Richard Strauss - Metamorphosen

Richard Strauss, Metamorphosen.

Antoni Wit, Conductor.
Staatskapelle Weimar.

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[SmeagolTheBeagle]

This is one of those pieces that you think about all day and eventually become so excited to return home and listen that it becomes an obsession.

[TheodoresTomfooleries]

I don't think I've ever heard anything which so perfectly sounds like grief, sadness, bitterness and loss like this.

[johnwalzer]

This is an exquisite piece but you have to be in the right frame of mind to enjoy it. It's not easy listening or light entertainment. I can't imagine anyone coming home at the end of a long, hard day and saying, "I need to chill and relax - I think Strauss' Metamorphoses would do the trick." No. But if you're in a contemplative mood and have half an hour to focus your attention exclusively on the music and let it carry you along in its very special sound world, Strauss' music can be cathartic. The appearance of Beethoven at the end and those final modulations are unbelievably dark and moving. Like Vaughan Williams and Verdi, Strauss could still conjure magic into his eighties.

[EASYTIGER]

This to me is the most extreme music of grief.

[davidecarlassara]

I have discovered this piece through this video when I was about 12, 6 years ago, now I can say it has remained one of my favourite pieces, and it kind of changed my life.

[rochelle]

The first time I heard this piece, I cried in the theatre. The performers told us the story of its composition, and I could just feel Strauss’s pain exuding from this piece

[gtheepic]

25:53 is the saddest part of the piece. it sounds like despair

[coolmuso]

I remember I first heard this piece in 2019. A friend of my mum's had given her two tickets for a recital happening in our town and I went with my sister. The main event of the recital was the Bruch Violin Concerto, but just before that, this piece was played. I had never heard of this piece before (I knew who the composer was) and I didn't know what to expect. I ended up being so captivated and moved by this music. It was so beautifully haunting and tragic that I went home that night with this piece stuck in my head and I had to give it another listen. And here I am still listening to it! A masterpiece.

[jimparkin]

No one scores the death of Western civilization quite like Richard Strauss.

[joshscores]

Toward the end of his life, Richard Strauss underwent a profound aesthetic change that resulted in some of the composer's most intensely personal and philosophical music. Among the most striking of these works from Strauss' final decade is Metamorphosen (1945), written in an atmosphere of devastation following World War II.

As a meditation on the bombing of Dresden (which destroyed the city and killed 130, 000 of its inhabitants), Metamorphosen represents a significant departure from the more exuberant of Strauss' tone poems -- Til Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, Don Juan, Don Quixote -- by that time a half-century old. In contrast to the vivid portraiture of those works, Metamorphosen is wholly unrepresentational, a tragic, pessimistic reflection on a more intimate level than any of Strauss' other music.

The work unfolds in a single, long movement. Strauss sustains and develops a series of recurring, interrelated motives that, as the title indicates, are linked by their transformation into new material rather than -- as in conventional variations -- a common thematic identity. The work includes several direct references to the funeral march in the second movement of Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony; here they sound entirely appropriate and natural within the broader structure, underlying rather than emphasizing the somber nature of the work as a whole.

(AllMusic)

[brianlocke]

According to Timothy L. Jackson's analysis:
0:00 Exposition, Group I, Motive 1
0:41 Motive 2
1:19 Motive 3
5:58 Group II, Subsidiary Theme 1, Motive 4: m.82
8:33 Transition I: m.130
8:46 Motive 5: m.134
9:15 Subsidiary Theme 2, Motive 6: m.144
11:25 Transition II: m.187
12:39 Development section I: m.213
14:05 Development section II: m.246
15:22 Development section III: m.278
16:12 Transition III: m.299
18:04 Reappearance of Group II Sub. Th. 1: m.345
19:34 Recapitulation begins: m.391
22:21 Overlap of Recap and Coda (Beginning of Coda): m.433
22:39 Transition IV: m.437
23:24 Recap resumes: m.449
25:58 Coda resumes: m.487
27:01 "Coda of the Coda, " Paraphrase of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony movt. 2: m.502

[bensladden]

In my mind this is what Kafka's Strasser heard when his sister played the violin in the living room: a most hauntingly beautiful sound, accompanied with the knowledge that he no longer is what he was. A seemingly irreversible metamorphosis. Yet, music never loses his potency, it heeds no human language.

[kevinbeck]

"No one can really know himself,
detach himself from his inner being
Yet, each day he must put to the test,
What is in the end, clear.
What he is and what he was,
what he can be and what he might be.

But, what goes on in the world,
No one really understands it rightly,
and also up to the present day,
no one desires to understand it.
Conduct yourself with discernment.
Just as the day offers itself;
Think always: it's gone well up to now,
so might it go until the end."

Wikipedia says he wrote this in his journal while composing this

[MrPSaun]

My God...
What a phenomenal piece of music!
How have I never heard this before!

[profmolo]

The number of times I have listened to this piece is troublesome😅. Of the over 734K views, I have contributed more than 1K. I am tempted to say Strauss is the King of Strings....

[FinanceAlex]

Beautiful beyond words! Such complexity yet simplicity at the same time

[futuropasado]

This art piece is so beautiful... one of the most sincere and purest expressions of the soul...

[Ivan_]

I'm so incredibly happy this channel wasn't erased after all this copyright madness.

[CharlesM]

Probably my favorite piece of music. Stunning.

[jonnsmusich]

Having the score is SO helpful. I'm just starting to learn this work and the texture is so rich and dense. Listening while reading along with the score makes it all so much clearer. Thank you