Intermezzo

Robert Storch is a famous composer living quietly with his feisty wife, Christine, at their villa in the Alpine resort of Grundlsee. So, nothing at all like Richard Strauss and his wife, Pauline, or their home in the Alpine resort of Garmisch, then? That’s the whole joke behind Richard Strauss’ Intermezzo (1924), a “bourgeois comedy with symphonic interludes” based on an incident in his own family’s life. This was Strauss’ eighth opera, and he wrote the libretto himself, turning a personal episode in 1902, when Pauline mistakenly believed that he was having an affair, into a bustling, ingenious and sometimes outrageous musical farce. Unsurprisingly, Pauline was furious when she saw it staged (the original cast even wore prosthetics to look more like the Strauss family), but audiences have come to cherish Intermezzo as one of the 20th century’s quirkiest comic operas. Strauss pares back his usual sonic opulence to tell the story in lively, conversational music, using a scaled-down orchestra to fill the gaps between scenes with vivid musical depictions of activities ranging from a toboggan crash to a card game. At its heart, though, is Strauss’ sharp, funny, unsparingly honest but deeply tender characterisation of Christine Storch: unmistakably his own wife, and one of the most loving marital portraits ever painted by a great composer.