Metamorphosen

Metamorphosen is a composition for 23 solo strings (ten violins, five violas, five cellos, and three double basses) by Richard Strauss. Written during the closing months of the Second World War, and first performed in January 1946 (by Paul Sacher and the Zürich Collegium Musicum), it was written as a statement of mourning for Germany's destruction during the war, in particular the bombing of the Munich Opera House, the Goethehaus, which Strauss called in a letter to opera librettist Joseph Gregor, "the world's most holy shrine — destroyed!"

The piece uses as its primary motivic element a passage from the funeral march in Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. During the final bars of the piece, the funeral march is quoted in full in the bass part (rather than just being briefly and repeatedly alluded to, as earlier), accompanied by the words "In Memoriam" in the score. According to Michael Kennedy's biography Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma (1999), one hostile early critic, the Dutchman Matthijs Vermeulen, interpreted the composition as mourning Hitler and the dismantlement of the Nazi regime. Nevertheless, it is generally accepted now that Strauss's melancholy in the piece stems from the toll of war on the German culture and aesthetic in general. Also, Strauss, though not openly anti-Nazi during the Third Reich (in order to be able to protect his beloved Jewish daughter-in-law and grandchildren from extermination) privately despised Hitler; Bruno Walter, himself Jewish, was among the early admirers of the piece).

As one of Strauss's last works, Metamorphosen masterfully exhibits the type of complex contrapuntal harmonies for which the composer showed a predilection throughout his creative life.