“The year 1919 was pivotal in European culture, with bold portents for the postwar future — it was the year that Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus and Marcel Duchamp painted a mustache on the Mona Lisa. [Richard Strauss’s] Die Frau ohne Schatten, in contrast, was almost reassuringly conservative in its late Romantic musical language, in its fairy tale libretto about a fundamentally good-hearted emperor and empress, and in its celebration of fertility and childbirth as the foundation of marriage and society.” – The New York Times