Tod und Verklärung, Op. 24 (1889)
(Death and Transfiguration Critical Edition of Richard Strauss' Works)

Following the tone-poems "Macbeth" and "Don Juan" which centre on specific heroes, Richard Strauss conceived the idea for a more abstract theme – which he nevertheless set to music in great detail. As he wrote, he was drawn to “depicting in a tone-poem the final hour of a man who had striven for the highest ideals – in other words, an artist”. He set to work as early as 1888, even before the premiere of “Don Juan”. There has long been speculation as to whether Strauss was processing a serious illness or the experience of a death struggle in “Death and Transfiguration”. He himself, however, expressly emphasised that his composition was not based on any personal experience. Whilst Strauss did not write a specific programme for *Don Juan*, instead prefacing his score with excerpts from Lenau’s poem, in "Death and Transfiguration" he described in detail what is to be heard in the music. He articulated this to the musicologist Friedrich von Hausegger: “The sick man lies in slumber, breathing heavily and irregularly, confined to his bed; pleasant dreams conjure a smile upon the face of the man in great distress; his sleep grows lighter; he awakens, and dreadful pains begin to torment him once more, the fever shakes his limbs – as the fit draws to a close and the pains subside, he reflects on his past life: his childhood flashes before his eyes, his youth with its aspirations and passions, and then, just as the pain returns, the guiding light of his life’s path appears to him: the idea, the ideal that he had sought to realise and portray artistically, but which he could not complete because it was beyond the capacity of any human being to achieve; the hour of death approaches; the soul leaves the body to find, in the eternal cosmos, that which he could not fulfil here on earth, now perfected in its most glorious form." Fifty years later, in the year before his death, Strauss was to recall once more, in his *Four Last Songs*, with a quotation from "Death and Transfiguration", how he had musically captured the experience of dying as a young man.Critical Edition of Richard Strauss' Works: Volume III/6 Herausgegeben von Stefan Schenk