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Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration)
Richard Strauss

Richard Strauss was born June 11, 1864 in Munich, and died September 8, 1949 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Composition of Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration) was completed on November 18, 1889. The work is dedicated to “my dear friend Friedrich Rösch.” Its first performance took place in Eisenach on June 21, 1890 with the composer conducting. It is scored for 3 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani (3 drums), gong, 2 harps, and strings.


It is no accident that the very title of Strauss’s tone poem, Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration), evokes the ghost of Richard Wagner’s opera, Tristan und Isolde. Wagner himself had excerpted and joined two parts from Tristan as orchestral pieces, calling them Liebestod und Verklärung (These excerpts are better known as Prelude and Liebestod, but that is another matter). When the young Strauss encountered Wagner’s opera in 1888, it became his obsession for the next several years, with Tod und Verklärung being one direct result of his experience.


Where Wagner’s opera addresses issues of love and death, abetted by healthy doses of Schopenhauer and Buddhist philosophy, Strauss’s work is the glorification of the Faustian ideal—a soul that strives toward an imagined goal. Like the title characters of Wagner’s opera, Strauss’s protagonist achieves redemption in death. To get a good idea of Strauss’s program (as well as of the musical content of the piece), one only has to read the poem by Alexander von Ritter—written after the composition was completed, and ready for publication—which is found at the head of the score:


In the small, poverty-stricken room, only dully illuminated by a candle end, lies the sick man on his cot. He has just struggled once again with death in wild desperation. Now, exhausted, he has sunk into sleep, and the quiet ticking of the clock on the wall is all you can hear in the room, in which the fearful silence is a premonition of the approach of death. Around the pale features of the sick man plays a sorrowful smile. At the confines of life, is he dreaming of the golden days of childhood? -- But death does not grant its victim sleep and dreams for very long. It shakes him awake cruelly and starts the battle anew. The urge for life and the power of death! What a horrible struggle! Neither one wins the victory, and it becomes quiet once again! -- Sinking back, weary from battle, sleepless as if in feverish delirium, the sick man now sees his life, trait by trait and image by image, passing by his mind’s eye. First the dawn of childhood, shining sweetly in untouched innocence! Then the bolder games of the young man, using and trying out his strength, until he has matured for the manly battle, which now blazes forth in hot joy with life’s highest benefits as its stake. To take everything that ever seemed transfigured and to mold it into an even more transfigured shape: this alone is the noble impulse that accompanies him through life. Coldly and scornfully the world places one barrier after another in the path of his efforts. Whenever he believes he is near his goal, he is greeted by a thunderous “Halt!” -- “Turn the barrier into a rung by which to rise ever higher and higher!” Thus he strives, thus he climbs, does not abandon his sacred impulse. What he has sought all this time with his heart’s deepest longing, he still seeks while bathed in mortal sweat, seeks-- but, alas, cannot find it. Even if he conceives of it more clearly, even if it gradually grows upon him, still he can never exhaust its possibilities, can never consummate it in his mind. Then the last blow of death’s iron hammer rings out, breaks the earthly body in two and covers his eyes with the night of death. -- But he hears mightily resounding from heaven that which he sought here lovingly: world-redemption, world-transfiguration!


There are many graphic touches in the score of Tod und Verklärung. At the beginning of the piece, for example, one can almost hear the labored heartbeat of the dying man. Similarly, at the moment of the protagonist’s death, a rising figure, accompanied by a decreasing dynamic, represents the soul escaping the confines of the sick body. The word “transfiguration” tells much about how Strauss treats his thematic material. Throughout the earlier stages of the piece, he hints at his melodies by insinuating their profiles. Only later does he permit these themes to flower into their full—and transfigured—shape.


Toward the end of his life, in composing the last of his “Four Last Songs,” Strauss returned to his noble “transfiguration” theme when setting the following line from “Im Abendrot” by Joseph von Eichendorff:


Wie sind wir wandermüde—Ist dies etwa der Tod? (How weary of travel we have become—could this perhaps be death?)


Program Note by David B. Levy, ©2007/2026

Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration)
Richard Strauss

Richard Strauss was born June 11, 1864 in Munich, and died September 8, 1949 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Composition of Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration) was completed on November 18, 1889. The work is dedicated to “my dear friend Friedrich Rösch.” Its first performance took place in Eisenach on June 21, 1890 with the composer conducting. It is scored for 3 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani (3 drums), gong, 2 harps, and strings.


It is no accident that the very title of Strauss’s tone poem, Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration), evokes the ghost of Richard Wagner’s opera, Tristan und Isolde. Wagner himself had excerpted and joined two parts from Tristan as orchestral pieces, calling them Liebestod und Verklärung (These excerpts are better known as Prelude and Liebestod, but that is another matter). When the young Strauss encountered Wagner’s opera in 1888, it became his obsession for the next several years, with Tod und Verklärung being one direct result of his experience.


Where Wagner’s opera addresses issues of love and death, abetted by healthy doses of Schopenhauer and Buddhist philosophy, Strauss’s work is the glorification of the Faustian ideal—a soul that strives toward an imagined goal. Like the title characters of Wagner’s opera, Strauss’s protagonist achieves redemption in death. To get a good idea of Strauss’s program (as well as of the musical content of the piece), one only has to read the poem by Alexander von Ritter—written after the composition was completed, and ready for publication—which is found at the head of the score:


In the small, poverty-stricken room, only dully illuminated by a candle end, lies the sick man on his cot. He has just struggled once again with death in wild desperation. Now, exhausted, he has sunk into sleep, and the quiet ticking of the clock on the wall is all you can hear in the room, in which the fearful silence is a premonition of the approach of death. Around the pale features of the sick man plays a sorrowful smile. At the confines of life, is he dreaming of the golden days of childhood? -- But death does not grant its victim sleep and dreams for very long. It shakes him awake cruelly and starts the battle anew. The urge for life and the power of death! What a horrible struggle! Neither one wins the victory, and it becomes quiet once again! -- Sinking back, weary from battle, sleepless as if in feverish delirium, the sick man now sees his life, trait by trait and image by image, passing by his mind’s eye. First the dawn of childhood, shining sweetly in untouched innocence! Then the bolder games of the young man, using and trying out his strength, until he has matured for the manly battle, which now blazes forth in hot joy with life’s highest benefits as its stake. To take everything that ever seemed transfigured and to mold it into an even more transfigured shape: this alone is the noble impulse that accompanies him through life. Coldly and scornfully the world places one barrier after another in the path of his efforts. Whenever he believes he is near his goal, he is greeted by a thunderous “Halt!” -- “Turn the barrier into a rung by which to rise ever higher and higher!” Thus he strives, thus he climbs, does not abandon his sacred impulse. What he has sought all this time with his heart’s deepest longing, he still seeks while bathed in mortal sweat, seeks-- but, alas, cannot find it. Even if he conceives of it more clearly, even if it gradually grows upon him, still he can never exhaust its possibilities, can never consummate it in his mind. Then the last blow of death’s iron hammer rings out, breaks the earthly body in two and covers his eyes with the night of death. -- But he hears mightily resounding from heaven that which he sought here lovingly: world-redemption, world-transfiguration!


There are many graphic touches in the score of Tod und Verklärung. At the beginning of the piece, for example, one can almost hear the labored heartbeat of the dying man. Similarly, at the moment of the protagonist’s death, a rising figure, accompanied by a decreasing dynamic, represents the soul escaping the confines of the sick body. The word “transfiguration” tells much about how Strauss treats his thematic material. Throughout the earlier stages of the piece, he hints at his melodies by insinuating their profiles. Only later does he permit these themes to flower into their full—and transfigured—shape.


Toward the end of his life, in composing the last of his “Four Last Songs,” Strauss returned to his noble “transfiguration” theme when setting the following line from “Im Abendrot” by Joseph von Eichendorff:


Wie sind wir wandermüde—Ist dies etwa der Tod? (How weary of travel we have become—could this perhaps be death?)


Program Note by David B. Levy, ©2007/2026