Berlin, Winter 1903. Hotel Bristol, sunset. Josef Stransky, a famous opera conductor, is having a drink with the Italian tenor who originated the role of Cavaradossi in Puccini’s Tosca, three years earlier. The tenor is approached by a young woman who fearlessly asks if she could have a free ticket to the opera. In bad German accent, he refers her to the conductor mispronouncing his name as “Straussky.” The conductor flirts with her and promises a ticket, but forgets about it afterwards. When she goes home, resolute to get her reward, she looks up his address (“Straussky”) in the telephone directory but can only find “Richard Strauss,” the composer.
A few days later, a note arrives at the Strauss residence. Strauss was not home. Pauline, his wife, opens the envelope: “Dear Sweetheart, do bring me the ticket, please. Thanks for your “pleasant” time at the hotel. Your faithful Mitzi.♥ My address is Mitzi Mücke, Lüneberger Strasse 5.”
“By the time Richard Strauss returned home from a concert tour,” Charles Osborne tells us in his Complete Operas of Richard Strauss, “his wife had already consulted a lawyer to start divorce procedings. For days the composer had to endure his wife’s stridently delivered accusations until a friend convinced Pauline it was a mistake. This was the incident that inspired Strauss to compose his domestic drama Intermezzo […] completed in Buenos Aires in August 1923, when he visited that capital as a conductor.” Incident or accident?
—Raúl Rodriguez, La Bergamote, NYC, 11.6.2018