Four Last Songs

Program notes

About the Work

The Four Last Songs (Vier letzte Lieder) are Richard Strauss’s sublime farewell to life and to music, among the most beautiful and moving works ever written for the human voice. Strauss composed them in 1948, when he was eighty-four, in the shattered aftermath of the Second World War, with his own death less than a year away. After a lifetime as one of the great masters of the orchestra and of opera, he returned at the very end to the intimate form of the orchestral song, setting three poems by Hermann Hesse and one by Joseph von Eichendorff. The songs were not conceived or published by Strauss as a set; the title and the grouping were supplied posthumously by his friend, the publisher Ernst Roth, who issued them together in 1950, after the composer’s death.

The songs form a profound meditation on the cycle of life, the acceptance of death and the consolations of love and nature. Three of them (all but ‘Spring’) deal directly with endings (sleep, autumn, sunset), yet there is no fear in them, only a serene, glowing, valedictory peace. Strauss writes for a soprano voice soaring over a rich, warm orchestra, with luminous, sunset harmonies and exquisite instrumental solos. They are the perfect centre of this programme: a great composer’s autumnal leave-taking, framed by Gerhard’s modernist dawn and Mahler’s vision of heaven.

What to Listen For

The four songs trace a journey from spring to sunset. Listen first to ‘Frühling’ (‘Spring’), the most ardent, the voice blossoming, like nature itself, into warmth and colour. Then ‘September’, in which summer fades: listen for the gentle melancholy and the exquisite closing horn solo (a personal touch: Strauss’s father was a famous horn player) as the garden dies into autumn.

‘Beim Schlafengehen’ (‘When Falling Asleep’) is the emotional heart: listen for the heavenly orchestral interlude, in which a solo violin rises and soars before the voice returns, one of the most transcendent passages Strauss ever wrote, evoking the soul taking flight in sleep. Finally, ‘Im Abendrot’ (‘At Sunset’), setting Eichendorff’s poem about an old couple watching the sun go down after a long life together. Listen for the radiant orchestral sunset, and, at the words ‘Is this perhaps death?’, for the magical, hushed quotation Strauss makes of his own tone poem Death and Transfiguration from sixty years earlier, followed by the song of two larks (trilling flutes) as the music dissolves into serene, accepting peace. Lucy Crowe’s soprano carries this glowing farewell.