Completed in 1856, the first act of Wagner’s Die Walküre weaves the enrapturing music of Siegmund and Sieglinde into a love so powerful, so intoxicating, it sets into motion a whopping eleven and a half hours of opera. The second of the four Ring operas, Die Walküre premiered in 1870 at the National Theatre in Munich with the father of Richard Strauss leading the horn section. Over the coming years, the younger Strauss followed his father into that very same opera house, first as an audience member, then as a conductor, and later as a composer. Strauss achieved a level of glory seldom experienced by any composer until 1943 when the National Theatre fell to allied bombs; soon, many of the monuments to German culture—and to Strauss’s life—followed. At the end of the War, the brokenhearted 80-year-old issued his lament to a lost civilization: Metamorphosen.
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