There are few conductors these days who can matchDonald Runnicleswhen it comes to marshaling huge musical forces. And there are few works in the repertoire as enormous and recalcitrant as Richard Strauss' monumental operatic fairy tale “Die Frau ohne Schatten” (“The Woman Without a Shadow”).

The extraordinary San Francisco Opera production that opened Sunday, June 4, at the War Memorial Opera House was a blockbuster success on every level — musically, dramatically, visually and theatrically. It left the audience shaken and exhilarated for a variety of reasons.

最明显的激动的,亲眼看看ss the company’s former music director doing what he does best, facing down a gargantuan artistic creation and making it shine. There’s a gladiatorial aspect to the whole thing, if only because of the scale on which Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal operate.

“Frau” runs nearly four hours and calls for a cast of five leading singers, all of them required to operate at hyper-Wagnerian levels of power and stamina. There are subsidiary but similarly demanding solo roles, small and large choral ensembles and dancers, for a total of 110 personnel.

The orchestra, too, is a sprawling beast, with harps, celestas, armies of brass and woodwinds both on and off the stage. When the company presented “Frau” in 1976, it had to remove two rows of seats from the audience to enlarge the orchestra pit. (The Santa Fe Opera, which makes a specialty of Strauss’ operas, has presented all of them at some point in its history, except “Frau” and the little-known “Guntram”).

Yet, wrestling a behemoth is one of Runnicles’ superpowers. Throughout his years in San Francisco and beyond, some of his most memorable performances have involved outsized repertoire: Wagner’s“Ring” Cyclemost notably, but also the 2002 North American premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s massive“Saint François d’Assise”and Berlioz’s“Les Troyens”in 2015.

Sunday’s performance, the first production of “Frau” since 1989, was yet another entry in the roster of Runnicles’ triumphal San Francisco appearances, a majestic display of sweep and expressive precision. The expanded forces of the San Francisco Opera played as if with one mind, conjuring up vast waves of brass and string sonorities.

More detailed passages, from ordinary but heightened woodwind writing to show-offy excursions for xylophone, bells or glass harmonica, registered with a piquant edge. If “Frau” represents one of the most extravagant displays of Strauss’ orchestral mastery (and it does), the piece requires a ringleader as alert and commanding as Runnicles.

It also requires a cast as potent and virtuosic as the one assembled for this occasion. Swedish sopranoNina Stemme, who concluded the afternoon being awarded the San Francisco Opera Medal, has long been the company’s go-to artist for heroic female roles, from Wagner’s Brünnhilde to Puccini’s Turandot.

As the unnamed but dramatically central wife of Barak the Dyer, Stemme equaled or even outshone her previous contributions here. Her voice is tireless, effortless, full of body and color; she deploys it with an uncanny gift for emotional specificity in a role whose unpredictable psychological range — from resentment to rage to contrition — is not always easy to make cogent.

As her husband, the humane and long-suffering Barak, Danish bass-baritone Johan Reuter made a glorious company debut, in a performance of warmth, integrity and theatrical responsiveness. The magnificent scene that opens Act 3, in which Barak and his wife separately reckon up their marital and moral shortcomings (couples therapy with no therapist in view) was a gently explosive dynamo.

The subject of “Frau” is marriage, and this proletarian couple has a counterpart at the opposite end of the social scale in the Emperor and the titular Empress, whose lack of a shadow represents a tragic inability to bear children. Finnish soprano Camilla Nylund, in her first return to San Francisco since a 2012“Lohengrin,”brought vibrancy and tonal sheen to the title role. In his company debut as the Emperor, British tenor David Butt Philip displayed a beautifully crystalline but small vocal sound, lacking the power to encompass the role’s high-flying demands without pushing uncomfortably.

无缝的声带重量和超级malevolent stage presence, soprano (and Bay Area native) Linda Watson made a woefully overdue company debut in a breathtaking turn as the Empress’ nurse. Standouts among the expansive cast included former and current Adler fellows Stefan Egerstrom as the Spirit Messenger andMikayla Sageras the Keeper of the Temple Gates. (Like Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” a clear and acknowledged forerunner, the cast list of “Frau” includes several roles that amount to “the guy who shows up to say the thing.”)

We’re dwelling today on the musical riches of the San Francisco production, because any encounter with “Frau” is a bit more treacherous on a narrative level. The plot is both hard to follow — especially for something that aspires to the childlike clarity of a fairy tale — and a bit off-putting once one succeeds.

It’s a paean to the joys of marital love (hurrah) that insists on childbearing as an essential part of that formula (um…?). It posits theexistence of unborn childrenwho are eager for Mommy and Daddy to iron out their problems so their own lives can get underway.

Still, you don’t have to buy into all parts of the premise for Strauss’ music to shepherd you to a sense of transcendent beauty. That promise is borne out in the company’s production, deftly directed by Roy Rallo on designer David Hockney’s lurid and sumptuously otherworldly set.

Many years ago I described Hockney’s sets forPuccini’s “Turandot”as looking like Dr. Seuss on acid, and I’ve struggled in vain to find a better shorthand for this production as well. The spirit world that is the Empress’s original home operates amid elaborate curlicues of dark green and red; the dyer’s hut is streaked from floor to ceiling with saturated color. The costumes, designed by the late Ian Falconer, inhabit a shadowy middle ground between exoticism and fairy-tale whimsy.

Nothing in “Frau” is casual or taken lightly (this is the part of Mozart that Strauss too often overlooks). It’s a brawny, highly serious discourse on love and marriage that somehow gets inside your head and leaves you startled and restless. The San Francisco Opera production could not be better designed to have that effect.

Reach Joshua Kosman:jkosman@sfchronicle.com; Twitter:@JoshuaKosman