions have no substance. The symbolism, so eloquent in the poet’s account of his story, doesn’t speak in the story itself; and wholly lacking is the experienced manipulation of the state that can carry an audience willingly through a maze in spite of obscurities and incredibilities, as evinced by Zauberflöte supremely, and many a successful opera before and since. The ‘selling-point’ is a sublime allegory of human fertility set to Strauss’s greatest score. The actuality is a pretentious and overwrought mishmash by a composer of genius who is self-confessedly tired and bored.

If he’d not said so we would know it from the music anyway. Exhaustion and boredom are shown above all in the flogging-to-death of the two poor, short, unpregnant main themes, and then in the endless stretches of what Pauline ‘very rightly’ called note-spinning (it would be apt and piquant if this familiar phrase originated with her!). There is a lack of fresh ideas, alongside heavy dependence upon things done with greater zest in earlier pieces—e.g. the long cello solo preceding then continued within the Emperor’s big number in Act II (a diluted replay from Don Quixote) and the orchestral interludes where the vast forces seem to vomit themselves up (so much more thrilling in Salome and Elektra). The use of extreme intervals, in Act III especially, can epitomise the discrepancy between will and deed. They are literally an attempt to soar out of the habitual, but they don’t sear and hurt like comparable places in Bruckner 9, Kundry’s music and late Mahler (to say nothing of early Schoenberg) because the harmony is basically bland. Contrariwise, the mixture of blandness and surprise so magical in the late Strauss is also missing as yet.

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