Tod und Verklärung

When Richard Strauss completed his tone-poem Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration) in November 1889 he already had a reputation as a young German genius of irrepressible—possibly even irresponsible—creative verve. It might seem odd that a 25-year-old composer at the height of his youthful brilliance would be interested in so sombre a subject, but to any cultured young German of Strauss’s generation—brought up on Nietzsche and Wagner—notions of idealism, sacrifice and heroic struggle had never been more inspiring. Tod und Verklärung is a celebration of idealism: the creed of a young artist, expressed with all the iridescent colours of a full symphony orchestra. There’s a slow, melancholy introduction (Strauss imagined a dying man breathing “heavily and irregularly” in his sleep). A ‘life and death struggle’ commences—a passionate and stormy symphonic drama, crowned by a stately, soaring theme to represent the hero’s ‘ideals’. With a quiet stroke of the gong, we move beyond the veil where, to music of mounting radiance and triumph, the artist’s soul “leaves his body, to discover…the magnificent realisation of the ideal that could not be fulfilled here below”. It’s the vision of a young man, but decades later on his deathbed Strauss—a wit to the last—remarked that “dying is just as I composed it in Tod und Verklärung”.