The Shadow of the Empress: Fairy-Tale Opera and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy

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 ch