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Opera

The Royal Opera House's Die Frau ohne Schatten – a dream solution to Strauss’s problem opera?

Conductor and cast deliver near ideal performances but the staging needed more focus

22 March 2014

9:00 AM

22 March 2014

9:00 AM

Die Frau ohne Schatten

Royal Opera House, in rep until 2 April

If ever an opera was weighed down by its creators’ joint ambition, it is Die Frau ohne Schatten. Richard Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal quickly began to imagine their third true collaboration, produced during the 1910s but not premièred until 1919, as their masterpiece. But it turned into a complex and unwieldy embarrassment of riches, albeit a glorious one.

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