By Milner Fuller
Manager of Classical Programming
Death has always been a favorite subject for artists. How could it not be? What’s bigger than life and death? You can paint a landscape or compose a symphony about springtime, but nothing hits the human condition harder than the one thing none of us escapes.
And yet, today, most of us don’t want to talk about it. Death has been pushed out of sight. It happens in hospitals or nursing homes, behind closed doors, surrounded by machines and professionals. For a lot of people, death feels less like a natural part of life and more like an interruption—something to be managed, not contemplated.
That wasn’t the case in Richard Strauss’s time. In the 1880s, life expectancy in Europe was just over 40 years, barely half what it is in the U.S. today. Childhood death and death in childbirth were heartbreakingly common. People grew up with death around them. It wasn’t an abstract idea. It was in the house, in the neighborhood, in the family photo album. (Yes, literally: if you want to lose some sleep, google Victorian post-mortem photography. Families sometimes posed with their recently deceased children as though they were still alive. It’s eerie, and it shows just how differently people related to death.)
Transformations of Spirit: Oct. 10-11Death in the Romantic Imagination
The Romantics didn’t sweep death under the rug. They put it center stage. And they did it in wildly different ways:
The grotesque: Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique ends with a witches’ sabbath; Franz Liszt’s Totentanz is basically a death-metal riff on the “Dies irae;” and Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” gives us murder, dismemberment, and madness in grisly detail.
The erotic: Death wasn’t always horrifying. Sometimes it was seductive. Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde imagines love fulfilled only through death. Franz Schubert gives us “Death and the Maiden,” where Death whispers comfort to a terrified girl, and “Erlkönig,” where the seductive death-spirit lures a child away from his father’s arms. Poe’s “Annabel Lee” does something similar: love and the grave become inseparable.
The transcendent: For others, death is the crowning moment of life. Beethoven’s “Eroica” funeral march turns death into something noble and public. Strauss took that same idea in his tone poem Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration), where an artist struggles, then finally passes into radiant immortality.
Strauss at the End
Strauss didn’t just leave death behind once he’d written about it. Sixty years later, as he himself was dying, he came back to the same vision in his Four Last Songs. The final one, “Im Abendrot” (“At Sunset”), pictures two lovers—Strauss and his wife, Pauline—walking into the twilight together. The soprano sings: “Is this perhaps death?”
Immediately afterward, Strauss quotes the transfiguration theme from his old tone poem. A musical callback across a lifetime. And according to his family, Strauss really believed it: near the end, he said dying was exactly as he’d imagined it as a young man: a release, a transfiguration.
Then and Now
In the 19th century, when death was everywhere, artists stared it down. They made it grotesque, erotic, heroic, transcendent. They gave it shape.
In our world, we mostly don’t. Death is delayed, hidden, outsourced. We avoid it until we can’t. Maybe that’s why pieces like Strauss’s still move us so deeply. They remind us that death is not just a medical event but a human one—still the ultimate mystery, and still one of art’s greatest subjects.
It’s a reminder that while medicine can prolong life, art still gives us the language, and the courage, to face its end.
Transformations of Spirit: Oct. 10-11