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 2
When Die Amme and the Empress arrive at the dyer’s house, where the nurse draws on her magical powers to trick Barak’s wife into parting with her shadow, the serpentine theme returns in the orchestra as Barak’s wife challenges the women about their sudden appearance and when the nurse starts fawning over her. “You sly creature, whom I’ve never seen before – and I don’t know how you slipped in here – I can see through you this far,” the wife sings. Her skepticism ultimately saves her from succumbing entirely to Die Amme’s subterfuge.
Once Die Amme has enticed Barak’s wife to go along with the plan, as the violins meander sinuously around the duplicitous theme in the accompaniment, the nurse explains the next step – how the two women will return as her cousins to serve as her handmaids. As Act 2 opens, Die Amme and the Empress have returned to the dyer’s house. Die Amme is in her element as she maneuvers the situation to her advantage by tapping into the woman’s fantasies, and she and Barak’s wife sing in a lyrical waltz tempo. To further her agenda, the nurse prepares a sleeping potion for Barak. “Who told you to do that?” his wife asks – highlighted by lack of orchestral accompaniment – as she looks anxiously at her sleeping husband. She does not like the direction that events are taking and is ready to call off the deal. “I don’t want to be in your hands, and to have you spy out all my secrets, you old black-and-white spotted snake!” she insists. The orchestra reinforces the snake image with descending sixteenth-note runs spread over five measures. 17
All is going according to plan, but Die Amme has overlooked an important detail: the Empress begins to feel compassion for the couple, especially the long-suffering and ever-optimistic Barak. Back home that night with her nurse, the Empress talks in her sleep: “See – Nurse – see the man’s eyes, how tormented they look! Before such a gaze cherubim fall on their faces! Against you – Barak – I have sinned!” The orchestra is silent during her pronouncement. 18
When Die Amme and the Empress return to Barak’s house the next day, Die Amme senses that “Higher powers are in play, Oh, my mistress: And something threatens us,” but reassures the Empress that “we will invoke mighty names, and the thing whereupon you have set your mind will come to pass!” As the scene develops, however, it is obvious that Die Amme is losing her grip. Barak’s wife reveals to her husband that “I have sold my shadow; and there are ready purchasers, and the purchase-price is splendid and unequalled!” During the ensuing chaos, with Barak ready to attack his wife, Die Amme tells the Empress, “Now for it! Seize the shadow and take it for your own!” 19 But the Empress sees blood on it and declares, “I do not want the shadow” – sung in drawn-out notes with a leap above the staff held for six beats falling to the octave below on the syllables of “shadow” (“Schatten”). 20 She repeats her decision for added emphasis.
Barak’s wife, prepared to die at the hand of her husband, makes her final confession: “Barak! I did not do it! I have not done it yet! Listen to me, Barak! My mouth was a traitor to me, before my mind had done the deed!” 21 When the earth opens up and swallows Barak and his wife immediately afterward, and the room is flooded with water, Die Amme knows for sure, “Higher powers are in play! Hither to me!” Her statement matches that of the Empress’s declaration, with Die Amme’s slowed melodic line peaking on the B♭ above the staff for eight beats. 22
Die Amme suddenly is out of her element. Things have gone awry – her witchcraft has not turned out as expected. The nurse comes closest to showing compassion when she uses the last of her magical powers to save the Empress after Barak, his wife, and her shadow have departed. In the Erzählung, Die Amme “gently lifted her head up” and “cradled her in her lap and spoke to her, … threw her dark coat over them both, held her charge close to her with both arms, and flew off with her through the darkness. The nurse well knew the way she now had to take.” 23 The coat becomes a boat that carries the two women back to the spirit world.
In Act 3 of the opera, Barak and his wife and the Emperor and the Empress go through trials in “separate but parallel journeys,” as in Die Zauberflöte, to achieve the change of heart that each requires in order to move ahead as a couple worthy of the unborn children waiting for them in what Paul Stanwood describes as the “second enchantment” of a fairy tale – that of “discovery and purification.” 24 Die Amme and the Empress are the last to arrive in the spirit world, and in the Erzählung, as soon as the boat arrives, Die Amme, who initially welcomed a return to the spirit world, feels “a vague, oppressive fear” and seeks an escape route. 25 “Let’s get away from here!” she pleads with the Empress. “Help me to unmoor the boat from the rock! Higher powers are playing with us!” Not having realized yet that she has met her match, the nurse quips, “Were I not sharp-witted, what would become of you!” When the Empress replies that the boat will not move, her nurse does not skip a beat: “Leave the boat, then! But let’s get away! … Tuck up your skirt and be quick! I’ll lead you down, I’ll find a way out!” The Empress, however, hears the summons to judgment and is ready to face her father Keikobad. Again her nurse entreats her, “Let’s be off! I will get you a shadow! So it is arranged and so it is sworn. … But let’s get away from here! Away from the threshold: to cross it is worse than death!” 26
Die Amme has let slip another secret that she has held – the first was the riddle of the talisman that had let the Empress transform into a gazelle when the Emperor spotted her. The Empress is angry with her nurse for having withheld information a second time. “You have knowledge of hidden things and understand the meaning. Answer me! Are you silent out of malice? Are you purposely trying to confuse my mind?” 27 The nurse expects Keikobad to punish his daughter for having given her heart to a mortal, but the Empress is willing to face him; she is not willing, however, to put up with her nurse’s duplicity any longer:
Out of our deeds comes judgment! Out of our hearts calls the trumpet that summons us. Nurse, for ever do I part from you. You know too little of what men need; that on which their secret hearts are set is hidden from you. At what a cost they pay for everything out of grievous guilt, renew themselves like the phoenix, out of eternal death into eternal life raise themselves perpetually – they themselves hardly suspect. It is beyond you. I belong to them, you are not my kind! 28
“Curses on them!” Die Amme swears in the opera. “Men! How I hate them! Swarming like eels, screeching like eagles, sullying the earth! Death to them!” 29 Die Amme shows her true colors when, out of spite, she tells Barak, who is searching for his wife, that she is “Up there! She’s cursing you to death!” The nurse tells his wife, who is looking for her husband, that he is “Ready to kill you with his hands. Save yourself, fly!” to the serpentine theme in the orchestra. 30 But this same fiend, when picturing the Empress going through torture on her day of judgment, shows what could be genuine concern: “Alas for my child, delivered up, delusion before her eyes, traps and snares in her way! She is within! She is drinking! The golden, liquid bane flows over her lips and slides down! Her face quivers convulsively, a human shriek is torn from the wounded throat! Help her! Even if I have to die! Keikobad!” 31
The Erzählung describes the decisive moment when the Empress encounters the water with magical power to “seal the deal”:
She could do nothing but drink and win the shadow, or spill the cup. … Without hesitation, she spoke.
“I am beholden to you, Barak!” she said, and stretching the arm with the cup straight before her, she emptied the cup at the feet of the cloaked figure [the stone statue of her husband]. The golden water flamed into the air. The cup in her hand melted away. 32
In the opera, with her definitive “There is blood in the water, I will not drink!” (“Blut ist in dem Wasser, ich trinke nicht!”), and an emphatic spoken “I – will – not!” (“Ich – will – nicht!”), the Empress discovers that she has said the magic words that result in a shadow of her own and the Emperor’s release from his stony entrapment. 33 Both the Empress and Barak’s wife find soul mates in their husbands and their futures look bright; Die Amme, however, is not part of this rosy picture. She has overstayed her welcome, and in the opera the Messenger throws the nurse back into the boat to cast her lot in the human world.
Die Amme’s backpedaling has come too little, too late. The Messenger upbraids her for raising her voice and sends her away: “Get you gone from the threshold! Out you go, for ever!” The nurse makes a last-ditch appeal: “She was entrusted to me – by you yourself, Messenger! – for the space of three days! I watched over her, I struggled with her – she thrust me from her, she knows me no more. Keikobad! He must listen to me!” 34 Her pleas for mercy fall on deaf ears. “Who wants you?” the Messenger asks. “Nobody! Be off!” 35 Die Amme’s last words, ending in a vehement B♭ above the staff held for eight beats, are a curse directed at the “world of men” that has caused her downfall: “Devouring fire be in their bones!” 36
Having longed to return, Die Amme now finds herself a persona non grata. Hofmannsthal gives a final glimpse of the nurse as a fugitive, moving quickly in an attempt to find a cave in which to escape punishment. She loses her way, and her shrill cries for the Empress go unanswered. Her feeling “as though a net whose links she would not be able to tear were gathering about her from a great distance” foreshadows the nurse’s fate, which Hofmannsthal documents no further in the Erzählung; the nurse simply disappears from the story before the apotheosis. 37 In the operatic version of Die Frau ohne Schatten, Hofmannsthal spells out that fate.
Strauss was insistent that Die Amme’s farewell aria with her concern for the Empress’s fate, appeal to Keikobad, and “hideous lengthy curse on mankind” should provide “a proper big scene for the Nurse” of “at least twenty-five lines, with the voices of Barak and the Wife as interjections – at any rate the scene must end with a colourful conclusion of the Nurse’s aria.” When completed, Die Amme’s swan song offered the nurse what the librettist considered a “grand theatrical exit.’” 38
Notes
- Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten [libretto], 11; Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten [vocal score], 84.
- Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten [vocal score], 196–97.
- Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten [libretto], 28.
- Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten [libretto], 28, 29, 32.
- Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten [libretto], 33; Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten [vocal score], 267.
- Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten [libretto], 35.
- Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten [vocal score], 284.√
- Hofmannsthal, Woman Without a Shadow, trans. Hollander, 72–73. In the 1992 Salzburg Summer Festival production, Die Amme’s outward display of concern toward the Empress as the latter tosses about in bed and talks in her sleep, masks the nurse’s inner turmoil as she hears the Empress confess her sin against Barak and realizes that her plan is unraveling. See Richard Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna State Opera Chorus, cond. Sir Georg Solti (Decca DVD, 1993).
- Paul G. Stanwood, “Fantasy and Fairy Tale in Twentieth-Century Opera,” Mosaic 10 (2) (Winter 1977): 188.
- Hofmannsthal, Woman Without a Shadow, trans. Hollander, 80.
- Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten [libretto], 38–39.
- Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten [libretto], 39.
- Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten [libretto], 39–40.
- Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten [libretto], 40–41.
- Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten [libretto], 41; Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten [vocal score] (rehearsal no. 107), 337.
- Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten [libretto], 41. In the 1992 Salzburg Summer Festival production, Marjana Lipovšek interprets Die Amme’s solicitude for the Empress as a diatribe against Keikobad as well. See Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten, cond. Solti (Decca DVD, 1993).
- Hofmannsthal, The Woman Without a Shadow, trans. Hollander,
- Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten [libretto], 43, 44; Richard Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna State Opera, cond. Sir Georg Solti (1998 Decca CD libretto), 71, 72. *
- Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten [libretto], 41.
- Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten [libretto], 42; Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten, cond. Solti (Decca CD libretto), 69.
- Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten [libretto], 42.
- Hofmannsthal, Woman Without a Shadow, trans. Hollander, 81.
- A Working Friendship, 222, 231.
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).
