Emily X. X. Tan is a doctoral student and Clarendon Scholar at the University of Oxford where she is supervised by Laura Tunbridge and funded jointly by the Clarendon Fund and the Merton College Music Award. Her master’s degree was undertaken at Royal Holloway, University of London where she was in receipt of a Music Department Masters Scholarship; and her undergraduate degree was awarded by Exeter College, University of Oxford.
Emily’s doctoral project addresses Richard Strauss’s late works, considering in particular the role of a conservative musical aesthetic in the modernist era. In 2016 she was recipient of the Society for Music Analysis (UK) TAGS essay prize.
Abstract from “Reconsidering Strauss’s Metamorphosen (TrV 290)”
Richard Strauss completed his ‘study for twenty-three solo strings’ Metamorphosen (TrV 290) on 12 April 1945, a time of ‘no consolation and […] no hope’ (Strauss writing to Willi Schuh in 1943). Aside from Timothy L. Jackson’s 1992 analysis of the work’s compositional sketches and his Schenkerian reading of its form, recent scholarship has focussed mainly on extra-musical considerations: Strauss’s personal situation at the time of composition, the influence of Goethe, the meaning of its inscription ‘IN MEMORIAM!’, and the context of war-time Germany. In both popular and scholarly reception the piece is viewed as a work of excessive pessimism, nostalgia, and mourning.
This paper proposes an analytical reading of Metamorphosen that challenges both the pessimism of the work’s reception history and the conclusions of Jackson’s analysis, while also suggesting that the contradictions arising from analytical versus reception history approaches are constructive in understanding the political dimension of Strauss’s musical aesthetic. Using Hepokoski’s and Darcy’s sonata theory to examine Metamorphosen’s complex relationship to sonata form - and in particular the idea of a ‘structure of promise’ - I will consider how the work generates meaning through the negotiation and ultimate rejection of sonata form’s utopian ‘promise’. Considering the work’s formal structure in conjunction with Nietzsche’s idea of ‘Dionysian pessimism’ I aim to demonstrate how Metamorphosen can be viewed not only as a nihilist indulgence, but also as an expression of radical, perhaps even modernist hope.