A series of blogs identifying five general categories of the nurse character’s role in operas from the mid-seventeenth through the early twenty-first century. The categories are fluid and overlap, so that the nurse character can and usually does appear in more than one category within an opera. Taken from a careful study of librettos and available performances of a hundred-plus operas with at least one nurse character.
Scheming Nurses: Die Amme
The Woman Without a Shadow by Richard Strauss, Libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Premiered in Vienna, 1919
The Empress, a character of the spirit world who has assumed human form, must demonstrate her fertility by casting a shadow within three days, or her Emperor husband, to whom she has been married just under a year, will turn to stone. Relying on her nurse Die Amme’s magical powers, she embarks on a journey to the human world to obtain a shadow from the dyer Barak’s wife who has decided to remain childless. With witch-like powers, Die Amme conjures up pretty things and even a potential lover to entice Barak’s wife to part with her shadow. But at the point when the devious mission is almost accomplished, the Empress has pity on the couple and refuses to drink the water of life that would deny the wife her shadow permanently. Her act of compassion – a sentiment foreign to the nurse – saves the Emperor from his fate. The Emperor and Empress are reunited for what could be a life filled with children; the nurse is banished to life in the human world, which she detests.
PART 1
Margaretha engages in sorcery and witchcraft in which her reprehensible scheming has tragic results. She is a pivotal character in her opera without whom the plot would stall. The same can be said for Die Amme in The Woman Without a Shadow – Die Frau ohne Schatten – though her role is more complex, for she is a nurse, not just disguised as one, with supernatural powers able to cause harm. She is a key character in the fantasy world that librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal created in which the nurse entices a woman in one world to part with her shadow so that a woman in another, who lacks a shadow, can have it. The symbolism of the shadow so integral to the opera is played out on three planes – the spirit world of the Empress’s father Keikobad, where she lived as a child with her nurse; the human world of the dyer Barak and his wife; and an intervening sphere where the Empress and the Emperor live. The three levels are linked through the devious, diabolical actions of Die Amme’s scheming. 1
In March 1911 Hugo von Hofmannsthal met with Strauss to discuss collaboration on either a play with incidental music or an opera. Hofmannsthal had in mind a fantastical tale of a fairy’s daughter who is childless but obtains a stranger’s child that she eventually gives back to its real mother, contrasted with a discontented woman who gives up her child – and her shadow as a bonus – to a wicked fairy. The plot would feature two contrasting couples – the Emperor and Empress, and two commedia dell’arte characters – much in the spirit of Die Zauberflöte. On Strauss’s suggestion, the latter couple became the dyer Barak and his wife. According to William Mann, the commedia dell’arte characters were “unappealing” to Strauss’s “realism and humanity.” 2
Die Amme, who demonstrates witch-like powers throughout Die Frau ohne Schatten, is not referred to as a witch by name in either cast list or libretto, though her behavior clearly justifies the designation. In the Erzählung, Barak’s wife calls her a witch. The underhanded tactics Die Amme uses to obtain a shadow for the Empress, which threaten to destroy another woman’s marriage, point to nurse as witch. Just who is this mysterious nurse on whom the course of Die Frau ohne Schatten depends? From a careful reading of Hofmannsthal’s descriptions of the nurse and her strange behavior in the Ehrzälung, a detailed picture emerges, bringing to life this tendentious character who straddles the worlds of nursing and of witchcraft.
Die Amme is an old woman whose facial features mark her as a crone, but whose countenance borders on the nonhuman. Her wrinkled chin, toothless mouth with its long, thin, darting tongue, and blinking, red-rimmed eyes devoid of lashes are equally suggestive of a reptile. Hofmannsthal strengthens the resemblance in his description of the nurse’s dress of black and white patches that “made her look like a speckled snake.” When the disguised Die Amme shows up at the dyer’s house, however, Barak’s wife sees “a crone, who resembled a black-white magpie” – which causes the young woman “to laugh out loud like a child.” 3 The nurse’s hasty scuttling across the threshold reinforces the bird-like image.
When Die Amme is slow to respond to the Empress’s demand for help in finding a shadow, the young woman shouts angrily, “Go on, you delay, you double-tongued woman!” and pulls her up from the ground. “You are worse than a dragon!” Hofmannsthal’s depiction of the nurse’s hands as claws is dragon-like, but the Empress’s reference to the nurse’s tongue brings back to mind a snake, which Barak’s wife might have pictured when seeing Die Amme’s “magically eloquent tongue hurriedly whisked between thin lips” of her toothless mouth and hearing the strange woman hiss as she talked in a shrill voice. 4 Die Amme is as much serpent as woman, and her duplicitous actions support the age-old association of the serpent with evil.
Even before her journey to find the Empress a shadow, Die Amme is not thought of highly in the spiritual world or in the Emperor’s palace. To the Twelfth Messenger, she bears the guilt of the present predicament for her thoughtlessness when guarding the Empress during her last transformation – “you wretch, you let the treasure be stolen from you!” 5 To the Emperor, Die Amme merits no more attention than the carpet under his feet as he steps over the nurse on his way across the terrace to begin his day’s hunting. Because she has been blamed for letting the Empress wind up in the arms of the Emperor, the nurse is trying to work the situation to her own advantage. As Hofmannsthal explains, the nurse knows “how to twist and use everything that happened” to her benefit. 6
Die Amme was not always so witchy. Hofmannsthal hints of a kinder, gentler, more nurturing past. In defending herself against the accusations of the Twelfth Messenger, the nurse counters: “Thoughtless! Guilty! Could I have caught a slippery fish in the water with my hands? Could I have held a young, unruly gazelle by the horns? Why did he bestow the gift of transformation upon her? With that gift she became forfeit to mankind. What good was my watchfulness, my constant anxiety … ” 7 Perhaps that watchfulness and constant anxiety was genuine, perhaps not.
The Empress remembers her nurse as a friend “to whom she had fled with her fears and needs as a child” and who has forgiven her everything. Die Amme has never failed her: “You followed me from our island, you climbed over the Mountains of the Moon; for three months you wandered through cities and villages until you found out whither I had vanished. You lived among men, who are abhorrent to you, you ate and slept with them, you let their breath pass over you, everything for my sake.” 8 The libretto differs from the Erzählung in this and other respects as well; these variations are relevant when considering Strauss’s musical depiction of Die Amme.
The opera curtain opens on the image of Die Amme, whom Mann describes as “a deliberately ambivalent character, partly daemonic, partly grotesque, who hated mankind and willed its ruin,” crouching outside her mistress’s love nest as she does every night. 9 Sensing the presence of a spirit, whom she thinks is Keikobad, Die Amme is quick to point out her admirable work: “See, I watch beside your child by night, in sorrow and in pain!” 10 The act of guarding her mistress throughout the night belies the nurse’s total unconcern about the couple’s happiness. With her last words, the orchestra plays the theme that the libretto identifies as representing Die Amme, featuring uneven rhythms and wide intervals, giving a jagged quality to the melodic line that Mann characterizes as “angular and ambiguous,” and Norman De Mar, as “meandering”, “eerie and serpentine.” 11
Mann notes that in Die Frau ohne Schatten Strauss has composed themes that, while associated with specific characters, correspond more “with states of mind or action.” 12 He correlates the interval of a third with characters in the human world and that of a fourth with the spiritual world. Intervals of both a third and of a fourth are missing in Die Amme’s theme, reinforcing the ambiguity of her character.
The visiting spirit is not Keikobad but rather the Twelfth Messenger, who, as in the narrative, blames Die Amme for having allowed the Empress to wind up married to the Emperor and declares a three-day deadline on the issue of the shadow: if the Empress does not cast a shadow – that is, become pregnant – within that time, the Emperor will be turned to stone. Because Die Amme would like nothing better than to return to the spirit world, she is not eager for the Empress to conceive; thus homesickness perhaps explains her brief lapse into lyrical singing when she tells the messenger, “The light passes through her [the Empress’s] body as though she were of glass.” 13 The brief passage is sung to shimmering chords in the strings. Die Amme smoothes out her melodic line, turning lyrical again when relating the Empress’s nocturnal schedule, with allusions to the light that the Empress still casts instead of a shadow.
Del Mar identifies another theme referring to Die Amme’s duplicity in the events that follow, when orchestral notes wind around in chromatic fragments suggestive of a snake in the grass with its evil allusions. 14 Die Amme, in response to the Empress’s insistence on getting a shadow, wherever she must go, almost spits out: “From the world of men! From the world of men! Does it not make you shudder? The air of mankind for us breathes death! Its purity smells to us of rusty iron and stagnant blood, and of long-dead corpses! … Does it not fill you with horror?” 15 Die Amme sings the serpentine melody heard earlier in the orchestra as she continues her litany of the ugly aspects of the human world – she has even more to say on that topic.
Notes
- William Mann, Richard Strauss: A Critical Study of the Operas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 173.
- Mann, Richard Strauss, 171.
- Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Woman Without a Shadow: Die Frau ohne Schatten [1919], trans. Jean Hollander (Lewston: Mellen, 1993), 11, 14.
- Hofmannsthal, The Woman Without a Shadow, trans. Hollander, 9, 16, 18.
- Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow) [libretto], music by Richard Strauss, Op. 65 (London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1943), 1.
- 6. Hoffmannsthal, The Woman Without a Shadow, trans. Hollander, 14.
- Hoffmannsthal, The Woman Without a Shadow, trans. Hollander Ibid., 2.
- Hoffmannsthal, The Woman Without a Shadow, trans. Hollander Ibid., 7. The Empress is aware that Die Amme has magical powers, but she fears only their use among mortals.
- 9. Mann, Richard Strauss, 175. In translated correspondence with Strauss dated 28 December 1913, Hofmannsthal writes: “I have written in the margin of the text occasional notes about the dual facets of the Nurse, who vacillates between the demoniac and the grotesque.” See A Working Friendship: The Correspondence Between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, trans. Hanns Hammelmann and Weald Osers (New York: Random House, 1961), 184–85.
- Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten [libretto], 1; Richard Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Op. 65 [vocal score], libretto by Hugo Von Hofmannsthal (London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1943), (rehearsal no. 2), 6.
- Mann, Richard Strauss, 176; Del Mar, Richard Strauss, 162, 168.
- Mann, Richard Strauss, 173–74.
- Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten [libretto], 2; Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten [vocal score] (rehearsal no. 7), 8.
- Del Mar, Richard Strauss, 173; Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten [vocal score] (rehearsal no. 77), 36–37.
- Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten [libretto], 6; Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten [vocal score] (rehearsal nos. 77–78), 37.
A comprehensive list of the hundred-plus operas that include a nurse character is found on my website under BOOKS > The Nurse in History and Opera > Book Extras.
To learn more about how the nurse is portrayed on the opera stage, see Judith Barger, The Nurse in History and Opera: From Servant to Sister (Lexington Books, 2024).
