"Just Four More Songs"

Richard Strauss simply wanted to say, farewell.

Photo by Jordan Wozniak on Unsplash

In September 1949, the ailing Richard Strauss passed away at the age of 85. His career spanned a huge chunk of history, going through the fin de siècle, two world wars, and a slow rehabilitation of Germany from Nazism. In the final years of his life, knowing that the country he grew up in was no longer coming back, he simply accepted it as a fait accompli. With a few more tricks up his sleeve, he penned a few more works like his Oboe concerto and Metamorphosen. As time was coming up for him however, he made a return to the Lied, the genre to which he made a substantial contribution, composing with his wife’s voice in mind. The year before his death, he penned four more songs, the theme focusing on death, but not in conflict with it; he thought more of accepting it as a reality of life, wherein he accepted it without bitterness. Three of the songs took off from the poetry of Hermann Hesse while the last one was from Joseph von Eichendorff. It was unfortunate he did not get to live long enough to witness the premiere, but his wishes were fulfilled when his choice of singer sang them with “a world-class conductor and orchestra”. The singer in mind, Kirsten Flagstad, was the choice not out of her voice —she was a Wagnerian soprano— but out of sympathy of her situation as she was accused of being a collaborator for the Nazis in Norway; her choice of conductor, Wilhelm Furtwängler, faced the same dilemma. The premiere worked out. Here are the songs:

1. Frühling

2. September

3. Beim Schlafengehen

4. Im Abendrot

While these songs are not exactly the last works he penned since the song Malven was the last actual one, these were the ones his publisher thought were actually so; even the current order was not of Strauss’ thinking. These songs already are lush in themselves. Words cannot describe the beauty of these; I believe it is best for me to just give an overview of what to understand from the songs and let you, dear reader, just listen to them. Frühling is the only one which does not tackle death, rather the appreciation of the beauty of spring. September shows the transition from summer to autumn. As people enjoy the outdoors in those warm months, September shows that all that must come to an end; the same applies to life in general. Beim Schlafengehen is a call to have rest at last before flying away into the beauty of the night. The world and its weariness no longer need to plague the reader anymore —this is the first of the songs to be premiered. Im Abendrot shows the beauty of the sunset as the day ends, equating it with death but not in a dark way, rather shown as a peaceful transition. At that point, Strauss was content with the life he had lived, and no longer was he to suffer so much.

Here is Lucia Popp singing these songs with Georg Solti conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra: