New York Philharmonic Performs Post-War Classical at Lincoln Center

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 27 May 2026 14:47

Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Chris Lee

At Lincoln Center’s wonderful David Geffen Hall, on the night of Saturday, April 25th, I had the exceptional privilege to attend an amazing concert featuring the New York Philharmonic, splendidly conducted by the magnificent and beautiful soprano, Barbara Hannigan.

The event started auspiciously with a marvelous realization of Richard Strauss’s extraordinary Metamorphosen, A Study for 23 Solo Strings, from 1945. In an earlier review I described it as “a tour de force and a paragon of late Romanticism—music that often has a neo-Wagnerian character but that also recalls the work of Gustav Mahler, particularly the Adagietto from his Symphony No. 5.” Other close analogues might be Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, a possible influence, and Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, which has some of the same hushed intensity. The late musicologist Michael Steinberg—who was Program Annotator for the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, and San Francisco Symphony—commented on the destruction of Munich—the composer’s birthplace—during World War II, as follows:

The National Theater, called the Court Theater in the old days, was destroyed during the night of October 2–3, 1943. A few weeks later he penciled a 24-measure sketch that he labeled Trauer urn München (Mourning for Munich). A figure in quick notes in the middle of the texture would become a crucial component of Metamorphosen. On the morning of March 13, 1945, he learned that the Vienna Opera had burned down the night before; later that day he began to write Metamorphosen.

He went on to identify a theme that appears late in the piece:

It is the funeral march from Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, Eroica, and Strauss writes “IN MEMORIAM!” at the moment of its appearance. It is as though this were the hidden theme of which all this music is the development, the metamorphosis. Strauss himself insisted that when he wrote his Mourning for Munich sketch and its variant in Metamorphosen, he was not aware of the Eroica connection. The idea, he said, just “escaped” from his pen, and it was only while composing Metamorphosen that what now seems so inevitable as well as so moving became clear to him.

The annotators also adduced some further relevant connections:

On the morning of March 13, 1945, Richard Strauss learned that the Vienna Opera had burned down the night before, after an Allied bombing raid. For distraction from his misery, he had started to reread the complete works of Goethe. Almost certainly the title Metamorphosen came from Goethe, who used that word not only in his scientific writings, but also in reference to his own intellectual and spiritual development. Strauss copied two of Goethe's poems into his Metamorphosen sketchbook. The title of the first is Know Thyself, a task, Goethe suggests, as necessary as it is impossible. The second says that even in an incomprehensible world one must 

Behave with good sense 

As each day brings what it brings. 

Always remember: it's worked so far, 

And so it will surely work till the end.

Even more memorable, however, was the glorious presentation of the second composition of the evening, which proved to be another tour de force: François Poulenc’s stunning opera, La Voix humaine, Tragédie lyrique en un act, from 1958, adapted from the famous monodrama by Jean Cocteau, here magnificently sung from the podium in a dazzling performance by Hannigan. 

The eminent critic Martin Seymour-Smith, in a fascinating assessment, said of Cocteau that he “was one of the most versatile of all modern writers; but his greatest achievement is undoubtedly in the theatre; he was a successful playwright in both avant garde and traditional forms.” In the 1950s and ‘60s, Cocteau was championed by the critics of the magazine Cahiers du cinéma as one of the great French auteurs, deserving a place alongside such masters as Jean Renoir, Max Ophüls, Robert Bresson, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Jacques Becker, for his immortal series of films that included The Blood of a Poet, Beauty and the Beast, Les Parents terribles, Orpheus, and The Testament of Orpheus. He was also a scenarist for Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, Melville’s Les Enfants terribles, and Georges Franju’s Thomas l’imposteur, the latter two adapted from Cocteau’s own novels. His play, The Eagle with Two Heads, which he himself filmed in 1948, was the basis for Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Mystery of Oberwald from 1980, which starred Monica Vitti. The Human Voice was unforgettably filmed by Roberto Rossellini in 1948 with Anna Magnani.

With perfect justice, Hannigan and the musicians received an unusually enthusiastic ovation.