Warning: do not try this at home! Richard Strauss, the most auto­biographical of composers, sailed close to the wind when he wrote a not very flattering portrait of his wife in an opera – the more so since Pauline de Ahna was none of your sweet, compliant little numbers but an impetuous woman with a distinct naggy streak. It is hard not to see an element of own-back-getting from the even-tempered composer in its depiction of her silliness and lack of self-control, and yet the rarely performed opera turns out finally to be a loving portrait, not just of Pauline, but of their marriage, and by implication of marriage itself.After a bickery first scene, the composer Robert Storch sets off from the couple’s Bavarian home to Vienna for two months, leaving wife Christine at home