Frau Strauss's Alter Egos

An affectionate new production of Intermezzo in Dresden and a notable revival of Claus Guth's magical Frau ohne Schatten in Berlin

James Ley as impecunious aristocrat Baron Lummer, Maria Bengtsson as Christine Picture © Semperoper Dresden/ Monika Rittershaus

Richard Strauss married the soprano Pauline de Ahna in the autumn of 1894, four months after she had sung the heroine of his first stage work, Guntram, at the Ducal Court Opera of Weimar, where the composer was music director. Theirs was a happy, if complicated, marriage that endured until the middle of the 20th century: after Richard died in September 1949, it is said that Pauline wept until her own death the following May. To outward appearances they may have seemed a mismatch - she was the daughter of a general, he the son of horn player (as Pauline insistently pointed out to their friends) - but, despite her notorious moods and bossiness in public, Strauss was clearly devoted to her.

Indeed Pauline not only inspired some of his greatest early songs, but Strauss immortalised his wife in a series of operatic roles based to varying degrees on her character - from the hectoring Herodias in Salome (1905) to an idealised portrait of the world’s most beautiful woman, Helen of Troy, in Die Ägyptische Helena (1928).

Two other Strauss operas, Die Frau ohne Schatten and Intermezzo, feature married women who share character traits with Pauline: the Dyer’s Wife in the former, a magnum opus of Wagnerian proportions, pregnant with the philosophical and poetic ideas of Strauss’s favoured librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal; and Christine Storch in the latter, a ‘bourgeois comedy’ in which Strauss effectively puts his spouse and himself on stage. The fastidious Hofmannsthal wanted nothing to with Strauss airing his dirty linen in public, so left the composer to write his own witty and action-packed libretto. In a sense, Intermezzo is Strauss’s riposte to Hofmannsthal’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, a light-hearted, more accessible treatment of essentially the same story.