All this week on Voices Carry at 2pm, we are taking a deep dive into Richard Strauss’ final love letter, his Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs).
Richard Strauss was – like much of the world – despondent in the summer of 1945. Yes, the war was finally over, but the destruction and damage left over seemed insurmountable, and the horror of the past few years was just beginning to settle. Many of the cultural landmarks which served as a home to Strauss throughout his career – the Munich National Theatre, Dresden’s Semper Oper, Berlin’s Lindenoper and Vienna’s State Opera – were reduced to rubble. Strauss was lost, stumbling through his life in a fog of depression.
As the years passed, Strauss found an outlet in writing letters to cultural officials in Germany and Austria, arguing the necessity of rebuilding national arts programs. This increasingly concerned his son, Franz, who saw that his father’s pastime was unproductive, and his letters were being ignored. In a moment of pluck, he suggested to his father that he might better spend his time returning to composing songs, or lieder. He reminded Strauss that he had already begun to re-read the German poetry of his youth, so it could be a natural progression for him. Strauss was annoyed at his son’s suggestion, but knew he was right. And so, Strauss would go on to write his final song cycle, and while he, of course, could not know it was his last while he was composing (Strauss would die a year after writing these songs), there is no question that they are songs of farewell.
The first song, Frühling (Spring), is the most celebratory of the songs. Strauss was a master of orchestration, and lifts the soprano voice higher and higher as she sings of looking up to the trees and blue skies, the surrounding flutes evoking birdsong.
As September follows the journey of summer’s end, Strauss holds on to the warm glow of that transition, and the final push of the season’s heat swells through the lush string writing and the dewy drops of the wind section. The movement ends with the line “Summer remains standing, longing for rest. Slowly its large, tired eyes are closed.” The soprano voice lingers on the word Augen (eyes), the slow decrescendo perhaps mirroring a slip into unconsciousness. The song ends with a short and truly gorgeous French horn solo, the instrument of Strauss’ father.
The soprano pauses for a moment in the third song, Beim Schlafengehen (While Going to Sleep), to make way for a poignant violin solo, marking the passage of the soul from its earthly realm to the heavens, re-entering on the line “And my soul, unobserved, will float about on unencumbered wings…”
Finally, in Im Abendrot (In the Twilight), the singer reflects on a life well lived in partnership – “Through adversity and joy we’ve gone hand in hand…” The role of a pair of larks is played by trilling flutes, and the song ends with a question, and one of the most sublime moments in vocal repertoire, with the soprano asking “Is this perhaps – Death?”
Strauss’ Four Last Songs are, without question, among the most intimate and intense music he ever wrote. These are indeed farewell songs – to life, to art, to his 55-year marriage with the soprano Pauline de Ahna, who inspired this very music and would outlive her husband by a mere eight months. But these are not songs of despair; rather, these sing of a quiet acceptance of death, a nostalgia for a life well-lived, and an anticipation of a final rest.
