It started with a handful of players amid a sea of empty chairs. The vacant seats, laid out for the much larger forces needed later in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s all-Strauss program, lent an unplanned poignancy to the performance of Metamorphosen, a work written in the dying months of World War II. One could imagine this to be a lament for the countless numbers who died, symbolised by the unfilled places on stage. In fact, it was the loss of Germany’s cultural patrimony, through the destruction of opera houses and other institutions in Allied bombing raids, which particularly affected Strauss. Metamorphosen mourns the passing of a world to which he had devoted his life, both as conductor and composer.

The work, which Strauss dubbed a study for twenty-three solo strings, nods to some of Strauss’s most revered musical precursors: one theme resembles King Mark’s lament from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, while a descending dotted note line is explicitly revealed in the last bars as the main theme from the Funeral March of Beethoven’s Eroica. But the mutable harmonies and the textural variety he was able to create from this homogenous body of instruments are hallmarks of Strauss’s own art. Under Simone Young’s direction, this brooding work was sculpted with care by the string players, but it was also given a sense of momentum, never faltering under the burden of its sorrow until the final pages, when it settled into a frozen, heartbroken calm.