Keeping up with the Strausses is the subject of this "bourgeois comedy with music."
by Paul J. Pelkonen
"Believe me, I really, really needed my wife. I actually have a lethargic temperament, and if it were not for Pauline, I shouldn’t have done it all." --Richard Strauss
The home life of the composer Richard Strauss and his longtime wife Pauline is a regular subject of music from the composer's middle period. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the pages of his 1927 opera Intermezzo. This work plunges deep into the turbulent waters of the Strauss' long and happy marriage, providing an inside, if biased view of what life was like at a certain villa in Garmisch that, as its owner once boasted, was paid for with the proceeds from the earlier opera Salome.
by Paul J. Pelkonen
 |
| "Richard! Go compose!" Pauline and Richard Strauss in a happy moment. Photo from the Strauss family archive, Richard Strauss-Institut Garmisch-Partkirchen. |
The home life of the composer Richard Strauss and his longtime wife Pauline is a regular subject of music from the composer's middle period. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the pages of his 1927 opera Intermezzo. This work plunges deep into the turbulent waters of the Strauss' long and happy marriage, providing an inside, if biased view of what life was like at a certain villa in Garmisch that, as its owner once boasted, was paid for with the proceeds from the earlier opera Salome.
