Strauss - Death and Transfiguration

Program Note

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration)
Composed 1888-1889

In its exploration of that most universal of questions – what lies waiting for us all at the end of the road - Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration was a decidedly ambitious venture. By the time of its premiere in 1890, Strauss had already proven himself a master of orchestration and sound painting with the first few of his self-titled tone poems – his word was Tondichtung, literally "saying with sound" – portraying the vibrancy of the Italian countryside and culture in Aus Italien, the tragic events of the Scottish play in Macbeth, and the misdeeds, romantic conquests and ignominious fate of the infamous Don Juan. After the success of these early ventures, his next effort was on a topic of profound philosophical intent: a musical reflection on the final moments of life and the beyond. While the literature abounds with Requiem masses, funeral marches, and death scenes in operas or ballets, few composers had tried to create a purely musical narrative describing in detail the sensations and thoughts that might accompany the experience of dying. Rather than starting from a descriptive text or specific program, Strauss called upon friend and poet Alexander Ritter to compose a sort of descriptive accompaniment to the piece after the music had been written. In the lines of Ritter’s poem, we hear very clear echoes of the scene that Strauss had so carefully tried to paint in the music itself:

"In the small, poverty-stricken room...lies the sick man on his cot...exhausted, he has sunk into sleep, and the quiet ticking of the clock on the wall is all you can hear...At the confines of his life, is he dreaming of the golden days of his childhood? – But death does not grant its victims sleep and dreams for very long. It shakes him awake cruelly and starts the battle anew."

The gently pulsing rhythmic motive that begins the piece and runs throughout it in various guises could serve just as well as the ticking of a clock or as the irregular heartbeat or labored breathing of a dying man. Over it, harmonies take shape and shift slowly, conveying the silence and foreboding advance of the inevitable, and a wistful melody brings hints of reminiscence. The tranquility is broken by a harsh interruption, an audible death pang that initiates the struggle between motives of fate and suffering versus those of youthful memories and ardent striving that shapes the dialectic of the piece. In this struggle we can hear the painful convulsions of a dying man, and sense a body and mind wracked with conflict, only to be resolved by the arrival of what the ailing subject “has sought all this time with his heart’s deepest longing” – an idea of transfiguration that starts to peek through at the height of the struggle. The prefiguration of this theme sounds in stark contrast to the agitated texture that surrounds it and momentarily wins out; again Ritter’s words capture exactly what the music’s closing passages suggest:

"...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 longingly: world-redemption, world-transfiguration!"

~Eric Dudley, DMA Yale University