"In the summer of 1944, Strauss began to plan a large-scale piece for string ensemble in the nature of a funeral oration or lamentation. (...) The new piece would be called Metamorphosen - another homage to Ovid. Strauss had in mind the process by which souls revert from one state to another - though (...) the transformation may be a negative one, in which things devolve to their primordial state. The composer also took inspiration from a a short poem by Goethe, whose complete works he read from beguinning to end in his last years:
No one can know himself,
Detached from his self,
Yet he tries to become every day
What is finally clear from the outside,
What he is and what he was,
What he can and what he may.
Strauss finished Metamorphosen on April 12, 1945. Franklin Delano Roosevelt died the same day. (...) That afternoon in the ruins of Berlin, the Berlin Philarmonic presented an impeccably Hitlerish program that included Beethoven's Violin Concerto, Bruckner's Romantic Symphony, and the Immolation Scene from Götterdämmerung. After the concert, members of the Hitler Youth distributed cyanide capsules to the audience, or so the rumor went. Hitler marked his fifty-sixth birthday on April 20. Ten days later, he shot himself in the mouth. in accordance with his final instructions, the body was incinerated alongside that of Eva Braun.
Hitler possilby envisaged his immolation as a reprise of that final scene of the Ring, in which Brünnhilde builds a pyre for Siegfried and rides into the flames. Or he may have hoped to reenact the love-death of Tristan - whose music, he once told his secretary, he wished to hear as he died. Walther Funk thought that Hitler had modeled the scorched-earth policy of the regime's last phase on Wagner´s grand finale: "Everything had to go down in ruins with Hitler himself, as a sort of false Götterdämmerung." Such an extravagant gesture would have fufilled the prophecy of Walter Benjamin, who wrote that fascist humanity would "experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure."
But there is no evidence that the drug-addled Führer was thinking about Wagner or listening to music in the last days and hours of his life. Eyewitness reports suggest that the grim ceremony in the bombed-out Chancellery garden - two gasoline-soaked corpses burning fitfully, the one intact, the other with its skull caved in - was something other than a work of art.
Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise - Listening to the Twentieth century, Harper Perennial, 2009, pp. 367-370
