Lament For The Destruction Of a Culture

More Richard Strauss from the specialist combination of the Berliner Philharmoniker and Herbert von Karajan. The two pieces featured on this cd are Metamorphosen and Tod Und Verklarung. Although Tod Und Verklarung deals with death, it is a transcendent death in which there is hope and succour, whereas Metamorphosen remains an altogether bleaker work. This contradiction is explained by when they were written, Tod Und Verlarung ( Death and Transfiguration ) in 1899 when Strauss was still a young man who could take the optimism of the faith at face value, whereas Metamorphosen was written during and immediately after the disaster of WW2. It is written as an elegy for string orchestra and is a sustained lament. Some find it hard to take because of Strauss's ambivalent relationship with the Nazis and because of his statements that the despair was brought on by the destruction of opera houses, which although much to be regretted pale into insignificance when compared to other horrors of that time. That's being unfair to an eighty year old though and it is an indisputably moving work that the Berlin strings make sound exquisite. Tod Und Verklarung is scored for a full orchestra and is more in the vein of the other tone poems. The programmatic work traces the dying man's journey to the next world with taste and close attention to detail.