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“I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.” – Richard Strauss
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“It’s a funny thing, this is just how I imagined it in Tod und Verklarung” – Ricard Strauss, on his deathbed
Richard Strauss: Tod und Verklärung (Death andTransfiguration) op. 24 – Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France
Richard Strauss himself wrote: “Death and transfiguration is the fruit of my imagination, and not that of a lived experience (I fell ill almost two years later). It was an idea like any other… Probably the musical need, after Macbeth [which begins and ends in D minor] and Don Juan [which begins and ends in E minor] to write a piece that begins in C minor and finishes in C major!”.
The c minor key of the work’s opening is that of agony and nostalgia. The timpani announces the violence of the duel with Death, Un coup de timbale annonce la violence du combat avec la mort, a fierce struggle that subsides briefly before giving way to the glorious memories that seize the imagination of the dying hero: it is the heroic life (expressed by the horns), it is love, it is also the theme of the Ideal that seeks to impose itself. (The last of the Four Last Songs quotes this theme fleetingly.) A new transition, with stifled yet threatening tom-tom hits, leads to a great crescendo that affirms the theme of the Ideal and ends with an arpeggio of harps, in an atmosphere of definitive reconciliation. – www.francemusique.com/concerts
Dispatches from the Asylum 