Intermezzo, Garsington Opera, review: 'bogus and tedious'

What a silly, flimsy opera Richard Strauss’s Intermezzo is. First performed in 1924, it’s based on an actual, but trivial, episode in his blameless married life. Thinly disguising himself as Storch, a decent uxorious fellow, devoted to his art, whose only faults are domestic absent-mindedness and a penchant for long card sessions with the chaps, he turns his volatile but devoted wife Pauline into Christine – a menopausal hysteric with a fundamentally good heart.

The libretto (written by Strauss himself) hinges on Christine finding a letter in her husband’s absence which mistakenly leads her to suppose that he is unfaithful. She, meanwhile, has been enjoying an extra-marital flirtation with a young man who turns out to be a spiv.

Never for a moment in this farrago does one feel that the marriage is seriously threatened, tested or excavated. No wisdom or insight into relationships is offered: instead everything ends in an orgy of happy-ever-afterness that becomes positively nauseating.

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Strauss was attempting to write a “bourgeois comedy” of ordinary contemporary life – an idea fashionable in opera in the 1920s – but he fails to weave his material into anything either amusing or illuminating, let alone touching.

In its succession of 14 short scenes of conversational dialogue or reflective monologue, the only lyricism derives from a series of extravagant orchestral interludes, in which Strauss shows off all his old tone-poem tricks without giving them any correlative in the dramatic or emotional situation. It’s all utterly bogus, and tedious to boot.

^{Ailish Tynan & Mary Dunleavy as maid and mistress (Photo: Garsington Opera/Mike Hoban)}

Garsington stages the opera using Andrew Porter’s translation: I’m not convinced this helps its cause. Nor did Jac van Steen’s conducting do anything to endear me to the score – despite (or perhaps because of) the ad hoc orchestra’s enthusiastic playing, it was all pitched much too loud and what should seem spontaneous merely clunked.

American soprano Mary Dunleavy sang accurately and intelligently as the ghastly Christine, but only a Norma Shearer or Claudette Colbert could make the character anything but thoroughly tiresome.

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Mark Stone sounded a bit woofy as Storch. Sam Furness does a nice turn as Pauline’s toyboy and Oliver Johnston, still a student as the RAM, caught the ear as a hanger-on. Ailish Tynan and Barnaby Rea are wasted as a maid and a Viennese swell.

Bruno Ravella’s production is refreshingly straightforward, graced by Giles Cadle’s versatile doll’s house of a set.

But nothing can dilute or conceal the underlying smugness of Strauss’ self-portrait.

Until 9 July; 01865 368201 garsingtonopera.org