Sunday Classics: Who besides Richard Strauss could have brought us inside the Dyer's Wife's reality?

Things go from worse to even worse: At the end of Act II, thanks to the machinations of the Empress's scheming Nurse, the gentle dyer Barak tries to kill his wife, and both are swallowed up in the earth. (Georg Solti conducts at the 1992 Salzburg Festival, with Robert Hale as Barak, Eva Marton as the Dyer's Wife, Cheryl Studer as the Empress, Marjana Lipovšek as the Nurse, and Manfred Hemm, Hans Franzen, and Wilfried Gahmlich as Barak's wretched brothers.)

by Ken

Since we're only going to be dealing with bits of Acts I and III in our glimpse of the relationship between Barak the Dyer and his wife in Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten, I wanted to give you a chance at least to glimpse what happens in between, when the gentle dyer -- under fairly considerable provocation, it should be noted -- has to be restrained from killing the wife he cherishes. I know I haven't provided either proper dramatic context or any real way of your knowing what actually is going on, and for that matter, the performance doesn't provide us with singers who can really sing this stupendously difficult music beautifully. Oh well.

At the end of the act the unhappy couple is swallowed up, and we find them at the outset of Act III in separate mysterious dungeons, well, somewhere, neither aware of the other's fate or whereabouts, and both -- fearing it's all over for them -- seeing their life together in altered perspective.

As a bonus to Friday night's Frau preview, I threw in the Symphonic Fantasy from "Die Frau ohne Schatten" that Strauss wove nearly three decades after completing the opera. Just now I'd like to call your attention to the section that begins at about 9:33 of the Mehta-Sony recording. Here it is in a performance I actually like better, somewhat crudely edited by EMI and Amazon -- yes, I shelled out the 99 cents to download this "song"):

Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Jeffrey Tate, cond. EMI, recorded early 1990s
[It pisses me off no end that Amazon and other download sources feel utterly unobliged to provide basic discographic information about the "songs" they sell you -- often including not just recording date(s) but even the actual performers]

The music the composer is "fantasizing" about here is Barak's horrified recollection of the awful deed he came so close to doing.

Act III, Barak, "Mir anvertraut, dass ich sie hege"
("Entrusted to me for me to cherish")

Entrusted to me for me to cherish,
for me to bear
with these hands,
to attend to her
and be patient with her,
for the sake of her young herart.

Barak is written for essentially the kind of bass-baritone Wagner called a Heldenbariton, or heroic baritone. In practice, the role has been taken successfully by everything from unhyphenated baritones (I'm sorry I don't have Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's 1963 Munich Barak, which I've bought it twice on LP and once on open-reel tape, on CD) to a bass with a secure upper range. We're going to hear "Mir anvertraut" sung first by a baritone, and a not-at-all-bass-ish one at that, and then by a true bass. First our baritone, Josef Metternich, already past his best (maybe from singing those Heldenbariton parts?) but still a winning Barak.

Josef Metternich (b), Barak; Bavarian State Orchestra, Rudolf Kempe, cond. Live performance, Aug. 31, 1954

The case of our bass, Ludwig Weber, is a bewilderingly complex one. I don't think I know another singer of stature who so seemingly interchangeably did wonderful and dreadful singing. His 1955 Barak seems to me to fall mostly in the wonderful category, but I also need to point out that he was 56 at the time.

Ludwig Weber, bs (Barak); Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, Nov. 9, 1955

Now we're going to hear Barak's reflection again but continue on as the Dyer's Wife, again unaware of her husband's presence, voices her thoughts.

Act III, "Mir anvertraut . . . Dir angetraut, dein zu pflegen"
("Entrusted to me . . . Wedded to you, to care for you")

[translation by G. M. Holland for Decca]

BARAK: Entrusted to me, etc.
DYER'S WIFE: Wedded to you,
to care for you,
serving, loving, to bow to you,
to see you,
to breathe, to live,
to give you, dear husband, children!
BARAK: Entrusted to me --
and she fell reeling to the ground
in mortal dread of my hand!
Woe is me!
If I might see her once again
and say to her:
Don't be afraid,
don't be afraid!

José van Dam (bs-b), Barak; Hildegard Behrens (s), Dyer's Wife; Vienna Philharmonic, Sir Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded 1989

I don't mean to beat up on poor Hildegard Behrens, who's working hard but can't overcome the fact that she really can't sing the music beautifully. I think you'll hear the difference it makes to the way we receive the character to have a Dyer's Wife who sings the music as beautifully as Christa Ludwig does here.

Walter Berry (bs-b), Barak; Christa Ludwig (ms), Dyer's Wife; Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Heinrich Hollreiser, cond. Eurodisc/BMG/Tessitura, recorded 1963-64

REMEMBER, THINGS DIDN'T WORK OUT SO
GREAT FOR OTELLO AND DESDEMONA EITHER

Since we've already invoked the tale of Otello and Desdemona, whom we encountered in last night's digression to hear what I'm claiming to be the most beautiful curtain-lowering music I know, it occurs to me that even there we're being set up to hear the catastrophe that befalls the couple we meet still rapturously in love. Let's hear how Shakespeare, librettist Arrigo Boito, and Verdi handled Otello's downfall, listening just to a pair of key moments:

* in the Act I duet, our glimpse of his underlying insecurity, as he confides to his cherished wife his fear -- and note the repetition of the word "temo ("I fear") -- never being granted another moment of such happiness

* in Act III, with Jago's scheme to persuade Otello of Desdemona's infidelity succeeding only too well, Otello stuns the Cypriot court assembled to greet the Venetian ambassador by hurliing Desdemona to the ground, raging, "To the ground, and weep!," where she recalls the very different effect her smile once had on him and launches one of the most stunning ensembles in opera (which of course we're not going to hear)

[Again, you can find an Italian-English libretto for Act I here and for Act III here.]

Act I, Otello, "Venga la morte!"
("Let death come!")

Act III, Otello, "A terra, e piangi!"
("To the ground, and weep!")

James McCracken (t), Otello; Gwyneth Jones (s), Desdemona; New Philharmonia Orchestra, Sir John Barbirolli, cond. EMI, recorded Aug.-Nov. 1968

MEANWHILE BACK IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC . . .

Now let's go back to Act I of Frau ohne Schatten, to the point where the Dyer's Wife comes closest to being sympathetic, when for once she's not bellowing or deriding or shrieking, when in essence she tells Barak in as kindly a fashion as he can that their marriage has failed.

Act I, Dyer's Wife, "Dritthalb Jahr bin ich dein Weib"
("For two and a half years I've been your wife")

In order not to beat up on any one singer, let's go back to the 1955 Vienna performance and hear Ludwig Weber with a notable Strauss soprano of the era, Christl Goltz, a singer I actually admire, but one whose voice lost, very likely under the barrage of the heavyweight repertory she sang, lost its tonal freshness early on, leaving her sounding, well, like this.

[translation by G. M. Holland for Decca]

DYER'S WIFE: For two and a half years
I've been your wife --
and no fruit
have you won from me,
and you have not made
me a mother.
My longing for that
I've had to put
out of my mind.
Now it is for you
to put away desires
which are dear to you.
BARAK: Out of a young mouth
come hard words
and arrogant speech,
but they are blessed
with the blessings of recantation.
I am not angry with you,
I am happy of heart,
and I will tarry
and await patiently
the blessings which are to come.
[BARAK has tied up the huge bundle of skins, lifts it to the hearth and then hoists it onto his back by bending over and grasping the end of the rope; he straightens up.]
DYER'S WIFE [somberly, to herself]: None will come
into this house;
sooner will some go out
and shake the dust off their feet.
So let it be,
and rather today than tomorrow.
BARAK [nods good-bye without hearing her last words, then staggers to the door bowed under the heavy load of skins, singing to himself]:
If I carry the goods to market myself,
I spare the ass, who drags them for me!

Christl Goltz (s), Dyer's Wife; Ludwig Weber (bs), Barak; Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, Nov. 9, 1955

Now here are Christa Ludwig and Walter Berry, at the Met in 1966.

Christa Ludwig (ms), Dyer's Wife; Walter Berry (bs-b), Barak; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Karl Böhm, cond. Live performance, Dec. 17, 1966

Barak's music is written to sound beautiful, and to enable the character to grab the audience's sympathy. If the singer doesn't have the audience eating out of his hand, he's missed one of opera's most golden opportunities. Because we catch the Dyer's Wife almost entirely at her frustrated, belligerent worst, she by contrast almost always comes across as a shrew. And yet the reality of the situation is that she surely is the character who deserves, even needs our sympathy. Barak may be content with this life, but would anyone else eagerly embrace a life spent fighting against perpetual filth and stench. He reaps the emotional rewards of his unstinting generosity, but she's the one stuck with, for example, the endless horror of waiting on Barak's three appalling brothers, with whom she has the fortune to share the hovel she calls home.

It's important to take in what's obvious, and the inherent goodness of Barak is a fine example. But Strauss had a genius for taking us inside and underneath the obvious. For all the complexities of Hofmannsthal's Frau libretto, what fired Strauss as always, was the human depth, and for me this unmatched ability to penetrate literally to, if I may, the heart of the matter is what Frau is all about. I realize we've scarcely mentioned the opera's nominal "first" couple, the Emperor and Empress, but it's every bit as true of them. For the Empress, pampered child of an overweeningly powerful and stiflingly protective father, it's finding out for herself what she's made of. For the Emperor, it's learning that even for the privileged there's more to life than romantic fantasies.

And for me it always comes back to the Dyer's Wife. Christa Ludwig paid a price for all those performances of the role, which took a toll on her voice, which wasn't even a proper dramatic mezzo, let alone a dramatic soprano, but making us see and feel all that frustration and disappointment and pain was perhaps the crowning accomplishment of her distinguished career.

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