Strauss: Four Last Songs
Strauss wrote his posthumously titled and published Four Last Songs in 1948, the year before his death. While the 84-year-old composer did go on to compose the song “Malven” later that same year, the Four Last Songs are commonly viewed as his swan song, and their texts (by Joseph von Eichendorff and Hermann Hesse) and musical settings bespeak a quiet acceptance of the end of his long time on Earth. Without a trace of decadence or complexity, the songs glow with an aura of serene gratitude for life, enswathed in a most personal, ethereal lyricism. The radiant orchestral setting of the original makes prominent use of the horn in consort with the vocal line, a metaphor for Strauss’ hornist father and soprano wife. Strauss devised another self-reference in “Im Abendrot” (At Sunset), traditionally performed last in the set: after the singer utters the poem’s final line, “Ist dies etwa der Tod?” (“Is this perhaps death?”), Strauss quotes the seven-note “transfiguration theme” from his Death and Transfiguration, composed 60 years earlier. The four-song collection neatly frames Strauss’ lifelong relationship with the voice, beginning with the first song he wrote at age six, and ending in the elegiac farewell of the Four Last Songs.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival
Strauss wrote his posthumously titled and published Four Last Songs in 1948, the year before his death. While the 84-year-old composer did go on to compose the song “Malven” later that same year, the Four Last Songs are commonly viewed as his swan song, and their texts (by Joseph von Eichendorff and Hermann Hesse) and musical settings bespeak a quiet acceptance of the end of his long time on Earth. Without a trace of decadence or complexity, the songs glow with an aura of serene gratitude for life, enswathed in a most personal, ethereal lyricism. The radiant orchestral setting of the original makes prominent use of the horn in consort with the vocal line, a metaphor for Strauss’ hornist father and soprano wife. Strauss devised another self-reference in “Im Abendrot” (At Sunset), traditionally performed last in the set: after the singer utters the poem’s final line, “Ist dies etwa der Tod?” (“Is this perhaps death?”), Strauss quotes the seven-note “transfiguration theme” from his Death and Transfiguration, composed 60 years earlier. The four-song collection neatly frames Strauss’ lifelong relationship with the voice, beginning with the first song he wrote at age six, and ending in the elegiac farewell of the Four Last Songs.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival