Chapter 3 - Pauline de Ahna

Summary

This chapter deals with Pauline Strauss-de Ahna as a singer and as the wife of a prominent composer and conductor. Her professional career from its beginnings at Munich’s Royal Conservatory and her period of instruction as a pupil of Richard Strauss and Emilie Merian-Genast to her engagements at the opera stages, primarily of Weimar, Munich, and the Bayreuth Festival, is traced and contextualized within the typical structures of professional female singers. Special focus is on the question of how women were able to negotiate the role of a public performer on the one hand and that of a middle-class wife and mother on the other around 1900. Select reviews of her performances help profile her voice and repertory as an opera singer. The chapter also surveys her national and international activities as a Lied singer and examines the "bourgeois comedy" Intermezzo of 1924 with regard to the public image Richard Strauss staged of his wife and marriage.