Death and Transfiguration

Richard Strauss began writing the tone poem Death and Transfiguration (German: Tod und Verklärung), Op. 24, in the late summer of 1888 and completed the work on 18 November 1889. It is dedicated to his friend Friedrich Rosch. Under the composer's baton, the work was premiered on 21 June 1890 at the Eisenach Festival.

"Death and Transfiguration is one of Richard Strauss's orchestral masterpieces, composed in the genre of the programmatic tone poem. The models of this genre are the tone poems of Franz Liszt. Inspired by literature, poetry and philosophy, Strauss dramatically innovated and expanded the familiar musical form. He created poetic works in which the music is concretely meaningful and theatrically expressive.

In Death and Transfiguration, influenced by Schopenhauer's philosophy of suffering, the meaning of life and death as healing, Richard Strauss musically renders human agony and suffering, the struggle against death and the subsequent liberation of the spirit.

The programme text was written later. At the composer's request, Alexander Ritter composed a programmatic poem in four movements, which was printed at the beginning of the score: Largo (The sick man, near death), Allegro molto agitato (The battle between life and death offers no respite to the man), Meno mosso (The dying man's life passes before him) and Moderato (The sought-after transfiguration).

The composer emphasized that death and transfiguration are figments of his imagination, not his experience: '... (I fell ill almost two years later). It was an idea like any other. Probably the urge after Macbeth (the poem begins and ends in D minor) and Don Giovanni (which begins and ends in E minor) to write a piece that begins in C minor and ends in D major!". With this tonal scheme he alludes to Ludwig van Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the theme of fate.

Later, Richard Strauss returned to the ideas of Death and Transfiguration, using some of its themes in the last movement of his late tone poem, The Life of the Hero, Op. 40 (1898) and in the Four Last Songs for soprano and symphony orchestra written towards the end of his life (1948).