Richard Strauss:  Intermezzo

Christine Storch Janis Kelly Robert Storch Stephen Gadd

Baron Lummer Andrew Kennedy Notary Jonathan Best

Kammersinger Njabulo Madlala Commercial Counsellor Jeremy Huw Williams

Stroh Richard Roberts Legal Counsellor Colin Brockie AnnaSusanne Holmes

Notary’s wifeMartha McLorinan

Conductor Stephen Barlow

DirectorStephen Unwin Designer Paul Wills Lighting designerJohn Bishop

Richard Strauss wrote the libretto for Intermezzo. It proved to be both a weakness and a strength. a strength in so far as it enabled him to compose something entirely free from the inhibitions of characterisation and plot form which he felt had held him and opera back from a modern understanding of music emerging from the ordinary. It’s a weakness because the experiment proved to be a failure both dramatically and musically. the fact he never again wrote without a librettist admits his own sense if dissatisfaction with his experiment.

Yet though we now find the musical language of this opera rather accessible – unlike the audiences of the time – the story of a trivial misunderstanding regarding fidelity between a husband and wife even in Strauss’s hands lacks natural dramatic tension. yet he also gives us an entire world of upper middle class norms and its upper middle class trivialities, gossip pretensions and preoccupations. It’s not quite Beaumarchais as it is fixed firmly and routed to the composers own world but in its way it reveals much of the things in human nature that baffle amuse and endear.

The principal character – Christine Storch lovingly if not always beautifully sung by Janis Kelly – is itself an oddity. It demands a large voice but in a sense a diminuendo of delivery as much is semi-dialogue skirted with flashes of high register vocal line. she is not a loveable character and beyond the vanity on f her domestic preoccupation as a character she has little to say to the world. the genius of her and her ‘intermezzo’ romance singing the additions of her household accounts briefly summarises her intellectual worth and dramatic ambition. but out of this unpromising clay gradually Strauss moulds another Christine – one who finds her soul and who in the very last scenes explodes melodically, touchingly and almost orgasmically into our reality. I think our heroine is on stage for almost the entire opera and it’s a role at the end that demands of the singer an almost Wagnerian cri de coeur.

The real problem with the opera is that beyond Christine Strauss isn’t truly much interested in any of the other characters. Instead the music of greatest power and persuasive beauty resides in the orchestral interludes between each of the scenes. Here Strauss lavishes all of his inventive musical genius, waltzes, polkas, strange haunting strings that eerily linger over a last dissonant chord…on and on…until the continuing dramatic dialogue breaks into these idyllic reveries outside this normal world with its pedestrian concerns.

That said this night the last of the festival gave us some of the best musical singing of my week at Buxton. I loved Stephen Gadd’s composer and Andrew Kennedy’s louche but shallow Baron.

There wasn’t too much business; there was not too much over acting; the sets were simple but delightful; the costumes caught the music and the sense of place. I have a recording of Birgit Neilson as Christine but that doesn’t mean I did not enjoy and thrill to Janis Kelly.

I did and the audience did. ii thought of all the things tackled at Buxton –  this opera with its oddities and complexities should have been the one hardest at which to succeed. Their success only goes to show that sometimes if directors let the artists embrace their roles that even an uneven opera like Intermezzo can produce a triumph.

It is with that hope I would return to the festival though I honestly think that some of the productions that were staged this year should have been taken in hand and given a good kick up the proverbial backside before they were unleashed upon a paying public…