One is always hearing it stated as an argument against opera that for quite a considerable time, say the last twenty-five years, nothing has been composed which has achieved world fame or even maintained its place in the repertory for a single generation. Yet a really thorough and knowledgeable examination—that is to say, one not impaired by partisan, doctrinaire points of view—would show that in the period from 1900 to 1950 a whole row of significant creations in the realm of music drama have come into being, which were wrongly judged as decadent, old fashioned, repetitive, eccentric or over ambitious, and were therefore put on the shelf until they suddenly rose up again through a lively new production, like the Phoenix from its ashes. So it was with Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten when, on 1st October 1949, it had its first performance on the American continent at the Colón Theatre in Buenos Aires.