In 1919 the last Habsburg rulers, Emperor Karl and Empress Zita,
left Austria, going into exile. That same year, the fairy-tale
opera Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow),
featuring a mythological emperor and empress, premiered at the
Vienna Opera. Viennese poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal and German
composer Richard Strauss created Die Frau ohne Schatten through the
bitter years of World War I, imagining it would triumphantly appear
after the victory of the German and Habsburg empires. Instead, the
premiere came in the aftermath of catastrophic defeat. The Shadow
of the Empress: Fairy-Tale Opera and the End of the Habsburg
Monarchy explores how the changing circumstances of politics and
society transformed their opera and its cultural meanings before,
during, and after the First World War. Strauss and Hofmannsthal
turned emperors and empresses into fantastic fairy-tale characters;
meanwhile, following the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy after
the war, their real-life counterparts, removed from political life
in Europe, began to be regarded as anachronistic, semi-mythological
figures. Reflecting on the seismic cultural shifts that rocked
post-imperial Europe, Larry Wolff follows the story of Karl and
Zita after the loss of their thrones. Karl died in 1922, but Zita
lived through the rise of Nazism, World War II, and the Cold War.
By the time of her death in 1989, she had herself become a
fairy-tale figure, a totem of imperial nostalgia. Wolff weaves
together the story of the opera's composition and performance; the
end of the Habsburg monarchy; and his own family's life in and
exile from Central Europe, providing a rich new understanding of
Europe's cataclysmic 20th century, and our contemporary
relationship to it.
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