Alemania
A Strauss Fixation
Jesse Simon
It is perhaps understandable that the muted
reception of Die Frau ohne Schatten would have prompted Strauss to
retreat temporarily from the world of high mythology and turn his attention to
the vicissitudes of modern domestic life; but the semi-biographical Intermezzo
remains a curious outlyer in the canon. Von Hofmannsthal refused to work on it
and, without the poetic humanity of his regular librettist, Strauss let his
penchant for irony and cynicism get the better of him. If the opera’s
situations are the stuff of stock comedy, the mean-spirited portrayal of the
wife and the apparent saintliness of the husband make for an uncomfortably
one-sided critique of a turbulent marriage. Had Pauline Strauss ever wished to
file for divorce, Intermezzo would have made superb evidence of her
husband’s cruelty.
Tobias Kratzer’s new production at the
Deutsche Oper Berlin did little to dispel the unpleasantness behind Intermezzo’s
ostensible comedy. The staging was elegant, passingly witty and technically
unassailable, but its dazzling surface of up-to-the-moment modernity and
winking meta-textual reference only amplified the unlikeability of the
characters and the implausibility of the situations, leaving us with a battle
of the sexes in which neither side deserved to come out on top. Even the
excellent performance of Maria Bengtsson in the thankless role of Christine and
the presence of some delightful orchestral interludes could not transform the
opera into anything more than a frivolous confection with an extremely bitter
centre.
Strauss: Intermezzo. Sir Donald Runnicles, conductor. Tobias Kratzer, director. Berlin, Deutsche Oper, April 2024. © 2024 by Monika Rittershaus.
Mr Kratzer, who directed a very good
production of Arabella for the Deutsche Oper last season – and who is
scheduled to direct Die Frau next year – has an undeniable knack
for presenting conceptually complex stagings in ways that are easily
accessible. Where some directors revel in dense clusters of arcane imagery and
high theory, Mr Kratzer’s web of reference and allusion is constructed in such
a way as to make us feel that we’re in on the joke, that we can, indeed,
congratulate ourselves for having ‘got it’. His facility with concept is
matched by a command of technology – especially live video – and stage
management that yield highly controlled stagings of great visual appeal.
Mr Kratzer’s Intermezzo was
unfailingly clever from beginning to end, but it also seemed hopelessly
enamoured of its own cleverness. The setting was updated to a recognisable
present-day of Emoji-filled DMs and slightly awkward zoom meetings; live
interactions took place within a long, low space at the bottom of the stage
while the top half was left blank to accommodate both live and pre-filmed video
projections that (for the most part) related directly to the stage action. The
zoom call between Christine and the notary’s wife was given extra
verisimilitude by the slight latency between voice and projection, and when
Franzl appeared on stage glued to the glow of a computer screen, the video
projections revealed that he was, in fact, watching his father on an Arte
live-stream.
The staging’s knowing evocation of the
immediate present was a feat of disciplined technology and ingenious stage
design – although someone might have pointed out that the Berlin opera scene
already went through its ‘realistic-looking cars on stage’ phase seven years
ago – but its web of references designed to blur the lines between stage and
reality (as well as biography and fiction) was perhaps the greater achievement.
In the staging, Storch the famous conductor and Strauss surrogate was on his
way not to Vienna but to the Deutsche Oper Berlin to conduct the première of a
new production of Intermezzo, while Christine’s dalliance was
transformed into adultery in a scene suggesting that the libretto approached
the idea of ‘dancing’ in the same way that Hays-Code Hollywood used ‘kissing’.
The explicit infidelity and the fact that Christine’s final lines of contrition
were not spoken from the heart but read from the score made the uncomfortable
suggestion that the opera was less a domestic comedy than a revenge fantasy.
Strauss: Intermezzo. Sir Donald Runnicles, conductor. Tobias Kratzer, director. Berlin, Deutsche Oper, April 2024. © 2024 by Monika Rittershaus.
Whether or not there is biographical
justification for such a reading, the presence of Strauss loomed large over the
production. In the first act Christine attempted to seduce the Baron with some
Strauss-themed role-play, and the course of a long and awkward scene the two
ended up dressed as characters from Daphne, Rosenkavalier, Ariadne and Salome
(Christine later appeared as Elektra); and in perhaps the opera’s most
misguided scene, the stage action of Christine packing her bags was accompanied
by black and white clips from filmed Strauss productions (including some
footage from Mr Kratzer’s own Arabella). The clips were a delight, but
the twin games of name-that-soprano and guessing which scene they were singing
proved so distracting that it became all but impossible to concentrate on the
stage.
Yet even in the moments that didn’t quite
work, one was never left with a sense that anything had been left to chance. There
were plenty of visual easter eggs for those willing to look – the bizarre
ostrich painting in the background of one first-act scene was referenced in the
logo of the airline to which the Pratergarten scene had been transferred (the
name of the fictional carrier: Strauss Airlines, of course) – and the
neatness with which the visual cues and constant cross-references resolved
themselves left one in no doubt of the imagination and intelligence that had
gone into the staging. The manic cleverness, combined with a propensity for
broad comedy, created such an aggressively impressive surface that it became
almost impossible to discern the lack of real characters and emotions behind
it.
Strauss: Intermezzo. Sir Donald Runnicles, conductor. Tobias Kratzer, director. Berlin, Deutsche Oper, April 2024. © 2024 by Monika Rittershaus.
If the staging presented Christine as a
series of extremes – perfectly tailored to each scene but not always connected
to a central thread – Maria Bengtsson did an admirable job of weaving the
character’s occasionally contradictory moments into a credible whole. The
combattive banter in the opening dialogue with Storch had just enough affection
to keep the scene ambiguous, yet the prickly exterior vanished almost
immediately when she first came in contact with the baron; her outrage at the
discovery of her husband’s suspected adultery was comedically outsized, but the
resignation in her final scene suggested the impossibility of true
reconciliation. Ms Bengtsson conveyed the score’s most beautiful passages with
appropriate clarity, but the great strength of her performance was the ease
with which she navigated the diverse demands of the opera’s various scenes.
As Storch, Philipp Jekal started the
evening in a mode of distracted irritation at odds with the mythology that the
staging constructed around the character. His performance grew more impassioned
as domestic turmoil threatened to undermine his comfortable life – his
contribution to the “Pratergarten” scene was excellent – and a subtle but
palpable hint of condescension in the final scenes introduced traces of bitter
irony into the reconciliation between husband and wife. And Thomas Blondelle
gave a skilfully balanced reading of Baron Lummer, managing to convey the
essence of a man with no appreciable qualities without effacing the character
entirely.
The orchestra under Sir Donald Runnicles
gave a performance of the score that favoured carefully controlled dramatic
momentum over exaggerated opulence. The waltz interlude of the first act was
never overplayed and emerged – as Strauss surely intended – more as scenic
illustration than actual dance music; the storm of the second act was commendably
vigorous; and the interlude between the fifth and sixth scenes of the first
act, played with reverent clarity, came as a reminder that even situations of
domestic banality couldn’t prevent Strauss from crafting moments of disproportionate
beauty.
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