A beguiling exploration of the last Habsburg monarchs' grip on
Europe's historical and cultural imagination.
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 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 twentieth century, and our contemporary
relationship to it.
