Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings

Program notes

About the Work

Richard Strauss was eighty when he wrote Metamorphosen, and the world he had lived in was being destroyed around him. In October 1943 the National Theatre in Munich was burned out in an air raid. It was the house where his father had played first horn for nearly half a century, and where Strauss himself had first heard an opera as a child. He wrote to his friend and biographer Willi Schuh that this was “the greatest catastrophe which has ever been brought into my life, for which there can be no consolation”. Soon afterwards he sketched a few bars of music under the heading “Mourning for Munich”.

Those sketches found a purpose when the Swiss conductor Paul Sacher commissioned a piece for strings. Strauss wrote out the score in a single month, beginning on 13 March 1945, the day after the Vienna State Opera was destroyed, and finishing on 12 April, a few weeks before the end of the war in Europe. Sacher conducted the first performance in Zurich on 25 January 1946, with the composer present.

The subtitle is “study for 23 solo strings”, and it is meant literally. There are ten violins, five violas, five cellos and three double basses, and each player has an individual part. The title comes from Goethe, whom Strauss was rereading at the time and who used the word for the slow transformation of living things. It describes the method as well: a handful of short themes are turned over, combined and changed across an unbroken span of about 25 minutes.

Strauss never said in so many words what the piece mourns, and listeners have argued about it since. The score itself offers one clue. In the final bars the lowest strings play the opening of the funeral march from Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, and beneath it Strauss wrote two words: “IN MEMORIAM!”

What to Listen For

The piece opens in the depths, with cellos and basses moving through a slow sequence of dark chords. Then the violas introduce the idea that haunts the whole work: a few repeated notes followed by a falling phrase in a halting, dotted rhythm. If it sounds half familiar, that is because it is very close to Beethoven’s funeral march, though Strauss keeps the full quotation back until the end.

The overall shape is slow, faster, slow. From the dark opening the music gradually gathers speed and warmth. New melodies appear in major keys and the texture grows more and more intricate, until all 23 lines are in motion at once. Listen for how often a solo violin or cello rises out of the web and sinks back into it. These brighter passages sound like memories, and each time the falling theme pulls the music back.

At the height of the fast central section the momentum breaks, and the opening tempo returns with full weight. The last pages are a long descent. When the cellos and basses finally state Beethoven’s march plainly, under the theme that has been shadowing it all along, the connection is made, and the piece ends in C minor, very quietly.