Strauss Death and Transfiguration
Strauss Death and Transfiguration Program Notes
Three themes of the Romantic era are love, nature or death, and the Romantics focused on creating a personal and subjective response in the audience, to have them feel what they felt. Stunningly, Strauss was 24 years old when he began this piece. (It may be apocryphal, but 61 years later, dying, he said death felt like this piece. However, Strauss was a great self-publicist, even to the end!) Franz Liszt’s invention, the Tone Poem form influenced Strauss, the idea of representing the transformative nature of death, he was clearly led by Wagner, especially the Liebestodt (love-death) ending Tristan & Isolde. Strauss’s tone poems are quite literal, with specific events, ideas or people spelt out. Strauss gave an outline of Death & Transfiguration to his friend, the concertmaster and poet Alexander von Ritter (and nephew of Wagner, by marriage), who wrote a program for the tone poem: I. (Largo) In a dark, shabby room, a man lies dying. The silence is disturbed only by the ticking of a clock – or is it the beating of the man’s heart? A melancholy smile appears on the invalid’s face. Is he dreaming of his happy childhood? II. (Allegro molto agitato) A furious struggle between life and death, at whose climax we hear, briefly, the [grand, ascending] theme of Transfiguration that will dominate the final portion of the work. The struggle is unresolved, and silence returns. III. (Meno mosso) He sees his life again, the happy times, the ideals striven for as a young man. But the hammer-blow of death rings out. His eyes are covered with eternal night. IV. (Moderato) The heavens open to show him what the world denied him, Redemption, Transfiguration – the Transfiguration theme first played pianissimo by the full orchestra, its flowering enriched by the celestial arpeggios of two harps. The theme climbs ever higher, dazzlingly, into the empyrean [heaven]. Born: June 11, 1864, Munich, Germany Died: September 8, 1949, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, GermanyTod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration) is a tone poem by Richard Strauss that depicts the final hours of a dying artist — his struggle with death, his memories, and his ultimate spiritual transfiguration. It is one of the most emotionally powerful works in the orchestral repertoire.
Strauss composed the work in 1888 and 1889, and it was premiered in Eisenach on June 21, 1890, conducted by the composer.
A typical performance lasts approximately 25 to 28 minutes.
Listen for the contrast between the anguished passages depicting the dying man's struggle and the serene, radiant Transfiguration theme that closes the work in luminous E major. The opening depicts an irregular heartbeat in the strings — a remarkably realistic touch.
Strauss himself requested that Death and Transfiguration be played at his own funeral — and it was, when he died in 1949 at the age of 85. He reportedly remarked near the end of his life that dying was exactly as he had composed it.
