No love without drama: No notary (Markus Brück) can help when Christine’s (Maria Bengtsson) feelings run away.
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
How much privacy can you compose? When Strauss’ “Intermezzo” premiered in Dresden 100 years ago, the question was different than it is today. On television today, a pitiable staff exposes the most intimate problems, and for some theater people who consider themselves progressive, authenticity is seen as an aesthetic value.
In the bourgeoisie of 1924, however, there was still a separation between private life and public appearance. It seemed correspondingly irritating that a representative composer set an episode from his own married life to music. Instead of Strauss, the man was called “Storch”, and Storch’s “Christine” was unmistakably reminiscent of Strauss’s wife Pauline, who some found strenuous.
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The Dresden production brought out the parallels back then. The Storch singer wore a wig that was reminiscent of the composer’s hairstyle, and the stage design was based on the Strauss Villa in Garmisch. But the following applies: If real life is staged, you never have real life, but rather the production. The trashy misery on private television has been cast, the theater people are looking for impact, and Strauss has composed a work of art.
At the beginning of this “bourgeois comedy with symphonic interludes” Storch, a respected conductor, leaves for a two-month concert season. This gives rise to enough reasons for arguments with Christine, who also scolds her staff and only becomes a little more lenient when she gets to know a young baron. But as she soon realizes, he only wants to scam her for money.
To make matters worse, the letter from a “Mieze Maier” seems to prove that her husband was having an affair with this demimonde. Now Christine wants an immediate divorce and cannot be appeased by the telegrams from her husband, who understands little about the context. But then the misunderstanding clears up. Mieze Maier actually met a bandmaster, whose name was not Storch but Stroh, and sent the letter to the wrong person.
The fantasy of being wrongly suspected but then exonerated is flattering to one’s self. Strauss does even more: the little son naturally sticks with his dad, and the notary to whom Christine goes about the divorce believes it is impossible that Strauss/Storch could have done anything bad. When her husband finally returns, freed from all guilt, Christine doesn’t want to make things too easy for him, bickers again, but is soon brought to reason. The man has proven himself superior in every way, and marital harmony is the reward.
How can you still perform this today? Tobias scratch moves the action into the present and floods the stage with ideas, some of which are annoying, but many of which intensify the comedy trash that the piece also contains. Videos also serve this purpose, although the flood of images sometimes distracts from the music. But again and again – and this is clever – scratch shows that we are not dealing with original life, but with art. A series of quotations that connect Christine with other female characters from Strauss operas run through the piece.
This alone would not save the work. Butkrater shows how, despite the quarrelsome surface, and with it, the married couple come to terms with each other in a loving way. Connected to this humane is the inhumane. Christine may complain in a grossly unfair manner – her husband’s friendly, malicious questions about what it was like with the nice young baron and, oh, did he want money, destroy her more quietly and thoroughly than any tantrum. krater’s production explores the depths of a concept of two-person relationships that still prevails today.
Maria Bengtsson as Christine and Philipp Jekal as her husband convey these contradictions, while Thomas Blondelle as Baron convincingly plays the somewhat stupid Schnorrer. The Deutsche Oper Orchestra under Donald Runnicles doesn’t have an easy time of it given the abundance of images on stage. Sometimes the sound becomes too massive and the conversational tone required by Strauss when singing cannot be maintained. But the symphonic interludes, which comment on the events and the feelings of those involved and put them into music, are very successful.
Next performances: April 28th, May 1st and 5th
www.deutscheoperberlin.de
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