The Page 99 Test: Larry Wolff's "The Shadow of the Empress"

Wednesday, May 24, 2023

Larry Wolff's "The Shadow of the Empress"

Larry Wolff is the Julius Silver Professor of European History at New York University and Co-Director, NYU Florence.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Shadow of the Empress: Fairy-Tale Opera and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, and reported the following:

On page 99 of The Shadow of the Empress I discuss the correspondence of Richard Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, collaborating on the creation of the fairy-tale opera Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow) during the month of July 1914, as Europe was about to go to war in World War I. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand had just been assassinated at the end of June, and the war would commence at the beginning of August, so July 1914 was a critical month for all of Europe, while Strauss and Hofmannsthal debated some of the more sinister aspects of the opera: the Mephistophelean role of “The Nurse” and her Hexentanz (witch’s dance) as she persuades the Dyer’s Wife to renounce her shadow and her fertility, so that the Empress may obtain a human shadow. Hofmannsthal wanted the unborn children of the Dyer’s Wife to cry out from the frying pan on the stove, in fairy-tale fashion, but Strauss worried that the audience might be disturbed to think that the children were actually being cannibalized as part of dinner. These dark reflections (described on page 99) were taking place as Europe was about to embark upon the deadliest war in European history till then.

This material on page 99 is really central to my book, as I am particularly interested in understanding how the coming of war shaped the creation and eventually the reception of this opera. In 1911 Hofmannsthal and Strauss first imagined this opera, dealing with a fairy-tale Emperor and Empress (and the Empress’s search for a human shadow), at a time when Europe was still ruled by emperors and empresses, notably in Hofmannsthal’s Austria-Hungary and in Strauss’s Germany. In fact, 1911 was the year of the imperial marriage between Habsburg Archduke Karl and Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma, who would become the very last Habsburg Emperor and Empress during the war. The book follows the parallel lives of the fictive fairy-tale Emperor and Empress of the opera and the real-life Emperor Karl and Empress Zita, culminating in the opera’s premiere in Vienna following the war in 1919, the same year that Karl and Zita were compelled to depart from Austria, now transformed into a republic. The book thus argues that the moment when the fairy-tale Emperor and Empress stepped onto the stage in Vienna in 1919 was also the moment when real emperors and empresses were removed from political life and became, in effect, fairy-tale figures for most of the world during the rest of the twentieth century. The book then follows the stagings of this fairy-tale opera during the rest of the twentieth century, as the Europe of emperors and empresses became increasingly remote. For instance, the book considers what it meant to perform Die Frau ohne Schatten in Nazi Vienna during World War II and then to revive it in 1955 in postwar Austria with the rebuilding of the bombed Vienna Opera House. The book also follows Empress Zita as she took refuge from Nazi Europe in the United States in 1940; eventually she would receive a fairy-tale funeral in Vienna in 1989— seventy years after being exiled from Austria in 1919. It follows Emperor Karl on the path to posthumous beatification by the Roman Catholic Church in 2004, the ultimate fairy-tale transformation into a prospective saint. I write a little about my own Austrian family emigrating to the United States at the same time as Empress Zita, and about my own role in the beatification process surrounding Zita following her death. Returning to page 99, I just want to note that the coming of World War I profoundly shaped the creation of this opera, both prolonging the collaborative process and marking the opera itself both musically and dramatically. And by the time the war was over, and the opera was finally staged in Vienna, emperors and empresses had become definitively fairy-tale figures.