Program Notes
Tod und Verklärung, Op. 24 (Death and Transfiguration)
Richard Strauss
Richard Strauss’ Death and Transfiguration was completed in 1888 and narrates the experience of an artist as he lays dying. It is a powerful and challenging orchestral masterpiece that immediately engages the listener, written in four separate sections that are played without pause. We are presented with a sick man, The Artist, as he struggles with his final living moments. As he ruminates, his life passes before him as memories. Musical themes depicting childhood innocence, creative strife, and love symbolize The Artist’s journey. Vignettes of happier memories float to the surface, dissipating just as quickly as Death ultimately overcomes The Artist. Finally, The Artist accepts his reality and allows his spiritual transfiguration to take place.
Strauss composed the work while working as a rehearsal pianist at Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth Festival, and while there are no explicit quotations from the elder composer’s masterful opera Tristan and Isolde, the harmonic landscape and melodic structure most certainly had an effect on young Strauss—only 25 years old at the time. The orchestral work does not employ a vocal part, though operatic moments pepper the 25-minute piece. Like Tristan, Death and Transfiguration is tumultuous and suspenseful, but retains moments of bittersweet optimism. It reminds us that even in the darkest moments, something better may await on the other side.
This optimism is a reflection of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who inspired a great many artists but explicitly influenced Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Richard Strauss was subsequently influenced by Schopenhauer’s philosophy that suffering is necessary to liberate the spirit. Schopenhauer also believed that death, while final in the physical world, did not equate to ultimate annihilation of the spirit. Death and Transfiguration is able to personify this philosophy most explicitly in the battle between The Artist and Death in the middle of the work. Strings present multiple iterations of The Artist’s yearning theme, pleading for just one more moment in time, which is squandered by Death’s ominous timpani and brass interjections. A massively satisfying orchestral cadence follows, though The Artist’s battle is still not won. The fourth section, “The Sought After Transfiguration,” opens in stark contrast. Finally transcending the struggle, The Artist hesitantly steps into a sparsely orchestrated, sinister soundscape that quickly blooms into a serene reprieve—signaling that accepting Death has, finally, led The Artist to paradise.
Throughout Death and Transfiguration, we hear a recurring timpani motif—a heartbeat? The final grains of sand slipping through an hourglass?—that brings us back to the reality of the moment: imminent death. We are reminded constantly that nothing is forever, and our glimpses of happiness and accomplishment must be savored.
Fully accepting the narrative nature of this work, Strauss asked his close friend Alexander Ritter to write a poem to accompany the music. The composer expected a short inscription to include in the score’s front matter, but the final version that Ritter returned was remarkably articulated poetry that exceeded Strauss’ initial expectations. Ritter’s poem became a roadmap to the work and left Strauss in awe of how well his musical ideas were captured in words.
Ultimately, Death and Transfiguration is a portrait of strife, pursuing an ideal, and transcending struggle. It is clear that Strauss intended to capture the rawest, most final moments of life through music, and there is something comforting in knowing that the dying process is not entirely anguished. On his own deathbed sixty years later, Richard Strauss is rumored to have said the experience of dying was just how he’d written it in Death and Transfiguration.
Read Alexander Ritter’s preface to the published score of Death and Transfiguration here.
Preface to Death and Transfiguration
