Performed by The Toledo Symphony on November 22, 2025

Tod und Verklärung 
Richard Strauss (1864–1949) 

On the surface, Richard Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung, or “Death and Transfiguration” might seem to be just another attempt to describe the individual’s struggle against some formidable adversary, but within the context of Strauss’s output it is so much more. Instead of merely endeavoring to defeat an unnamed obstacle, Strauss’s protagonist is trying to defeat the challenges that separate him from the Ideal, all while enduring sickness and then disappointment as he finds himself in the throes of death. It’s interesting that Strauss chose this subject at the beginning of his career and when he was just beginning to be recognized as one of Europe’s foremost composers. Despite being only twenty-four when he wrote this piece, he remarked to his niece sixty years later, when he was on his deathbed, “It’s a funny thing, Alice, dying is just the way I composed it in Death and Transfiguration.” 

Remembering and continuing the spiritual and emotional journey of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in Tod und Verklärung, Strauss also moved purposefully toward a theme-based form – not unlike Liszt’s method of thematic transformation. Indeed, Strauss placed the evolutionary growth of the main theme at the very center of his process – to the point that, as musicologist Charles Youmans explains, “musical process is measured by stages of [the] theme’s completion.” (This technique would later be taken up and further developed by Richard Wagner in his use of the leitmotif.) 

Carrying this practice a step further, or perhaps to its natural conclusion, Strauss used thematic transformation as a yardstick by which to measure the hero’s evolution across the piece. Again, the themes he created, and their treatment, are not dissimilar to Liszt’s compositional style but are treated in different contexts. Although he was not the first (or the last) to use this technique – or to contribute to the tone poem genre – he is unarguably a master of both. 

Very basic outlines of sonata form (exposition, development, recapitulation, coda/conclusion) survive in Tod und Verklärung, but this form is by no means complete or in any way standard in the length or even the strict function of the sections. In fact, the sections of sonata form that are loosely represented here are the least structurally important in the traditional form. This cannot be coincidental and is possibly indicative of Strauss’s desire to overwrite the traditional form. Youmans also points out that these sections are the ones that are “given over to disease” and represent the “programmatic obstacle” or the “force that must be overcome.”  

There are two main themes in Tod und Verklärung. The first is the “Ideal Theme,” and it is this that forms the basis for most of the work. The secondary theme represents the protagonist who must reach the Ideal. These themes appear much earlier than can be easily recognized, so they are hidden and embedded throughout. These two themes interact over four main sections that are performed without pause: I. The sick man near death; II. The battle between life and death offers no respite to the man; III. The dying man’s life passes before him; IV. The sought-after transfiguration. 

The first section opens with soft pulses in the strings and timpani, the slight irregularities of which may represent the gradual failing of the heart in the face of encroaching sickness. As the fever worsens, the protagonist sees his life played out before him and regrets his failure to realize his youthful purpose. As he dwells on this, he becomes agitated. Then, as Strauss describes, “death seems to knock at the door.” The rhythms, continued from the opening, now threaten to overtake the themes with the brass and timpani. 

Strauss uses quite a bit of syncopation in order to create a sense of need in the forward motion. Each section corresponding with the growth of the protagonist layers on the last and increases the sincerity with which the struggling theme pushes toward the Ideal theme. This bursts out into a solo for cellos marked appassionato. Inevitably, the two themes are thrown together, and the fantasy is shattered by the return of pain. There is a really lovely moment when, in the midst of his torment, the hero glimpses a slight ray of divine light. This is depicted by the concertmaster’s solo, which is then given over to the clarinet. 

The last section (the coda, if you like) serves as the work’s climax, the moment of transfiguration. It’s here that the relationship between the two main themes is finally clear. This connection seems to build, rising slowly out of the horns, until it exhales into a final acceptance of all that has come before. This may be more readily understandable on a musical level than a theoretical one. Combining the common physical impulse of breath with Strauss’s “transcendent vision” only strengthens the gesture. Strauss himself stated that the most extraordinary thing about Tod und Verklärung was that “the main theme [did] not arrive in its entirety until the end of the piece.” Strauss shares Liszt’s objective of creating music that is more communicative, more evocative, and more expressive than anything else. 

Tod und Verklärung was premiered in 1890 in Eisenach. For the occasion, Strauss asked his friend, poet Alexander von Ritter, to compose a small poem about the idea of our earthbound trials leading to a heavenly bliss. Von Ritter took this request seriously and produced an explanatory poem that he expanded to form a full-scale map of the four stages of the piece. 

1.  In a small bare room, dimly lit by a candle stump, a sick man lies on his bed. Exhausted by a violent struggle with death, he lies asleep. In the stillness of the room, like a portent of impending death, only the quiet ticking of a clock is heard. A melancholy smile lights the invalid’s pale face – does he dream of golden childhood as he lingers on the border of life?

The mood is quiet and there is a steady, yet syncopated pattern played by the violins and violas. This is often thought to be the death motive, though it can also be associated with a ticking clock and a failing human heartbeat. Arching woodwind solos over horn and harp accompaniment signal a sad smile and thoughts of youth. 

1.  But death grants him little sleep or time for dreams. He shakes his prey brutally to begin the battle afresh. The drive to live, the might of death! What a terrifying contest! Neither wins the victory, and once more silence reigns.

Harsh blows of the brasses and a faster tempo signify the struggle with death. Motives that describe this struggle, including a fast-paced version of the death motive from the opening, are battered about the orchestra. Just as death is about to triumph, we hear a glimpse of the transfiguration theme presented in the harp, trombones, cellos, and violas, the ideal that can only be achieved after death. But death has not yet come. The music settles again as calm returns to the room. 

III. Exhausted from the battle, sleepless, as in a delirium, the sick man now sees his life pass before him, step by step, scene by scene. First the rosy dawn of childhood, radiant, innocent; then the boy’s aggressive games, testing, building his strength – and so maturing for the battles of manhood, to strive with burning passion for the highest goals of life: to transfigure all that seems to him most noble, giving it still more exalted form – this alone has been the high aim of his whole existence. Coldly, scornfully, the world set obstacle upon obstacle in his way. When he believed himself near his goal, a thunderous voice cried: “Halt!” But a voice within him still urged him on, crying: “Make each hindrance a new rung in your upward climb.” Undaunted, he followed the exalted quest. Still in his death agony he seeks the unreached goal of his ceaseless striving, seeks it, but alas, still in vain. Though it grows closer, clearer, grander, it never can be grasped entire or perfected in his soul. The final iron hammer blow of death rings out, breaks his earthy frame, and covers his eyes with eternal night. 

This section begins quietly, with solos traded throughout the orchestra building to a more marchlike section that describes the man’s maturation to adulthood. The orchestra swells, and at the high points of phrases we hear the trombones and timpani proclaim the death motive. In the midst of the chaos, the transfiguration motive is also heard, signaling that the end is near. Another outburst occurs, the final struggle with death, the storm and fury of the orchestra dying away and capped off with the sound of the gong, the death knell, announcing the soul’s departure. 

1.  But from the endless realms of heavenly space a mighty resonance returns to him, bearing what he longed for here below and sought in vain: redemption, transfiguration.

Beginning quietly, the transfiguration theme is presented and is, itself, transformed. The sound grows as instruments are added, climbing higher and higher, with all the symbolic imagery implied, to the uppermost reaches of the brass, woodwinds, and strings. The work ends peacefully and tranquilly, with death having won the battle but with the soul’s deliverance and transformation surpassing all. 

 

Four Last Songs  
Richard Strauss (1864–1949)  

Richard Strauss’s life spanned numerous major developments in classical music and two World Wars. Strauss himself seemed to exist alongside these events while following his own path. In 1943, allied bombers destroyed the Munich National Theater, closely followed by the destruction of other theaters in Berlin, Dresden, and Vienna. The loss of these historic spaces, where Strauss's music had been performed, affected him deeply.  

Strauss wrote, “The burning of the Munich Hoftheater, as it was called during the Imperial era, consecrated to the first performances of Tristan and Meistersinger, where 73 years ago I heard Freischütz for the first time, where my good father sat for 49 years in the orchestra as first horn, where ... I experienced the keenest sense of fulfillment as the composer of ten operas produced there – this was the great catastrophe of my life. For that there can be no consolation in my old age, no hope.”  

Strauss met this tragedy with music. His Metamorphosen, incorporating his Trauer um München (“Mourning for Munich”) was finished in 1946, and the Four Last Songs completed two years later, in 1948.  

A farewell to life and Romanticism, the Four Last Songs were first composed as individual pieces. They weren’t written in their current performance order, which takes us on a journey from spring to fall, looking then toward sleep and death, and closing with the sunset. The first three songs use text by Hermann Hesse, and Im Abendrot (“At Sunset”) uses text by the German poet Joseph Eichendorff. Im Abendrot also includes a quote from Strauss’s own Death and Transfiguration.  

The songs are gentle, sensuous, sweet, lyrical, and feature delicate textures. Musicologist Herbert Glass writes, “The sublime Metamorphosen and Four Last Songs are retrospective, drenched in a sense of what was and never will be again.... But they are indeed songs of farewell – to life, to art, to a vanished world.... To more than one observer, Strauss saved his best for the very end.” 

Strauss's Four Last Songs was published posthumously in 1950 and premiered that same year in London by Kirsten Flagstad with the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. 

Spring 

In shadowy crypts
 
I dreamt long
 
of your trees and blue skies, 

of your fragrance and birdsong. 
 
Now you appear 

in all your finery,
 
drenched in light
 
like a miracle before me. 
 
You recognize me, 

you entice me tenderly.
 
All my limbs tremble at
 
your blessed presence! 
 
September 
 
The garden is in mourning.
 
Cool rain seeps into the flowers.
 
Summertime shudders, 

quietly awaiting his end. 
 
Golden leaf after leaf falls
 
from the tall acacia tree.
 
Summer smiles, astonished and feeble, 

at his dying dream of a garden. 
 
For just a while he tarries 
 
beside the roses, yearning for repose.
 
Slowly he closes
 
his weary eyes. 
 
Going to Sleep 
 
Now that I am wearied of the day,
 
my ardent desire shall happily receive 
 
the starry night 

like a sleepy child. 
 
Hands, stop all your work.
 
Brow, forget all your thinking.
 
All my senses now
 
yearn to sink into slumber. 
 
And my unfettered soul 
 
wishes to soar up freely 
 
into night's magic sphere 

to live there deeply and thousandfold. 
 
At Sunset 
 
We have through sorrow and joy
 
gone hand in hand;
 
From our wanderings, let's now rest
 
in this quiet land. 
 
Around us, the valleys bow 

as the sun goes down.
 
Two larks soar upwards
 
dreamily into the light air. 
 
Come close, and let them fly.
 
Soon it will be time for sleep.
 
Let's not lose our way 

in this solitude. 
 
O vast, tranquil peace, 

so deep in the evening's glow! 

How weary we are of wandering - 

Is this perhaps a hint of death? 

 

“Ah! Perfido,” Op. 65 
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) 

Ludwig van Beethoven composed his concert aria “Ah! Perfido,” Op. 65 in 1796 for soprano and orchestra. Despite the higher opus number, it is an earlier work. “Ah! Perfido” is structured in two main parts and is in the style of eighteenth-century Italian opera.  

The soprano gives a dramatic monologue after her lover leaves and betrays her. It begins with boiling rage, softens to pleas for mercy, then returns to rage. In the first recitative, she expresses anger at the gods for failing to punish her lover, then begs them to spare him, even offering to die in his place. Before long, she again expresses anger.  

“Ah! Perfido” is modeled after Haydn’s Scena di Berenice, which was composed a year earlier. The text used in the recitative is by librettist Pietro Metastasio, but the aria text’s author is unknown.  

“Ah! Perfido” was premiered in Leipzig by popular soprano Josefa Duschek, for whom Mozart had also composed.  

 

Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde 
Richard Wagner (1813–1883) 

“He looked into my eyes. His suffering tormented me; the sword – I let it fall!” 

— Isolde, Tristan and Isolde, Act I, Scene ii 

Richard Wagner’s Prelude to his opera Tristan and Isolde is one of the most well-known pieces in classical music, inspiring reactions as intense today as when it was first written. Composer Giuseppe Verdi ­is reported to have said, “[I] stood in wonder and terror” before Tristan and Isolde.  

Wagner began working on Tristan when he was also busy producing the single largest musical project of the nineteenth century: the four operas known as the Ring Cycle. He became captivated by the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde, in which the Cornish knight Tristan and the Irish princess Isolde (or Iseult) fall in love. The families of the two are enemies, and to broker peace, Isolde’s father decides to host a tournament, with the prize being Isolde’s hand in marriage. King Mark of Cornwall sends Tristan to represent him in the tournament, and Tristan wins Isolde for the king. On the voyage home, however, Tristan and Isolde both drink a love potion (depending on the version of the story, this may be accidental). Despite being intended for and then married to King Mark, Isolde remains hopelessly in love with Tristan. Wagner described this story as possessing a balance between yearning and intensification, inevitably followed by relapse. “From the timidest lament in unappeasable longing, the tenderest shudder, to the most terrible outpouring of an avowal of hopeless love, the sentiment traverses all phases of the vain struggle against inner ardor, until this, sinking back powerless upon itself, seems to be extinguished in death.” 

Written in 1863, Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan and Isolde has been admired for its slow recounting of pure emotion. Its form is almost imitative of a set of variations joined together in a seamless pattern of tension and resolution that, with only small exceptions, feels as natural as breathing. One of Wagner’s most significant compositional contributions, the leitmotif, is used here, though maybe not as obviously as in some of his other works – or even later in this opera. A leitmotif is a short musical fragment (usually a specific melodic or rhythmic figure) that represents a character, situation, object, or idea. In Wagner’s work in general, as well as in this Prelude, the leitmotifs he employs are not simply small separate segments interspersed throughout the larger form; rather, they evolve, as does what they represent, along with the drama. Though they remain recognizable, Wagner also casts them in various harmonic lights, giving them new connotations. This is an effective tool for foreshadowing and providing windows into characters’ thoughts. The versatility of these motifs renders them core musical material. 

Another element of note in Wagner’s Prelude is the beautiful and skillful use of chromaticism. Chromaticism is not a new concept in the nineteenth century, but few, if any, composers took it to the lengths Wagner did, with his modulations giving way to sometimes kaleidoscopic shifts in perspective. While the term “chromaticism” may have some slightly threatening overtones in the context of music, especially for the staunch lover of the Classical, its use in the nineteenth century is really intended to be in line with the word’s actual root: “concerned with color.” This use of pitch material not strictly included in the tonality of a piece pushes the boundaries of the expressive tools available to composers. Musicologist Rob Kapilow states that Tristan and Isolde is possibly “the most perfect embodiment of this revolutionary chromatic language.” In the context of Tristan and Isolde – not only in the Prelude but in the entire opera – Wagner also used chromaticism to emphasize the main duality present in the story; that is, tonality stands for the yearning quality, and atonality represents the negation that follows. 

Wagner writes, “There is henceforth no end to the yearning, longing, rapture, and misery of love; world, power, fame, honor, chivalry, loyalty, and friendship scattered like an insubstantial dream; one thing alone left living: longing, longing unquenchable, desire forever renewing itself, craving and languishing; one sole redemption: death, surcease of being, the sleep that knows no waking!” It is possible to see a parallel in his own life at this time, as he was in love with the daughter of one of his primary financial patrons. 

From the very first notes of the Prelude, the gradual unfolding of each gesture heightens the effect of each phrase, rendering each event extraordinarily concentrated. The opening swells from the cellos in a four-note idea are often referred to as the “sorrow” or “longing” motif. This opening phrase is at the center of the Prelude, becoming the “desire” or “yearning” theme. Wagner uses two elements to increase tension: silence, and deceptive cadences (points of arrival at the end of phrases that finish “deceptively” in a chord other than the one we expect in the tonal context). The silence in place of resolution makes us almost hold our breath, while the deceptive cadences propel us into a new iteration of similar melodic material. This helps to heighten the sense of unfulfilled desire, which eventually moves back toward the opening iteration, creating an almost cyclical overall form – though a satisfying resolution has still not occurred! (Wagner uses these deceptive cadences throughout the opera.) 

“The look” or “glance” motives appear quite early in the Prelude, first emerging in the cellos as if from the earth. With its uncertain dotted rhythm, it is a relatively short fragment; but it’s a central theme throughout the Prelude and the opera and refers to the look exchanged between Tristan and Isolde that first caused Isolde to spare Tristan’s life. Eric Chafe (musicologist) explains that “poetically, the glance of love is an important theme in both Gottfried von Strassburg and Schopenhauer [specifically, their versions of the story [of Tristan and Isolde], and Wagner’s conception is indebted to both: to Gottfried for its place in the story of Tristan and Isolde, and to Schopenhauer for its metaphysical meaning.” Simply put, it is the beginning of their love and the cause of Isolde’s compassion. As literary critic Dieter Borchmeyer says, “the love between Tristan and Isolde bears the marks of fellow-feeling from the very outset.” 

Most of Wagner’s leitmotifs have more than one meaning: a philosophical (referential) meaning, and a dramatic meaning. In Tristan and Isolde, many of the leitmotifs are direct references to Schopenhauer. The leitmotifs used here are also strikingly similar to one another, which enables Wagner to easily slip from one to the next without an obvious break in the phrase. This characteristic also lends itself to the layering of melodic material, which gives a wonderful complexity of texture. The “love potion” motif, or “the drink of atonement,” is derived in this way, at least in part, from “the glance,” and the relationship between the two themes becomes central to the Prelude.  

In the last moments of the Prelude, we find ourselves in a sort of epilogue; there is no new material. Wagner outlines this section: “All forward momentum has been frustrated, and resolution is nowhere to be found – emotionally and dramatically, there is nothing but longing and yearning … the poetic idea behind … [is the] lovers’ main struggle against inner ardor [tied to their seeking death as an escape from desire].” According to Schopenhauer, such an escape is not possible because “suicide is the affirmation not the negation of the will.” Renowned conductor Bruno Walter declared, “Never before has my soul been deluged with such floods of sound and passion, never had my heart been consumed by such yearning and sublime bliss …” Though he disliked much of Wagner’s music, Richard Strauss said, “Tristan and Isolde marked the end of all Romanticism. Here the yearning of the entire nineteenth century is gathered in one focal point.” 

The Liebestod (“Love-Death”) is the final scene in the opera. At this point, Tristan has been fatally wounded and died in Isolde’s arms. Isolde imagines Tristan rising, transcending death. The transfiguration occurs when she “sinks down” beside him, finally achieving a spiritual union with Tristan in death.