Written by Anna Vorhes

Born
June 11, 1864, Munich, Germany

Died
September 8, 1949, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany

Instrumentation
ten violins, five violas, five celli, three bass

Composed
September 1944 - April 1945

World Premiere
January 25, 1946, by Collegium Musicum Zürich, Paul Sacher conducting

Duration
25 minutes

Something to listen for
This work is very unusual because it does not use the strings as groups.  Each individual player has a part unique from the others.  Each part has at least one moment to shine in the composition.  The lush texture that results is part of the depth of emotion expressed in this work.  Listening to a recording, one is tempted to believe one or another of the players are leading all the way through, but experiencing live musicians playing allows listeners to identify how the melodies and accompaniments and the polyphony travel through the ensemble.  You may hear a brief quote from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.  There is building up and drawing back.  Finally, toward the end there comes a familiar melody from Beethoven's Third Symphony.  In the score, Strauss indicates "in memorium" as the strains of Beethoven's funeral march are heard.  Strauss was reacting to the end of World War II, quoting Beethoven's reaction to Napoleon's crowning himself emperor.  Beethoven's response to earing the news was to destroy his dedication of the Eroica.  Strauss's reaction was to create a more complex work, reacting to the destruction of so many places and so much of the society he valued.

Program Notes

Richard Strauss was a composer blessed with good health and a long life.  Some of his most beloved works were created at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century.  His tone poems ranged from the picture of a mischievous young boy in Til Eulenspeigel, to an examination of Nietzsche's speculations on man and superman in Also Sprach Zarathustra, to examination of human existence in Death and Transfiguration.  After the turn of the century, he turned his focus to opera, with Salome, Ariadne auf Naxos and the beloved Der Rosenkavalier among others.  Then as he was on the cusp of his seventies, the world around him changed. 

When Hitler began his rule of Germany, Strauss made the decision to accept appointments in the Third Reich.  Many artists left Germany in search of everything, from safety to a place that suited their philosophies better.  Strauss decided to stay.  It's complex to say why he did so.  One part was undoubtedly his desire to use his public position to protect members of his extended family, including his Jewish daughter-in-lay and her family.  Another part was the thought that he had built a life and following in Germany, and it would be hard to relocate in his seventies.  He held no illusions about the German government by the time he wrote this piece, however.  He no longer had the patronage of the government, he had not been able to save all those he had hoped to protect, and life was difficult by the final days of  WW II.

Watching and hearing of the destruction of many of the beloved concert halls Strauss had built his career in was extremely upsetting to the composer.  Hearing the Munich Opera House had been destroyed by bombs led him to write, "I can write no more music today.  I am beside myself."  He turned to the writings of German philosophers, especially those of Goethe.  Among other works, Strauss read The Metamorphoses of the Plants and The Metamorphoses of the Animals.

Strauss began work on this attempt to make sense of the world he found himself inhabiting in September, 1944.  He started out thinking of a smaller ensemble but ended up with this wonderfully complex work by the time of its premiere in Switzerland.  Friends had arranged for a commission from a Swiss ensemble which performed the premier in January of 1946, eighty years ago this month.

While Strauss was composing, Germany fell.  Around the composer, people were being asked to commit suicide to avoid the takeover by the Allies.  It's hard to imagine living in a time where in the last concert of the Berlin Philharmonic, just days before the end of the war, Hitler Youth passed cyanide capsules to the audience should they wish to use them before the Allied invasion.  That month alone, it is estimated that over 7,000 Germans committed suicide in Berlin.

Fortunately, the American division that took over the area where the Strauss family lived included several musicians who admired the composer.  They insured that Strauss and his family were left with as much peace as possible at the end of the war.  Strauss would live a few more years, finally succumbing to complications from a stroke in 1949. 

The complexity of Metamorphosen seems analogous to the disturbing complexity of the world during the Second World War.  Strauss was long disillusioned by the government, having used them as much as he could early on but finally being rejected by them and rejecting the government, albeit quietly, in return.  This composition feels like an expression of complex and difficult thought patterns as the world changed during the Third Reich and its fall.