OGIC: Opera from the outside

It was a cold, wet, nasty weekend in Chicago last weekend, so for the most part I stayed in. However, I was lured out from under several blankets on Saturday night by the Lyric Opera’s production of Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow).
I love going to the opera but, to be honest, still can feel daunted on encountering an art form for which I lack any kind of competent critical apprehension or vocabulary. It’s not as if I actually believe that aesthetic appreciation depends on the capacity to interpret or assess the work before one–but the habits you pick up during several long years in humanities graduate school do tend to breed a little anxiety on this count.
Plus I’m out of practice lately, not having been to an opera in two or three years. So the four-hour running time attached to a work I knew nothing about gave me a tiny bit of pause–just the most fleeting question as to my own staying power and capacity to appreciate what I saw and heard.
Well, this is the Lyric Opera, and I needn’t have worried. While the story of Frau is an ornate fairy tale centered on procreation that seemed to me more than a little nuts (though reading Magda Krance’s well-informed précis here after the show was a great help in sorting it out), the sheer beauty of the music and the singing made me forget myself, as well as forgetting any anxiety I might have had about appreciating it properly. Deborah Voigt in the lead, a character who is transformed over the course of the opera, was most affecting, particularly in the joy she conveys with real power and yet with tremendous delicacy after she’s experienced her sea change. The whole thing, from the great voices assembled on one stage to the achingly beautiful orchestration to the fantastical set and choreography, was enough to make this reluctant operagoer embrace pure, unschooled aesthetic enjoyment again. (And if that isn’t enough to convince you, the genuine opera buff who accompanied me found it just as wonderful as I did.)
There are still a few performances of Frau on Lyric’s calendar, including one tonight. I’m told it’s seldom staged, and even less frequently with an orchestra as fine as the Lyric’s–so go to it, Chicago types. Find tickets here.