World Premiere: June 21, 1890
Last HSO Performance: November 16, 2014
Instrumentation: 3 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, 2 harps and strings
Duration: 23 minutes

Richard Strauss

It was at his first conducting post as assistant to the renowned Hans von Bülow at Meiningen that Strauss began composing his tone poems. Death and Transfiguration (1889) was the third of these, following Macbeth (1887) and Don Juan (1888). The literary inspiration for Death and Transfiguration originated with Strauss himself, as he noted in a letter to his friend Friedrich von Hausegger: “The idea came to me to write a tone poem describing the last hours of a man who had striven for the highest ideals, presumably an artist. The sick man lies in his bed breathing heavily and irregularly in his sleep. Friendly dreams bring a smile to his face; his sleep grows lighter; he awakens. Fearful pains once more begin to torture him, fever shakes his body. When the attack is over and the pain recedes, he recalls his past life; his childhood passes before his eyes; his youth with its strivings and passions; and then, when the pain returns, there appears to him the goal of his life’s journey — the idea, the ideal which he attempted to embody in his art, but which he was unable to perfect because such perfection could be achieved by no man. The fatal hour arrives. The soul leaves his body, to discover in the eternal cosmos the magnificent realization of the ideal which could not be fulfilled here below.” 

Strauss’ composition follows his literary program with almost clinical precision. It is divided into four sections. The first summons a vision of the sickroom and the irregular heartbeat and distressed sighs of the man/artist. The second section is a vivid portrayal of his suffering. The ensuing section, beginning tenderly and representing the artist’s remembrance of his life, is broken off when the anguished music of the second part returns. This ultimate, painful struggle ends in death, signified by a stroke of the gong. The final section, hymnal in mood, depicts the artist’s vision of ultimate beauty as he is transfigured into part of “the eternal cosmos.”