Richard Strauss composed Metamorphoses during the closing months of the Second World War, from August 1944 to March 1945. The work was commissioned by and dedicated to Paul Sacher, the founder and director of the Basler Kammerorchester and Collegium Musicum Zürich. It was Sacher who conducted the first performance on January 25, 1946, in Zurich. Strauss was unfortunate to live at a time when his creative abilities were pitted against his understanding of larger world issues. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, had appointed him president of the new state music bureau, without the composer's agreement. From that point, Strauss became stranded in a country where music and politics became inseparable. Yet it was during World War II, that ultimately Strauss came to terms with the devastation of Nazi power through music.
Strauss wrote, “The burning of the Munich Court Theater, where Tristan and Die Meistersinger received their first performances, where I first heard Freischütz seventy-three years ago, where my father sat at the first horn desk for forty-nine years… it was the greatest catastrophe of my life; there is no possible consolation, and, at my age, no hope.” Shortly after the bombing of Dresden, the last German city to fall, Strauss began sketching a Trauer um München (Mourning for Munich), a requiem for German civilisation, written solely for strings.
Strauss favoured quotation and integration and he recognised the likeness of one of his main musical ideas to the infamous funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. He also recalls, in another passage, a theme from act 2 of Tristan and Isolde. His Metamorphosen melody embodies four repeated notes and then a descending minor scale. Along with three other main themes, the piece is developed polyphonically. Strauss made the most of the utter coincidence and allows the cellos and basses to quote Beethoven’s theme in the finale. Here, at the pieces’ end, he wrote in the manuscript, “In Memoriam!” The memorial, it is widely accepted, was not just for the bombed opera houses, but for the shattered culture that they represented. A few days after the completion of Metamorphosen, Strauss wrote in his private diary, "The most terrible period of human history is at an end, the twelve-year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which Germany's 2000 years of cultural evolution met its doom".
Alixandra Porembski, English Language Annotator