Written by Dr. Helmut Frehse

The Four Last Songs (German: Vier Letzte Lieder) were the final completed works of Richard Strauss (1864 – 1949), ranking among the most haunting music ever written. The songs are “Frühling” (Spring), “September”, “Beim Schlafengehen” (Going to sleep) and “Im Abendrot” (In the glow of Sunset). There is no indication that Strauss conceived them as a unified set. The overall title Four Last Songs was provided by his friend Ernst Roth, the chief editor of Boosey & Hawkes, who put them into this order that most performances now follow.

At the end of 1946, Strauss read Eichendorff’s poem “Im Abendrot”, in which an aged couple look at the setting sun and ask, “Is that perhaps death?” The words matched precisely Strauss’ feelings of those years. The piece was completed by May 1948. During that time, a friend sent Strauss a volume of poems by Hermann Hesse. Strauss chose four verses to form a five-song cycle with the Eichendorff setting. The Hesse pieces were composed between July and September 1948, making them the final works that Strauss completed. He never finished the last of the Hesse songs. Strauss died quietly at his Garmisch home exactly one year later.

The settings are for a solo soprano voice given remarkable soaring melodies against a full orchestra, and all four songs have prominent horn parts. The combination of a beautiful vocal line with supportive brass accompaniment references Strauss’s own life: His wife was a famous soprano and his father a professional horn player.

Each of the magnificent Songs treats metaphorically the approach of death – through images of rebirth in spring, autumn, rest and sunset. In these moving creations, Strauss left what British musicologist Neville Cardus described as “the most consciously and most beautifully delivered ‘Abschied’ [‘farewell’] in all music.”

Towards the end of Im Abendrot, exactly as the soprano’s final intonation of “der Tod” (death) ceases, Strauss musically quotes his own tone poem Death and Transfiguration, written six decades earlier, as though bringing round full the cycle of his life’s work. The quoted phrase (known as the “transfiguration theme”) symbolizes the fulfillment of the soul into death.

The premiere of the work was given posthumously at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 22 May 1950 by Kirsten Flagstad accompanied by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. Strauss had written the Songs, as is now accepted, for this great Wagnerian soprano.

Recommendations:

R. Strauss Four Last Songs with Jessye Norman and the Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig conducted by Kurt Masur

R. Strauss Four Last Songs, The Alpine Symphony with Anja Harteros and the Stadtskapelle Dresden conducted by Fabio Luisi

R. Strauss Four Last Songs with Renee Fleming and the Munchner Philarmoniker conducted by Christian Thielemann

All of the above are available from www.amazon.co.uk

As a taster have a look at You Tube and an interview and songs with Renee Fleming along with Christian Thielemann.