“Four Last Songs”. Composer: Richard Strauss. Sung By: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.

“Four Last Songs”.

Composer: Richard Strauss.

Sung By: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.

Available on YouTube

HERE

This rendition is, in the view of Zephyrinus, a marvellous complement to the recent Post on this Blog, on 21 February 2024, headlined “What Are The Four Last Things ? An Interview With Fr. Timothy Finigan”.

The following Text is from CLASSIC FM

Richard Strauss: “Four Last Songs”. Swansong of sublime beauty.

Strauss’s “Four Last Songs” are simply one of the most touchingly beautiful ways for a composer to end his career, says Jane Jones.

At the end of a long and successful career, when a composer still has the power to move his audience with a swansong of such sublime beauty that it takes your breath away, - well, you know that work is a masterpiece.

That’s the way I’ve always felt about the “Four Last Songs” by Richard Strauss since I first heard them performed by the incomparable Jessye Norman.

Richard Strauss was in his 80s and living in Switzerland at the end of World War II and, although he was increasingly feeble, he was still composing.

Throughout his successful operatic and orchestral career, he’d written songs – almost 200 of them, inspired by his wife Pauline. She was quite a character with a formidable reputation as the iron rod in that relationship – managing the money and giving her husband just enough to live on ! 

But she was also a successful soprano who performed Strauss’s songs to great acclaim. Towards the end of 1946, Strauss read a poem by Eichendorff, “Im Abendrot”, in which an ageing couple at the end of their lives together look at the setting sun and ask: “Is that perhaps death ?”.

The words matched the composer’s feelings entirely, and became the inspiration for the start of a five-song cycle which he never completed.

But he did compose four, although they weren’t linked as a group until after his death when Strauss’s publisher named them “Four Last Songs”.

The Eichendorf poem [Editor: “Im Abendrot”], which translates as “At Sunset”, is fittingly the last of the four, with the first three songs all settings of poems by Herman Hesse.

Beginning with “Spring”, the second is “September”, followed by “Going to Sleep”, each seems to be part of Strauss’s preparations for death and it’s hard to imagine a more conscious or deliberate farewell from this master of song.

The words are all warm, wise and reflective with no hint of religious consolation as death approaches, but rather a deeply felt appreciation of the world before leaving.

This isn’t some maudlin notion with the benefit of hindsight, although these songs do have a profound sense of longing and melancholy, but the overwhelming effect is one of a feeling of serene peace.

It’s simply one of the most touchingly beautiful ways for a composer to end his career.

[Note: Zephyrinus urges all readers to, at least, listen to the sublime “Im Abendrot”, the fourth song in the cycle. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf cannot be bettered in this rendition.]