Richard Strauss’s father, Franz, a distinguished musician, played horn in the Court Orchestra of Munich. With a dogmatically conservative attitude towards the music of his time, he raised his son on a diet of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, not allowing him to become acquainted with the music of such “radicals” as Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms, let alone Liszt and Wagner. Sons, however, frequently have a way of defying their fathers; Strauss not only became intimate with the music of the 19th century, but also became one of the composers to whom his father would not have given approval. Strauss was to become one of the 20th century’s most distinctive composers, often using the tone poem as his chief vehicle of musical expression.
In 1945, Strauss produced some remarkable and affecting music. In Metamorphosen, he looks backward to the style of an earlier time with great mellowness and depth of feeling. The circumstances surrounding Metamorphosen’s composition were not happy and are reflected in the work. “Perhaps sorrow and despair make us babble on too much,” Strauss wrote to a Swiss critic, “but the burning of the Munich Court Theater, where Tristan and Die Meistersinger had their first performances, where I first heard Freischütz 73 years ago, and where my good father sat at the first horn desk for 49 years … was the greatest catastrophe of my life. There is no possible consolation.” (Many people wonder why Strauss never spoke up against the events of World War II that led to the bombing of Munich.) Strauss sketched a composition to be called Sorrow for Munich, which was never completed, but became part of Metamorphosen.
Metamorphosen was commissioned by the Collegium Musicum of Zurich and its conductor, Paul Sacher. Strauss composed it quickly in the spring of 1945. Sacher’s orchestra premiered Metamorphosen on January 25, 1946, but it was not until 1990 that a short score was discovered in Switzerland and acquired by the Bavarian State Library in Munich, Germany. Its discovery gave rise to the theory that Strauss originally conceived the piece for seven strings and then changed his mind when he received Sacher’s commission intended for a larger string group.
Metamorphosen consists of a set of transformations of three or four themes or thematic fragments. The principal theme, played by the viola after eight introductory measures, bears a striking resemblance to a phrase from the “Funeral March” in Beethoven's “Eroica” Symphony. Strauss said that while composing, he was virtually unaware of the likeness, but slowly, the literal quotation from the Eroica fashioned itself out of his theme. Strauss' other thematic references may not have been unconscious; the clearest is from King Marke's monologue in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, undoubtedly an allusion to the bombed out Munich Court Theater. There are other Tristan references too, and recollections of Strauss's own Thus Spake Zarathustra and Ariadne auf Naxos.
Structurally, Metamorphosen has one long movement, subdivided into three sections. The first and third are slow, both elegiac and marked Adagio, while the middle one is a more animated Agitato. Throughout, Strauss weaves polyphonic threads in constantly changing textures into a deeply moving composition.
Program notes by © Susan Halpern 2025