Strauss - Tod und Verklärung | Cristian Măcelaru | WDR Sinfonieorchester

Richard Strauss - Death and Transfiguration (Tod und Verklärung) op. 24, played by the WDR Symphony Orchestra under the baton of its chief conductor Cristian Măcelaru. Recorded live on 08.06.2024 in the Kölner Philharmonie. Richard Strauss - Death and Transfiguration (Tod und Verklärung) op. 24 WDR Symphony Orchestra Cristian Măcelaru, conductor ► Find out more about the symphony orchestra, concerts and current live streams at https://sinfonieorchester.wdr.de ►The WDR Symphony Orchestra on Facebook   / wdrsinfonieorchester   ► Further concerts and introductions to works from the world of classical music, symphonic crossover, choral singing and concerts for children can also be found in the ARD Mediathek: https://www.ardmediathek.de/klassik Introduction to the work: After the tone poems ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Don Juan’, in which concrete heroes take centre stage, Richard Strauss had the idea for a more abstract theme - which he nevertheless set to music in great detail. As he wrote, he was tempted to ‘depict in a tone poem the hour of death of a person who had striven for the highest ideals, probably 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 dealing with a serious illness or the experience of a death struggle in ‘Death and Transfiguration’. However, he himself expressly emphasised that his composition was not based on any personal experience. While Strauss did not write a specific programme for ‘Don Juan’, but prefaced 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 formulated this for the musicologist Friedrich von Hausegger: ‘The sick man lies in bed in slumber, breathing heavily and irregularly; friendly dreams conjure up a smile on the face of the seriously ill man; sleep becomes lighter; he awakes, terrible pains begin to torture him again, the fever shakes his limbs - when the attack ends and the pain subsides, he remembers that he is in a state of agony. As the attack ends and the pain subsides, he remembers his past life: his childhood passes before him, his youth with its aspirations, its passions, and then, as pain sets in again, he remembers his past. Then, as pain sets in again, the light of his life's path appears to him, the idea, the ideal that he has tried to realise, to portray artistically, but which he could not complete because it could not be completed by a human being, the hour of death approaches, the soul leaves the body to find completed in eternal space, in the most glorious form, that which he could not fulfil here on earth.’ Fifty years later, in the year before his death, Strauss was to recall in his ‘Four Last Songs’ how he had musically summarised dying as a young man with a quotation from ‘Death and Transfiguration’. Text: Otto Hagedorn