Metamorphosen

Doors open, 19:00

Concert starts, 19:30

Musicians:

Daniel Rowland, violin

Yuval Gotlibovich, viola

Maja Bogdanovic, cello

Nicholas Schwartz, double bass

DBA Top Talents

Program:

Schoenberg, Verklaerte Nacht

-Pause-

Strauss, Sextet for Strings from Capriccio, Op. 85

Struass, Metamorphosen

Arnold Schönberg, Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4

Written in 1899 and inspired by a poem by Richard Dehmel, *Verklärte Nacht* (“Transfigured Night”) tells of a couple walking through a dark forest as the woman confesses that she is carrying another man's child. Her companion's acceptance transforms despair into forgiveness and hope. Schönberg's intensely expressive music mirrors this emotional journey, moving from darkness and tension toward a radiant sense of reconciliation. Written for string sextet, the work stands at the threshold between late Romanticism and the musical modernism that would soon emerge.

Richard Strauss, Sextet from Capriccio, Op. 85

The opening sextet of Strauss's final opera, Capriccio, dates from 1942. Elegant, intimate and almost serenely detached, it introduces an opera concerned with the relationship between music and words, art and life. The refined beauty of the sextet seems to belong to another world—a world of cultivated European culture that, by the time Strauss wrote Metamorphosen three years later, was already disappearing.

Richard Strauss, Metamorphosen

Written in 1945, Metamorphosen is Strauss's elegy for a world devastated by war. Originally conceived for seven string players, its continuous web of intertwining melodies gradually transforms grief into remembrance. Near the end, Strauss quotes the funeral march from Beethoven's Eroica, followed by the words “In memoriam.” Heard after the Capriccio sextet, the work takes on an especially poignant meaning: the same composer who once celebrated the beauty of European artistic culture now mourns its destruction.

Together, the three works trace a journey from personal transfiguration, through artistic reflection, to historical mourning, three very different meanings of transformation.