Historians often use the term “the long 19th century” to refer to the period from the French Revolution (1789) to the First World War (1914). In music, this roughly corresponds with period we call “Romanticism”, from Mozart’s late works through Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz and Wagner all the way to Richard Strauss. The period ends, abruptly, with the advent of modernism, ushered in by Stravinsky’s ballet “The Rite of Spring”, and Schoenberg’s atonal works. From that point on, Romanticism was passé, no longer reflecting the spirit of the age.
As a young composer, Richard Strauss (1864-1949) was seen as a modernist. His operas “Salome” and “Elektra” did everything modern music was supposed to: pushed the limits of harmony, expanded the size of the orchestra and shocked audiences. He did everything to the maximum. But with the arrival of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Strauss retreated from the modernist frontlines. His next opera, “Der Rosenkavalier” returns to the world of the 18th century with a traditional plot based on the doings of the aristocracy, peppered with audience-pleasing waltzes. He continued to write in a similar idiom all the way to the end of his life in 1949, his compositions increasingly sounding like they came from the vanished world of the nineteenth century. It’s not a stretch to define “the long nineteenth century” in music as beginning with Beethoven’s Third Symphony, “Eroica”, and ending with Strauss’s death. Beethoven’s symphony was the first to present the artist as hero (the absolute epitome of romanticism in music), and Strauss’s late works were the last to hold on to the 19th century’s musical values. No-one else was writing music that sounded anything like the long nineteenth century in the 1940s, and the era ended with Strauss’s death.
Our concert next week begins with Beethoven’s “Eroica”, and ends with one of Strauss’s final works, his tone-poem “Metamorphosen”, written in 1945 for 23 solo string instruments. Strauss lived in an elegant villa in Garmisch, outside Munich. From the earliest moments of his career he had been seen as the greatest living German composer, his operas played in very house, his symphonic works in every concert hall. By 1945, he had watched with horror as one German city after another collapsed under the Allies’ bombs. Of particular pain was watching the opera houses fall, for these had been the places of his greatest triumphs. In February 1945, Dresden was razed to the ground. Strauss despaired, writing to his librettist Gregor: “…I too am in a mood of despair! The Goethehaus, the world’s greatest sanctuary, destroyed. My beautiful Dresden, Weimar, Munich, all gone!” Every major opera house and concert hall in Germany was now rubble.
It was in this atmosphere that Strauss began “Metamorphosen”, the name borrowed from Goethe’s ideas about plants constantly growing and changing, yet remaining the same. Strauss used Goethe’s idea in relation to musical themes: melodies that can constantly change and develop, yet retain their original character.
Strauss’s main melody is based on nothing less than the theme from the second movement of Beethoven’s “Eroica”. That movement is a funeral march: Beethoven’s depiction of the death of our hero who comes to represent all mankind. Strauss always claimed that the quotation was an accident, but whether this is true doesn’t really matter to us. What more appropriate theme could there be for a German witnessing the total destruction of all he held dear?
“Metamorphosen” is an astonishing work, almost relentlessly despairing and grieving in anguish, all through the lens of Beethoven’s funeral march. On the final page of the score, Strauss finally quotes Beethoven’s melody in full, giving away his secret. Underneath it he wrote, “In Memoriam”. It’s almost as if the traditions of musical Romanticism and the German musical culture that had dominated the world since Bach’s time, are dying with the final sighs of Strauss’s music. Our concert next week begins with Beethoven’s Eroica, and ends with Strauss’s “Metamorphosen”.
“Metamorphosen” poses interesting questions for us. First, as Americans, it forces us to consider how much “good” was destroyed during the Second World War, instead of seeing that conflict in a simplistic, binary way. As a musician, it’s astonishing to witness the end of what is perhaps classical music’s greatest, and certainly most-loved epoch. Perhaps “Metamorphosen” it is a reminder to us all, as the hymn says, that all “Earth’s proud empires pass away.” We might do well to remember that in our lives and our politics.
Originally published in The Florida Times-Union, January 31, 2021: