Chris Reynolds

Intro to Graduate Studies

Strauss and his Metamorphosen: The Equivocal Elegy

As World War II came to a gruesome end, Europe was finally given the chance to look at
itself in a mirror, and to see what it had become. Cultural institutions that had existed for
hundreds of years had been decimated. What was once innocent had become polluted and ugly.
The old word of Europe, full of its glamour, beauty, and history was gone, and Richard Strauss
had lived through it all. By 1944 he had seen both World Wars, the rise and fall of the Weimer
Republic, and the rise and fall of Naziism. His music had undergone major stylistic change, from
earlier, Wagnerian works such as Don Juan, to the glaring modernism of Elektra, and then back
to romantic ideals in pieces like Der Rosenkavalier. Strauss, at this time, had just learned of the
destruction of the four major opera houses in Germany and Austria: Berlin, Dresden, Munich,
and Vienna. Opera was the primary institution of his career, and one of the principal cultural
institutions of Germany and Vienna for decades. The loss of these houses that were so
influential in his own career hurt him deeply. He wrote to his sister after their destruction,
Dear Hanna, many thanks for the kind letter. I can write no more today. I am beside
myself.
Around this time he had received a commission from Zurich for a suite for strings, which he had
avoided on account of the war as well as his own ailing health. He was unable to travel without
permission from the Reich and had shut himself inside his own home for much of his free time.
But after the destruction of these houses he sprung into action. He had been working, in various
sketchbooks, on an adagio for strings that had never fully taken form. Drawing from several
sketches of this adagio, as well as sourcing material from various composers and a title from
Goethe, he unveiled the finished product: Metamorphosen for 23 Solo Strings. The work, though
a mark of Strausss autumnal brilliance and mastery of counterpoint has been the source of

debate among scholars because of its ambiguity. Its explicit quotations of famous German
works as well as his own, combined with the words In Memorium written in the score raise
questions about what exactly Strauss was trying to memorialize or mourn. While some critics
have postulated an interpretation of Nazi-sympathy in remembrance of Hitler and the Reich, a
better case can be made for Strauss mourning the loss of European culture.
To make a case for this interpretation, one must look at Strausss relationship with the
Reich, before looking a the piece itself. Historians are divided over the nature of Strausss
involvement with the Nazis. While never a party member himself, he held the important position
as head of the Reichsmusikkammer and was present at several important Nazi events. Early in
the Reich, he filled in for both Bruno Walter and Toscanini, who had quit in protest of the Nazi
regimes censorship and treatment of Jews. At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, his own Olympische
Hymne was performed to much criticism from the artistic detractors of the Nazis. When he had
accepted the position at the Reichsmusikkamer, Toscanini is quoted as saying, To Strauss the
composer I take off my hat; to Strauss the man I put it back on again. Pamela M. Potter, in her
essay Strausss Friedenstag: A Pacifist Attempt at Political Resistance, points out that Strauss
had lived under plenty of administrations prior to Hitler, and had conciliatory relationships with all
of them. She says,
Although frequently appearing as energetic cooperation, this resistance from within
was based on Strausss assumption that good could be achieved through the
influence
gained by token conciliatory gestures.
Strausss relationship with the Nazis seemed no different than his relationship with earlier
administrations until the disaster of Die Schweigsame Frau, his opera in collaboration with
Stefan Zweig, a Jewish man, that led to a one year ban on Strausss works. After this, Strauss
began taking the Nazis seriously as a threat to his artistic and personal freedoms. It is possible
that his acceptance of the commission for the Olympics was an effort to regain standing within
the Reich so that he could regain a platform on which to be of artistic use to the German people.
That is probably the most optimistic interpretation, and the truth is probably somewhere inbetween that and pure self-preservation. It was well-known, however, that Strauss did not get

along with Goebbels, going so far as to call him a pipsqueak. Strauss had maintained through
the de-nazification process that his involvement with the party was for two principle reasons: to
protect the artistic integrity of German culture, and to protect two of his jewish relatives
(daughter-in-law and granddaughter). He had a history of being as much of a nuisance to the
Nazis as a help, between his public refusal to recompose A Midsummer Nights Dream after the
ban on Mendelssohn (Carl Orff took it instead), and his refusal to refer to Hitler as the Fhrer,
but rather Herr Hitler. Bryan Gilliam in his essay Friede Im Innern maintains that this was less
an act of political defiance and more an act of Strausss own arrogance. Nevertheless, it is clear
that Strausss relationship with the Reich was complicated, strained, and rarely beneficial for
either party. Strauss never said anything positive about Hitler or other party-officials, and his
diary entry a few days after completing the Metamorphosen sheds light on his personal view of
the Reich and the war:
The most terrible period of human history is at an end, the twelve year reign of
bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which
Germanys 2000 years of culture evolution met its doom.
The years leading up to the Metamophosen proved difficult for Strauss. Though the 1930s were
the years of Strausss greatest fame and position, he suffered both personally and artistically.
Both of his prized librettists died, and in particular the suicide of Stefan Zweig was deeply
troubling to him. Zweig and he had collaborated on his first failure, Die Schweigsame Frau.
Strauss was a deep admirer of Zweigs writings, and became one of his closest friends. After
Zweig fled Germany with his wife for Brazil, he committed suicide in 1942 after completing his
most famous novel, The World of Yesterday. He had begun writing it while still in Germany in
1934. The novel is, in a way, an elegy that mourns the loss of what Europe was before the wars
in all of its cultural glory. It seems there is a connection here between this work and the
Metamorphosen. The circumstances around its composition can give us clues to its meaning.
He was at the same time writing a lament for Munich called the Munich Memorial Waltz. The
sketches for this work appear in the same two notebooks as the sketches for the
Metamorphosen. The original sketchbook contains only the main melodic motifs for the

Metamorphosen but no structure. He did not have a complete work until the 4th sketch in the
second notebook. In the 5th sketch, in the same notebook as the Munich Memorial Waltz , we
find the completed version of the motifs with the proper rhythm. On closer consideration, one
finds distinct similarities between the motifs in the Memorial Waltz and the Metamorphosen.
The works motifs quote many works: The Funeral march from the Eroica Symphony, the
finale of the Jupiter Symphony, the fugue from the G minor solo violin sonata of Bach, as well as
a theme from Strausss early piano sonata from 1881. The most important quote, from the
Eroica Symphony, becomes the principal motive in the work, and it is on the last page of the
score, when it appears completely unaltered, that the words IN MEMORIUM! are written. It is
exactly this that is the subject of controversy: The Eroica Symphony was one of the favorite
works of Hitler and the Nazis. Hitler used the work often in forms of propaganda, reappropriating it and the hero message for his own use. He had asked that the funeral march
be performed on the radio broadcast of his death announcement (which was still yet to happen
at the time of composition for the Metamorphosen). The interpretations of the work as
sympathetic to Naziism use this association as their main crux. These criticisms began in 1947
with Matthijs Vermeulen, who believed that the work memorialized Hitler, who he had believed
would forever be associated with the Eroica. People since then have seen parallels between
Beethovens association with Napoleon and Strausss association with Hitler, but Strauss, unlike
Beethoven, never initially loved the hero figure.
More contemporary criticism has been kind to both Strauss and this work, but have not
forgotten the complicated nature of his involvement with the Reich. Michael Kennedy in his
essay Strausss Autumn Glory writes about the Metamorphosen,
Begun in August 1944, set aside in October when he underwent a creative block, but
completed between January and March 1945, this was no wrist exercise but a
profound and elegiac apologia for the barbarities of Nazism and even
possibly his own
complaisance in the early years of the regime. Whatever the
cause, whether the
destruction of great cultural buildings or the wrecking of a
mans soul.
Similarly, and perhaps more severely is Bryan Gilliams assessment of the, Metamorphosen

A resigned composers private, inward doubts about the future of a German culture
brought down by its darkest instincts.
As well as his assessment of Strausss relationship with the Reich,
His service to the Nazis and his willingness to work with an unethical regime are
indefensible and a matter of record.
Strauss, nor anyone who was complicit with the Reich, is entirely innocent. But it is clear
that his relationship with them was not one of love, and not one that he would mourn the loss of.
If anything, Strauss loved music and the great legacy of German culture that the Nazis had
destroyed. The use of the Eroica Symphony in the work is not a tribute to the Nazis, but an effort
to retake and a work and composer that were destroyed by the Nazis. He mourns Munich, he
mourns Germany, and he mourns the Europe that was destroyed; the Europe that gave him a
career, happiness, and his love for a musical legacy that he himself became a part of.

Bibliography:
Birkin, Kenneth W. "Strauss, Zweig and Gregor: Unpublished Letters." Music & Letters 56, no. 2
(1975): 180-95. http://0-www.jstor.org.library.juilliard.edu/stable/734664.
Gilliam, Bryan. ""Friese Im Innern": Strauss's Public and Private Worlds in the Mis 1930's."
Journal of the American Musicological Society 57, no. 3 (2005): 565-98.
doi:10.1525/jams.2004.57.3.565.
Potter, Pamela M. "Strauss's "Friedenstag": A Pacifist Attempt at Political Resistance." The
Musical Quarterly 69, no. 3 (1983): 408-24. http://0www.jstor.org.library.juilliard.edu/stable/742179.
Kusche, Ludwig, and Kurt Wilhelm. "Richard Strauss's "Metamorphosen"" Tempo, no. 19
(1951): 19-22. http://0-www.jstor.org.library.juilliard.edu/stable/942757.

Gregor, Neil, (Author). "Music, memory, emotion: Richard Strauss and the legacies of war."
Music & Letters 96, no. 1 (February 2015): 55-76. RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full
Text, EBSCOhost