I.

In a city as operatically overdetermined as Berlin, even a new production of Richard Strauss’s “Die Frau ohne Schatten” might be expected to pass with respectable indifference. But when Tobias Kratzer mounted the late-Romantic behemoth this January at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, capping a Strauss trilogy that had begun with “Arabella” and “Intermezzo,” the result was not just another repertory refresh. This ambitious cycle, overseen by one of today’s most acclaimed directors at one of the country’s major houses, took place in the wider context of a serious and wide-ranging reevaluation of the German composer’s neglected lesser-known operas.

Richard Strauss is the most prolific opera composer of the 20th century whose works are still performed regularly, but his reputation rests on a handful of the 15 operas he wrote during his long career. More than 75 years after his death, Strauss is still best known for the scandalous shock of “Salome” (1905), the blood-curdling modernism of “Elektra” (1909), and the nostalgic glow of “Der Rosenkavalier” (1911). Yet lurking in the shadows of these hits are stage works that had far uneasy origins and fraught reception histories. 

In the 1930s and 1940s, as Europe darkened, Strauss premiered a string of works that seemed almost cursed by circumstance. “Die schweigsame Frau,” a giddy comedy written with Stefan Zweig, debuted in 1935 under a cloud of Nazi disfavor. Adolf Hitler himself stayed away from the Dresden premiere, offended by the Jewish Zweig’s involvement. A letter in which Strauss criticized the regime was intercepted by the Gestapo and sealed the opera’s fate. The work was banned after only four performances and not heard again in Germany until after the war. In 1938 came “Daphne,” a one-act “bucolic tragedy” that premiered in Dresden on the eve of World War II. Conceived as a poetic idyll about a maiden who becomes a laurel tree, “Daphne’s” pastoral myth stood in marked counterpoint to the gathering storm outside. Originally paired with Strauss’s bombastic one-acter “Friedenstag,” “Daphne” grew into a full-length piece. The premiere went ahead under Karl Böhm’s baton, even as Nazi cultural officials looked askance at its escapist tone. Strauss’s next project, “Die Liebe der Danae,” fared little better. This “cheerful mythology” about the princess Danaë was slated for the 1944 Salzburg Festival, but history intervened. Weeks before opening night, the July 20 assassination attempt on Hitler provoked a shutdown of all theaters. The Nazis allowed only a single dress rehearsal on August 16, 1944 – a bittersweet private preview so the 80-year-old Strauss could at least hear his work. It would be the opera’s only performance until 1952, three years after Strauss’s death.

Some earlier works by Strauss also failed to connect with audiences. “Intermezzo,” a 1924 domestic comedy satirizing Strauss’s own marriage, is perhaps the oddest thing he wrote. Strauss, who uncharacteristically penned the libretto himself, dubbed it a “bourgeois comedy with symphonic interludes.” It can strike a contemporary listener as trivial and not a little misogynistic. “Die ägyptische Helena” (1928), Strauss’s riff on Helen of Troy, also stumbled out of the gate. Despite a sumptuous score and a libretto by his famed collaborator Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Helena” was judged “a less successful work” by the composer. 

Five years after Strauss’ music entered the public domain, many of these lesser-heard operas are being dusted off – and not for novelty’s sake. They’re being interrogated, reframed, and elevated in productions that are visually and conceptually daring and carefully prepared, cast and performed. These are rediscoveries both for Germany’s operagoing public and the singers and conductors who step into the ring to champion these works. 

As anyone who has spent time in German opera houses will know, it is common for directors here to critically deconstruct pieces onstage. If this goes for canonical works like “Don Giovanni” or “La Bohème,” it applies even more to the output of a figure as complicated and contradictory as Strauss, a great composer who risked irrelevance in the final decades of his life and whose legacy has been forever tarnished by his association with the Third Reich, which used him as a musical monument to bolster their supremacist claims about German culture. While the recent spate of productions of Strauss rarities have run the stylistic gamut from minimal to overstuffed, what they share is a refusal to let the composer’s music drown in its own beauty. 

II.

Over the past few seasons, Kratzer’s idiosyncratic triptych has been at the heart of this resurgence. His “Intermezzo,” a brittle 1924 comedy of marital discord loosely based on Strauss’s own life, was set in a sharply contemporary world of smartphones and travel chaos. The heroine’s neurotic jealousy played out across airports and hotel rooms in what felt like a stylish social satire. His “Arabella,” too, eschewed rococo nostalgia for something more astute and cynical: a noirish and gender-bending deconstruction of love, sex, and class. 

But it was Kratzer’s “Die Frau ohne Schatten” that delivered the most radical reinvention. Often viewed as an unstageable metaphysical fable, the 1919 opera was here transformed into a dreamlike clinical psychodrama. Set in sterile hospital corridors and psychological break rooms, the production reframed the opera’s fantastical elements—mystical falcons and gazelles, shadows, spirit messengers—as metaphors for trauma, fertility, and the repression of female agency. While these transpositions arguably stripped the work of its grandeur, there was an undeniable coherence and intensity to Kratzer’s vision.

The elevation of “Die Frau ohne Schatten” from mystical muddle to central Strauss statement has been steadily underway for decades, extending back at least to Herbert Wernicke’s bold and abstract production at the Metropolitan Opera in 2001. More recently, there have been high profile new stagings by Lydia Steier in Baden-Baden and Katie Mitchell in Amsterdam. When Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducted Wernicke’s production at the Met this winter, it was widely hailed as a season highlight. 

The Met’s “Die Frau ohne Schatten” is the house’s only successful attempt to resuscitate Strauss’s deeper catalogue. Some may remember the 2007 production of “Die ägyptische Helena” mounted for Deborah Voigt. Despite the soprano’s tireless advocacy of the work, the production did little to bolster the work’s reputation. To this day, it remains a curiosity. 

Only “Die Frau ohne Schatten” has successfully re-entered the core repertory, bolstered by sustained interest from major houses, conductors, directors, and audiences alike. Others like “Arabella” (1933), “Daphne” and “Capriccio” (1942) have surfaced periodically, typically as showcases for charismatic sopranos drawn to Strauss’ lush, soaring melodies. 

Crucially, these works are now being heard and staged differently in the country of the composer’s birth: not as curiosities, but as serious contributions to opera in the 20th century. In turn, they are helping reshape our understanding of Strauss himself, not merely the composer of imperial nostalgia and shimmering decadence, but a dramatist of ruthless irony, psychological fissures, and moral contradictions.

It’s too early to say which, if any, of these neglected works might move from the margins to the center, managing to wriggle into the repertoire; yet it feels significant that a work as obscure and problematic as “Intermezzo” went up at two of Germany’s leading opera companies this season. After Kratzer’s production of “Intermezzo,” revived this season in Berlin, the Semperoper Dresden became the second opera house to stage that thorny “conversation piece with symphonic interludes,” in an acclaimed production by Axel Ranisch.

Meanwhile, at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, Sebastian Weigle led a luminous “Die Liebe der Danae,” another postwar curio long considered a musical and dramatic clunker. In Claus Guth’s coolly grand staging, the opera became a corporate parable about the commodification of desire. Danae, sung on short notice with impressive power by Manuela Uhl, was no longer a mythic princess but an ambitious woman caught in a transactional world of wealth, marriage, and the absurd gods who peddle both. Guth’s production, which returns in July for two performances during the 150th Munich Opera Festival, was sleek, ironic, and disarmingly moving.

German audiences have proved astonishingly open to these rediscoveries. “Daphne” – a chilly mythological idyll sometimes considered as Strauss’s chamber answer to “Elektra” – received a haunting staging in 2022 by Romeo Castellucci in Berlin. The setting—a snowed-in, post-apocalyptic landscape—imposed stark and nightmarish visuals over the opera’s pastoral narrative and articulated the opera’s emotional arc through strong symbolic design.

That production, like many in this wave, leaned into abstraction: cool lighting, white drapery, and a deliberately static, almost Beckettian disquiet. Its main misstep was entrusting the score to the young and immensely talented Thomas Guggeis. The wunderkind maestro, recently appointed Generalmusikdirektor of Oper Frankfurt, seemed both lost in and overwhelmed by a score that is lushly sinuous and deceptively simple. As the mismatch illustrated, these difficult scores often require specialist knowledge and experience. Weigle and Christian Thielemann have been two of the most vital, campaigning from the podium for peripheral works and mounting compelling arguments for their musical rigor and dramatic potential.

III.

In July, Thielemann will make his opera debut as the Berlin Staatsoper’s Generalmusikdirektor with a new production of “Die schweigsame Frau” directed by Jan Philipp Gloger. With its libretto by Zweig, based on the Jacobean comedy “Epicoene, or the Silent Woman” by Ben Jonson, the opera is a brilliant comic construction that has never quite escaped the shadow that the Nazis cast over its 1935 premiere. Despite its pedigree, the opera has been rarely staged since. The upcoming Berlin production signals a reclamation of sorts and is arguably the most significant attempt to revive the work since Barrie Kosky’s Munich production back in 2010. It also represents a kind of symbolic homecoming: the post currently held by Thielemann was once occupied by Strauss.

It’s a reminder, too, of the complicated place Strauss himself occupies in the cultural memory of 20th-century Germany. In his dotage, Strauss allowed himself to be turned into a kind of aesthetic mascot by the Nazis. His willingness to serve as president of the Reichsmusikkammer, even as Jewish friends and colleagues were being purged, remains an indelible stain on his legacy.

Curiously, the Salzburg Festival, that traditional standard-bearer for Strauss, has not played a leading role in this revival, at least not since Alvis Hermanis’s sparkling “Danae,” conducted with epic sweep and radiant precision by Franz Welser-Möst in 2016. But such forays remain rare in Salzburg today. (Markus Hinterhäuser, the festival’s artistic director, hasn’t programmed any operas by Strauss since 2021, which saw a revival of Krzysztof Warlikowski’s “Elektra” from a year earlier.) 

What does this flowering mean? Partly, it’s generational. Directors like Kratzer, Guth, Steier, and Castellucci are neither Strauss apologists nor iconoclasts. They treat his works as texts to be interrogated, not embalmed. They see the social satire, the buried trauma, the coded melancholy, and the self-critique. Their productions sidestep both reverence and ridicule.

Germany’s opera houses are not merely reanimating the lesser-known Strauss: they’re inviting us to listen to the imperfections, the eccentricities, the digressions, and to discover a composer who is thornier and less flattering, but also, perhaps, more honest and human. 

In the end, the forgotten Strauss may be the one who has the most to tell us.