Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration), tone poem, Op.24

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration), tone poem, Op.24

While Don Juan seems an entirely appropriate work for Richard Strauss at the age of 24 - unmarried but not inexperienced and abundant in creative energy - Tod und Verklärung seems a very unlikely project for the same composer only a few months later. The traditional explanation, that he had recently suffered a life-threatening illness, has long been discredited, not least by Strauss himself, who pointed out that he did have a serious illness but not until two years after the work was written. Perhaps the death-bed scenario of Tod und Verklärung was a purely professional choice, to give the composer the basis of a tone poem that would be a complete contrast to its predecessor, or even a reversal of it. Whereas Don Juan starts in the midst of life in the major and ends with a kind of extinction in the minor, Tod und Verklärung begins near death in the minor and ends with the posthumous realization of a long-sought artistic ideal in the major.

If Tod und Verklärung still seems less than entirely characteristic of Richard Strauss - nothing else he wrote comes as close in spirit to the symphonic poems of César Franck - it is perhaps because of his devotion at that time to the principles of Franz Liszt. He had been converted to the Liszt aesthetic by his friend Alexander Ritter, whose verse commentary on the work is rather flatteringly printed in the score. Far from being the source of inspiration for the music - the scenario was devised by the composer himself - Ritter’s poem is an informed but somewhat misleading response to it. The most reliable guide to the poetic content is an account Strauss provided in a letter, five or six years after he had completed the work, in 1894.

The construction of Tod und Verklärung, unlike that of Don Juan, cannot realistically be compared to any classical form like rondo or sonata form. In Liszt’s symphonic poems, as Strauss observed, “the poetic idea really does act simultaneously as the structural element,” and that is what happens here. Obviously, he would not have chosen a scenario that does not work in musical terms but in committing himself to a construction that, again in the composer’s words, “makes the main theme its point of culmination and does not state it until the middle” he was taking a big risk. Normally, an idea as important as that would be introduced and integrated at an early stage but in this case the whole of the first section and most of the second

are concerned with other things.

The Largo introuction sets the death-bed scene in C minor, the dying man’s ”irregular breathing,” as Strauss puts it in his letter of 1894, represented by the artfully syncopated motif heard first on muted violins and violas and then as a fitful pulse on timpani. During the course of the work that motif is to appear in every area of the orchestra and at all dynamic levels. The lyrical melodies introduced by flute and oboe shortly after the first entry of the harp represent “friendly dreams” which “conjure a smile on the features of the deeply suffering man.” But as the tempo changes to Allegro molto agitato, “he wakes up…racked with horrible agonies,” which are vividly depicted by loud exclamations from the brass and woodwind and writhing gestures on lower strings and woodwind. The most prominent theme here, introduced by the whole orchestra in rhythmic unison at the top of a climax, seems to be a desperate expression of defiance. It is only towards the end of this splendidly sustained struggle that the main theme of the work, the symbol of what Strauss describes as the dying artist’s “highest idealistic aims,” rises in brief splendour on horn and trombones.

Then “the pains leave off” and in the slower passage that follows “his thoughts wander through his past life, his childhood passing before him, the time of his youth with its strivings and passions.” All this is represented by resourceful and increasingly fervent variations on the lyrical melodies from the introduction and, eventually, illuminated by three proclamations of the “idealistic aims”on two harps and brass. But, as the reminders of the syncopated motif insist they must, the agonies return - and for the last time: life is cut off on a sudden diminuendo just before the first entry of the tam-tam. So much for death. Transfiguration is a vision of the artist’s “highest idealist aims” finally achieved. In musical terms, the proud theme representing those ideals is at least admitted to the tonality so far denied it and secured there in an elevated affirmation of C major.