Intermezzo (Strauss)

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Work data
Title: intermezzo
Original language: German
Music: Richard Strauss
Libretto : Richard Strauss
Premiere: November 4, 1924
Place of premiere: Dresden theater
Playing time: approx. 2 ¼ hours
Place and time of the action: Austria at the beginning of the 20th century
people
  • Hofkapellmeister Robert Storch (baritone)
  • Christine, his wife (soprano)
  • Franzl, her little son (child's voice)
  • Anna, the maid of honor (soprano)
  • Baron Lummer (tenor)
  • Kapellmeister Stroh (tenor)
  • Notary (baritone)
  • Wife of the notary (soprano)
  • Kommerzienrat (bass)
  • Council of Justice (baritone)
  • Chamber singer (bass)

Intermezzo - A bourgeois comedy with symphonic interludes in two acts (Opus 72, TrV 246) is the eighth opera by Richard Strauss . The composer wrote the libretto himself. The premiere took place on November 4, 1924 in the Dresden theater .

action

Stage: The villa of Hofkapellmeister Storch; Toboggan run on the Grundlsee; Salon in Vienna; Prater in Vienna

first act

The famous sound poet and court music director Storch has to go to Vienna for an engagement. The travel preparations lead to - obviously usual - friction with his caring wife Christine. After his departure, Christine met the Baron Lummer, whom she ran over while tobogganing. She wants to write her husband a letter of recommendation for the young man who would like to study, but Lummer angrily refuses when he asks her for money. She is completely enraged when the post delivers the slippery letter from a certain "Mieze Meier" to her husband. Christine wants the separation and sends her husband a telegram to Vienna - "We are divorced forever!"

Second act

Vienna - stork playing skat. Christine's telegram arrives. Storch, who has just taken protection of his wife in the men's group, is stunned, but after a while suspects the mix-up. Kapellmeister Stroh, Mieze Meier's “friend” and the actual recipient of the letter, has to clear up the mistake. Reconciliation in the Storch house - the couple laugh again at their "exemplary" marriage.

History of origin

While working on the woman without a shadow , Strauss asked his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal in May 1916 for a “very modern, absolutely realistic comedy of characters and nerves” as a counterpoint. Hofmannsthal refused and recommended the playwright and critic Hermann Bahr . Since Strauss had an opera with autobiographical features in mind, Bahr advised the composer to write the libretto himself under supervision. Strauss created a successful comedy text, the main characters are easy to recognize as the Strauss couple. He added a longer theoretical introduction to the score, in which he explained the concept of the opera; Strauss saw in her more than an autobiographical "breaker" or a "stopgap until the next Hofmannsthal", although he had once said something about it.

At the beginning of the work, the opera had the working title Das marital Glück . At the beginning of June 1918, Strauss wrote to Hofmannsthal that the composition of the "little marriage opera (...) was excellent". Nevertheless, Strauss did not complete the composition until August 21, 1923 on the second South American tour with the Vienna Philharmonic .

The premiere took place on November 4, 1924 in the Dresden theater , directed by Fritz Busch (with Lotte Lehmann as Christine). The opera was a great success with the audience because of the autobiographical “revelations”, but critics treated it very ungraciously for the same reason ( Paul Hindemith was an exception). After the "sensation" subsided, to the great regret of the composer, the opera quickly fell silent. Even today, intermezzo is only played sporadically, for example in 2008 at the Zurich Opera House in a production by Jens-Daniel Herzog under the direction of Peter Schneider .

layout

orchestra

The orchestral line-up for the opera includes the following instruments:

music

In his introduction to the score, Strauss explained the aim of his work: word intelligibility. The voices are in the foreground, the orchestra only assists. Strauss wanted to create a "German Parlando ". The quick sequence of scenes in the piece is linked by numerous interludes in which the action is introduced or continued musically (for example, the piano “shuffling” cards before the Skat scene). There is only opera on a grand scale in the finale. Ulrich Schreiber considers the original score to be one of the “most aesthetically interesting” and one of the underrated works by the sound poet.

interpretation

Like Die Frau ohne Schatten and Die ägyptische Helena, Intermezzo is one of the Strauss operas that deal with the theme of marriage. In Arabella , too , the foundations of the cohabitation of man and woman form the intellectual center of the work. Strauss had already written in the context of his Sinfonia domestica : "Marriage is the most serious event in life." The increasing endangerment of civil marriage was a widespread topic in artistic discourse, especially in the period after the First World War . The operas mentioned treat marriage from the perspective of fairy tales, myths and history. For Hofmannsthal, marriage was above all a “miracle of transformation”, in which two autonomous personalities find each other ready to surrender themselves. For Strauss, on the other hand, marriage was first and foremost a reality that acts as a stabilizing force and should guarantee life security.

However, the realism with which Strauss treated the subject in Intermezzo was deeply alien to Hofmannsthal. Strauss, however, sensed the trail of a new form of opera: away from literary opera, the great romantic subjects, the superhuman heroes, the hollow pathos of language. He envisioned a new genre of play and conversation operas in the structure of episodic sequences of scenes. With this, Strauss tied in with developments that took place simultaneously in realistic and naturalistic drama (for example in Gerhart Hauptmann , Frank Wedekind , Ferdinand Bruckner and Hermann Bahr). How much he even included the development of the new media in these considerations is shown by a remark to Hermann Bahr that he had “almost only cinema images” in mind as the dramaturgy of this new genre.

Hofmannsthal criticized the lack of drama in the libretto. It is a mere "character painting" with no right action. Strauss countered: “But what are these so-called dramatic acts? Always the same for 2000 years: murder and manslaughter, intrigue of the subordinate against the hero, engagement with obstacles overcome or divorce - none of that is interesting and has been there so and so often. ”He had already emphasized earlier that it was“ harmless and insignificant the occasions for this piece "may be, so what is caused by them," are "after all, still the worst conflicts of soul that can move in a human heart". Strauss pleaded for the thematization of individual characters and their conflicts in the opera, as well as for the reflection of the everyday bourgeois world in the libretto as in the composition. In doing so, he created essential foundations for the further development of realistic music theater in the 20th century.

Discography (selection)

literature

  • Katharina Hottmann: Bourgeois mentality and genre concept in Richard Strauss' “Zeitoper” “Intermezzo” . In: Hanns-Werner Heister (Ed.): The ambivalence of modernity . Vol. 1. Berlin 2005 (= Music, Society, History 1), pp. 89–100.
  • Kurt Wilhelm : Richard Strauss personally . Henschel, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-89487-326-4 .
  • Ulrich Konrad : Intermezzo - The Egyptian Helena - Arabella . In: Richard Strauss Handbook. Metzler / Bärenreiter, Stuttgart / Weimar / Kassel 2014, ISBN 978-3-476-02344-5 .
  • Bryan Gilliam: Intermezzo and the tradition of time opera in the twenties. In: Richard Strauss. Life - work - interpretation - reception . Internationales Gewandhaus Symposium 1989. Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1991, pp. 129-134

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Willi Schuh : Richard Strauss - Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Correspondence . Zurich 1978, p. 342.
  2. ^ Willi Schuh : Richard Strauss - Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Correspondence . Zurich 1978, p. 409.
  3. ^ Ulrich Konrad : Intermezzo - Die Ägyptische Helena - Arabella. In: Walter Werbeck (Ed.): Richard Strauss Handbook. Metzler / Bärenreiter, Stuttgart / Weimar / Kassel 2014, ISBN 978-3-476-02344-5 , p. 214.
  4. ^ Ulrich Schreiber : Opera guide for advanced learners . Volume 3. Bärenreiter, Kassel 2000, ISBN 3-7618-1436-4 .
  5. ↑ quoted from: Ulrich Konrad : Intermezzo - Die Ägyptische Helena - Arabella . In: Walter Werbeck (Ed.): Richard Strauss Handbook. Metzler / Bärenreiter, Stuttgart / Weimar / Kassel 2014, ISBN 978-3-476-02344-5 , p. 217.
  6. ↑ quoted from: Ulrich Konrad : Intermezzo - Die Ägyptische Helena - Arabella . In: Walter Werbeck (Ed.): Richard Strauss Handbook. Metzler / Bärenreiter, Stuttgart / Weimar / Kassel 2014, ISBN 978-3-476-02344-5 , p. 218.
  7. ^ Willi Schuh : Richard Strauss - Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Correspondence . Zurich 1978, p. 669.
  8. ^ Willi Schuh : Richard Strauss - Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Correspondence . Zurich 1978, p. 669.
  9. ^ Willi Schuh : Richard Strauss - Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Correspondence . Zurich 1978, p. 670.
  10. ^ Willi Schuh : Richard Strauss - Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Correspondence . Zurich 1978, p. 569.