OPERA REVIEW : A Bright New Vision of Shadowy Strauss : The Music Center Opera enlists David Hockney to design a lavish, painterly, sometimes oddly whimsical production of the forbidding ‘Frau ohne Schatten.’

It was Ogden Nash, I think, who so wisely observed that “Nietzsche is peachy, but Freud is enjoyed.”

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It was Richard Strauss who so shrewdly pointed out that his “Die Frau ohne Schatten” offers a strange fusion of the fury of “Elektra” and the introspection of “Ariadne auf Naxos.”

All that deep thinking came to mind Sunday night when the Music Center Opera presented Strauss’ rousing and rambling, stubbornly allegorical, musically glorious, semi-Asian, quasi-fairy tale in a lavish production shared with the Royal Opera of London.

“Die Frau” isn’t exactly a challenge to be taken lightly. Even with delicate cuts, it runs nearly four-and-a-half hours and doesn’t want to end. It demands a heroic cast, a Wagnerian orchestra and a stage apparatus that does not shy from miracles.

The swollen rhetoric of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto examines the problems of spiritual and physical fulfillment in hyper-symbolic plots and subplots that involve, among other interesting oddities, an empress who used to be a gazelle, a shadow that represents fertility, an unhappy woman who contemplates selling her shadow, a love-starved dyer who would rather lug his goods to market than burden his donkey, a wicked witch who commutes from lofty heights to lowly depths, and an emperor who turns into a rock.

Did I forget something? Oh, yes. There’s a chorus of unborn children. Also a singing falcon and a school of fish who fly into a frying pan. Apparently they sing too.

It would be easy to perform this narrative hodgepodge as an extravagant magic show. It is tempting, certainly, to dismiss the philosophical convolutions as so much mystical mumbo-jumbo.

Even the composer and librettist, in their voluminous correspondence, betrayed a trace of self-mockery when they substituted a canny acronym for the title of the opera. Instead of “Frau ohne Schatten,” they liked to call it “Frosch.” That means frog.

Still, for all its fanciful curlicues and detours, this is a very somber, potentially poignant opera. It begs to be taken seriously.

The Music Center authorities did that, much of the time. They assembled a reasonably strong cast and put it at the resourceful disposal of John Cox, a stage director who knows exactly how to focus characterizations, when to keep things moving and, most important, when not to.

The local impresarios seemed convinced, however, that their chief selling point was the designer: none less than David Hockney. The ads blasted his name while ignoring those of the beleaguered singers.

Hockney has turned the opera into a scenic wonderland of gleaming, fluidly changing, primary colors. Everything looks very pretty and very painterly, from the stylized panoramas of winding roads, lakes and ornamental trees in the upper realms to the dye-dripped platform that functions as Barak’s modest hovel.

Hockney dabbles sweetly in sexual imagery, even to the point of invoking a poetic splash of spermatozoa on the scrim to accompany the ultimate orchestral climaxes. The designer occasionally teeters dangerously on the brink of whimsy--some of the visual devices inspired laughter that would have outraged Strauss--and the threat of candy-coated kitsch occasionally lurks on the backdrop. Nevertheless, Hockney’s vaunted imagination, frequently brash and often illuminating, is essentially responsive to the score.

Ian Falconer complemented his efforts with exotic costumes that range from lovely (the Empress’ glittery gowns) to odd (the Dyer’s Wife’s harem jumpsuits) to bizarre (the turbaned Emperor’s pasha uniform).

Most opera companies reserve “Die Frau ohne Schatten” for their biggest Germanic gun in the pit. During his lifetime, the late Karl Bohm monopolized the opera at the Met. San Francisco recently enlisted Christoph von Dohnanyi. Georg Solti held forth in Salzburg two summers ago. When our production first appeared at Covent Garden last year, Bernard Haitink was on the podium.

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Los Angeles deemed the assignment appropriate for Randall Behr, a valued routinier who serves as resident maestro for all seasons and all reasons. The prospect caused considerable gnashing of critical teeth.

It would be less than realistic to pretend that Behr sustained maximum tension throughout the marathon, that he observed every opportunity for dynamic finesse, or that he always made things easy for his singers. Still, he deserves credit for grace under pressure.

The broad outlines of the piece were well defined, and he coaxed cohesive responses from the so-called Music Center Opera Orchestra (a new amalgam of the members of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and some of the city’s best free-lance players). Behr’s work may not have been inspiring, but it was always competent. We must be grateful, and relieved.

The singers were uneven, though hardly more so than singers in most “Frau ohne Schatten” ensembles. It may be worth remembering that when Los Angeles last saw the opera, courtesy of San Francisco at Shrine Auditorium between 1959 and 1964, the lineups included Leonie Rysanek, Marianne Schech, Ella Lee, Irene Dalis, Eberhard Waechter and Paul Schoffler.

The arduous title role was undertaken on Sunday by Ellen Shade, radiant in tone and extraordinarily sympathetic in demeanor, if not quite as assertive as she had been in Salzburg two summers ago. Perhaps her relative restraint on this occasion could be attributed to the aftereffects of a fall she sustained in an accident on the set last Monday.

The equally arduous role of the Dyer’s Wife was sung by Gwyneth Jones, a wonder of pathos and power after some 30 years in the world’s most cruel assignments. She isn’t a notably reliable technician; she may scream a bit here, wobble a bit there. But she is one of those rare artists who spares nothing--dramatically or vocally--and she can slice the brightest, most incisive fortissimo tones this side of Birgit Nilsson.

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Jane Henschel (known as Haentzschel in her student days at USC) mustered staggering, wide-ranging force plus considerable agility as the Nurse, even though she failed to exert much demonic allure. Hockney apparently envisioned her as a big, black-cloaked butterfly, and she flitted through the challenge accordingly. Too bad she was stranded in the wrong realm when her exit boat malfunctioned.

James O’Neal, an alumnus of Cal State Northridge, all but strangled on the pushy platitudes and high tessitura of the Emperor, as has many a better-known tenor before him. When he held back, however, he showed some signs of lyric promise.

Franz Grundheber (the only German in the cast) defined the hearty goodness of Barak (the only character in the opera bearing a name) with a warm, supple, rock-solid baritone and a penchant for posing rather than acting.

The smaller roles, dozens of them, were in appreciative hands and larynxes. Richard Bernstein delivered a reasonably imposing Spirit Messenger, Greg Fedderly a mellifluously narcissistic Apparition of Youth. David Daniels made a limpid case for using a countertenor as the Keeper of the Threshold.

The various offstage voices sounded as if they were piped in from Zanzibar via a faulty shortwave radio.