Metamorphosen

One of the 20th century’s most troubled and troubling masterpieces, Metamorphosen is a wordless war requiem for string orchestra that is also an impassioned, intensely personal meditation on a civilisation destroyed by its own criminal folly. The elderly Strauss spent much of the Second World War in his villa at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, maintaining a studied distance from politics. But in October 1943, his hometown of Munich was devastated in an Allied bombing raid, and he responded the only way he knew how—sketching a few bars of music, entitled “Mourning for Munich”. Returning to the sketch in 1945, in the final weeks of the war, Strauss worked with a new intensity, and the sketch grew into Metamorphosen—a “study for 23 solo strings” with a name borrowed from Goethe. It began as a piece of chamber music, but the finished work is written for 23 individual musicians, each playing their own line, and combining into a sweeping, 25-minute panorama of a world in anguish. It begins in deep funereal darkness, then brightens as half-remembered fragments of Wagner and Mozart rise through ever-richer and more agitated surges of sound. A final climax totters into an equally final collapse, and the opening music returns, destined this time to lead downwards into darkness—where a fragment of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony stands, blackened, amongst the ruins.