After 42 years Sissy Strauss, the beloved artistic liaison of the metropolitan opera, leaves New York to move back to her hometown Vienna.
The film gives an inside view of her famous Salon in New York and her pasta-parties, where singers such as Anna Netrebko and Juan Diego Flòrez performed in from of a private audience. Everyone comes along, when Sissy and her husband Max are inviting: artists, directors, diplomats, writers, neighbours – friends. What makes these meetings so special? Maybe it’s the genuine performances from super stars of the Opera in a small and private environment.
The love of the artists made it possible for Sissy Strauss to reopen a salon in New York.
“The pressure in opera business is huge. But here you can relax. You can just be yourself and meet people who you usually never meet“ says the Swedish singer Peter Mattei, who embodies the title role in the current enactment of Don Giovanni at the Met theatre.
But now Sissy Strauss is up for a change. The viewer gets to see her departure from New York back to Vienna and her first Salon after coming back to her old home.
The Salon tradition in Vienna ended with the departure of Berta Zuckerkandl in the last half of the 1930s. Maybe with Sissy Strauss there is a new impulse for Salon culture in Vienna.