Sir Georg Solti’s Gramophone Award-winning CD recording of this opera (Decca, 5/92), recorded at intervals over a two-and-a-half-year span, is a superb achievement despite a few hyperactive moments, and it is well-nigh ideally cast (Julia Varady, Plácido Domingo, José van Dam, Hildegard Behrens and Reinhild Runkel, all equalling or even surpassing most of their rivals). This Salzburg Festival production, from a year later, is not its equal in that respect. A mere second-best, then, but with pictures? Not quite. Studer isn’t as compelling an Empress as Varady, and is no actress, but she sings ravishingly and her conscientious attempts to portray the character are touching in themselves.

Moser is a lightweight Emperor set beside Domingo, but his lyrical understatement is effective. Hale’s Barak is a bit worn of voice, but he is an affectingly rough diamond of a dyer, backed up by the lantern-jawed likeability of his stage presence. Marton is sometimes piercing, sometimes squally and cannot manage Behrens’ moving vulnerability and intimacy, but the sense that she is a shrew despite herself, and her despair in Act 3, are real and moving.

No potentially adverse comparisons apply to Lipov?ek’s vividly acted, formidably sung Nurse, nor to the playing of the Vienna Philharmonic; the sound quality is good. Götz Friedrich’ s production, in spacious and spectacular sets by Rolf Glittenberg, is relatively straightforward; the quality of myth is well conveyed, with a solemnity that Strauss would surely have approved, but not without such human touches as the Empress half-shyly, half-delightedly dancing with her shadow in the climactic scene. With the solitary exception of Rudolf Hartmann’s 1967 Covent Garden staging, with its wonderful sets by Josef Svoboda, I can think of no production of Die Frau ohne Schatten that I would rather have than this.