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  • Eine 3000 Jährige Kulturentwicklung abgeschlossen: Biographie und Geschichte in den Metamorphosen von Richard Strauss
  • Kenneth Birkin
Eine 3000 Jährige Kulturentwicklung abgeschlossen: Biographie und Geschichte in den Metamorphosen von Richard Strauss. By Laurenz Lütteken. pp. 45. (Amadeus, Winterthur, 2004, €15. ISBN 3-905075-12-1.)

Commissioned by Paul Sacher for the Collegium Musicum of Zurich in 1944, Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen—Studie für 23 Solostreicher was first performed under Sacher in Zurich on 25 January 1946. Originally conceived for eleven string instruments, the short score completed on 8 March 1945 was designed for string septet; the final version for twenty-three solo strings apparently evolved during preparation of the full score later that month. In the first chapter of his fine book, Laurenz Lütteken offers a résumé of the work's genesis, together with an uncluttered and very readable analytical survey that convincingly links the 'Eroica' quotation (significantly labelled 'In memoriam') to the preceding dual thematic material upon which Metamorphosen as a whole is based: 'All the melodic figuration of the work ultimately shows itself to be dependent on the Beethoven funeral march [quotation] which, at the same time, in retrospect, authenticates the interdependency of [the relationship between] the two main characteristic themes of the work' (p. 13).

As Lütteken points out, that 'In memoriam', linked as it is to the Marcia funebre quotation from Beethoven's Third Symphony, has triggered a good deal of speculation over the compositional motivation of this work. Setting aside wayward attempts to link its grief-stricken strains to Hitler's death and the collapse of the Nazi regime, later commentators have coupled it directly with the contemporary Munich Gedächtniswalzer, thereby interpreting In memoriam, and the sombre tone of the piece, in terms of wartime devastation and, by implication, of the physical destruction of Germany's concert halls, theatres, and opera houses. All this was, admittedly, crucial to Strauss's professional well-being, and doubtless there is some truth in that supposition. Strauss's mood, at the time of the Sacher commission, was patently influenced by the desolation surrounding him in the last days of the war, but, as Lütteken explains, the psychological motivation for the composition of Metamorphosen was much more far-reaching:

The Beethoven reference, and the fact that the composer inserted the superscription 'in memoriam' at its appearance in the score, has united commentators in the assumption that Metamorphosen is a lament inspired by the 'catastrophe' of the Second World War. This widely held superficial interpretation, however, gives rise to considerable uneasiness; when all is said and done it poses an unanswered question: why did Strauss produce such luxuriant instrumental writing? Such tonal opulence has, after all, little to do with the aforesaid interpretative assumption!

( p. 14)

Lütteken takes, surely correctly, a much broader view, advocating what he calls 'a new approach dependent on an overall view and perspective of Strauss's entire oeuvre; ultimately, on a survey dependent on comprehension of the extremely contradictory nature of musical history itself in the first half of the twentieth century'. This approach, he agrees, 'may well, at first sight, seem surprising. It is, however, founded upon the multifarious life activity, artistic experience, and historical awareness of the composer himself' (p. 14).

In the first of the three short chapters that follow, the development of the symphonic concept is traced from Beethoven (the 'illustrative' overtures), through Liszt, to Strauss himself, with particular emphasis on the biographical 'Eroica' significance in Strauss's work from Ein Heldenleben (with its shared E flat major tonality) onwards. As Lütteken points out, Strauss's remarks about Ein Heldenleben (in a letter to Willi Schuh) are deliberately designed to invite a parallel between his own work and that of Beethoven: 'In this sense', he comments,

one can interpret the meaning, not only of the self-quotation in Heldenleben, but also the Beethoven quotation in Metamorphosen—Strauss's first completed large orchestral work for thirty years. The tightrope that the composer walks between the objectivity of the [symphonic] genre and biographical subjectivity is manifest in Metamorphosen. The citation 'In memoriam' is not only a tribute to Beethoven's memory—it...

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