[This review was recently published at the Opera Britannia website and can be seen there with pictures from the show].

Strauss’s Intermezzo is seldom performed and consequently not particularly widely known. Scottish Opera’s new production (directed by Wolfgang Quetes) is an attempt to rescue the reputation of a difficult and troubling work which, though it has wonderful music throughout, never quite allows us to escape a suspicion that what we are watching is a rather vicious public shaming by the composer of his wife.

In a world in which we are used to watching the inner turmoil of dysfunctional relationships played out on the small screen, it is surprising how shocking it remains for them to be performed before our eyes on the opera stage.

The plot, such as it is, is this. A famous composer (obviously supposed to be Strauss himself) is in a stormy marriage with an untrusting, yet not entirely faithful wife (obviously supposed to be Pauline, Strauss’s wife). Though she has a dalliance with a young student baron who tries his hardest to tap her for money, she reacts hysterically when she wrongly suspects her husband of playing fast and loose with women in Vienna. In the end she discovers that the composer’s virtue is intact and domestic bliss is restored. The opera’s origins came about some 20 years after the real life events in the Strauss household which are described therein. So hot to handle was it at the time that several librettists turned the job down and in the end Strauss was compelled to set his own text. [Read more…]