Metamorphosen, A Study for 23 Solo Strings

By Richard Strauss

BORN : June 11, 1864, in Munich

DIED : September 8, 1949, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany

Ω COMPOSED : 1943–45

Ω WORLD PREMIERE : January 25, 1946, by the Collegium Musicum Zürich with conductor Paul Sacher, who commissioned the work

Ω CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA PREMIERE : October 19, 1969, led by then-Music Director George Szell. The Orchestra most recently performed Metamorphosen in fall 2011, with Music Director Franz Welser-Möst conducting performances in Cleveland, Paris, and Vienna.

Ω ORCHESTRATION : 5 first violins, 5 second violins, 5 violas, 5 cellos, and 3 basses

Ω DURATION : about 30 minutes

DURING WORLD WAR II and its aftermath, the discomforts of age, the privations of war, and the loss of many dear people and things combined to test Richard Strauss’s usually buoyant attitude toward life. To save him from depression, Strauss’s friends and his son, Franz, urged him to resume composing. New works began to trickle from him again, including the Symphony for Winds, the Oboe Concerto, and the DuetConcertino, all in a light, Neoclassical vein. But accompanying them were pieces in a more searching, Romantic style, including Metamorphosen and the Four Last Songs with orchestra. When

Strauss wryly referred to these works as “wrist exercises,” his friends were gratified to hear a spark of the old Straussian ironic wit.

Even in our fraught present time, it’s hard to grasp the enormous dimensions of death and destruction in World War II. Between 1943 and 1945, millions of people died, and beloved cultural institutions, such as the Munich National Theater, the Dresden Opera House, and the Vienna State Opera, were destroyed by bombs. For Richard Strauss, who had grown up listening to his father play horn in Munich, premiered his operas Salome and Der Rosenkavalier in Dresden, and venerated the art form at its great temple in Vienna, this was devastating. Hearing news of the destruction in Munich, at age 80, he wrote: “I am beside myself. … There can be no consolation.” A few bars of music Strauss wrote in mourning for the bombing of Munich grew, a few months later, into the long elegy he titled Metamorphosen. He pointedly indicated that it was “for 23 solo strings,” not for string orchestra — in other words, a piece of chamber music, with an implied intimacy of expression. The Swiss conductor Paul Sacher, who commissioned so much important new music in the 1930s and 1940s, gave the premiere with his Zurich-based chamber orchestra, the Collegium Musicum, in January 1946. Strauss himself conducted the final rehearsal.

The work’s title has inspired much speculation. According to MerriamWebster, metamorphosis means a “change of physical form, structure, or substance especially by supernatural means,” and the work’s themes are certainly subjected to constant change and stirred together in counterpoint. This produces ever-shifting harmonies that seem like a ray of sunlight one moment and deep gloom the next.

Strauss’s churning of related themes finds parallels in W. B. Yeats’s poem “Easter 1916,” questioning the needless death and sacrifice in the wake of Irish republicans’ failed rebellion against British rule. Yeats writes the refrain: “All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.” Yet, it is hard to find anything “born” in Metamorphosen, which the critic Alan Jefferson called “possibly the saddest piece ever written.”

In this piece, Strauss seems to be using the endlessly twisting, unfurling idiom of Wagner to mourn the symbolic death of Wagner and so much else in German culture in what he called “the most terrible period in human history… the 12-year reign of bestiality, ignorance, and anti-culture under the greatest animals.” Many have criticized Strauss for not demonstrating the same grief he held for the destruction of German culture for the human cost of the brutal Nazi regime, but the sense of loss is palpable.

Strauss’s metamorphosis seems to unfold in reverse: the butterfly turns into a destructive worm. Recent scholarship has traced the inspiration of Metamorphosen not to Yeats, but rather to Goethe, who addressed the idea of transforma- tion in the poems The Metamorphosis of Plants and The Metamorphosis of Animals. These ideas also extended to the poem

“Niemand wird sich selber kennen” (Nobody Will Ever Know Himself ), a dark and prophetic meditation on civilized people’s capacity for evil.

As for the themes of this piece, there are allusions everywhere to masterpieces of German music, too fleeting and too many to describe here. One theme, however, stands out from the rest. This is a brief descending scale, in a dotted rhythm. It appears almost subliminally throughout this long adagio, but near the end Strauss quotes it outright. It is a phrase from the second-movement funeral march of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”), originally written to honor Napoleon Bonaparte then famously rescinded when Napoleon declared himself Emperor. Beethoven instead dedicated his Third Symphony “to the memory of a great man.” It seems likely that Strauss felt he was composing this music in memory of a great musical culture. There is no escaping the deep sadness of it.

— David Wright