Four Last Songs

Quick Facts

• Composer’s life: Born June 11, 1864, in Munich, Germany; died September 8, 1949, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria, Germany
• Year completed: 1948
• First performance: May 22, 1950, Royal Festival Hall, London, Philharmonia Orchestra, Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting, with soprano soloist Kirsten Flagstad
• First BSO performance: July 8, 1983, at Tanglewood, Seiji Ozawa conducting, with soprano soloist Leontyne Price
• Approximate duration: 24 minutes

In addition to the soprano soloist, the score of the Four Last Songs calls for an orchestra of 3 flutes (1 doubling piccolo) and an additional piccolo, 2 oboes and English horn, 2 clarinets and bass clarinet, 3 bassoons (1 doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, bass tuba, harp, celesta, timpani, and strings.

The title “Four Last Songs” was provided upon their posthumous publication by Ernst Roth of Strauss’s publisher Boosey & Hawkes. He gives an account of their composition in a preface to the score:

The first sketches for ‘Im Abendrot’ are found in a notebook from the end of 1946 or the beginning of 1947. The final sketch of the score is dated ‘Montreux, 27 April 1948’ and the score itself was finished on 6 May that year. The sketch of ‘Frühling’ followed, with the full score completed at Pontresina on 18 July 1948. ‘Beim Schlafengehen’ was finished on 4 August and ‘September’…on 20 September of the same year.

After the war, in summer 1945, Strauss was despondent; the nightmare of Nazism was over, but the new dawn cast a horrible light on a Germany reduced to rubble. Landmarks of culture, especially the very institutions directly related to his life’s work—the Dresden Opera, Munich Opera, Vienna’s State Opera—were destroyed. Strauss, whose lifelong instinct was to wave off pessimism by finding solace in work, found it increasingly difficult to put a positive face on anything. In early 1948, his days were spent vainly corresponding with cultural officials, writing artistic testaments for the reactivation of German culture. It distressed Strauss’s son, Franz (“Bubi”) to see his father—obsessed with events beyond his control—spend the end of his life writing pointless letters that were largely ignored.

Franz, therefore, encouraged him to give up letter writing and return to composing, suggesting that he might return to lieder composition. After all, he was already seeking solace in re-reading the German Romantic poems of his youth. As annoyed as Strauss was by his son’s unsolicited suggestion, he knew he was right. Two years earlier (in 1946) Strauss had jotted down a few musical sketches after reading Im Abendrot (“At Sunset”), by Eichendorff, but broke it off; Franz’s advice reawakened that lyrical impulse, and he began composing steadily.

Im Abendrot (completed May 6th, 1948) would be the first of four orchestral songs that were performed and published posthumously under the title Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs), a designation invented by Ernst Roth, Strauss’s publisher at Boosey & Hawkes, who also devised the order in which they are traditionally performed. We can never know in what order Strauss would have placed them, or whether he even intended them as a complete set, although this seems likely. After he scored the last song on September 20, 1948, Strauss handed them to his daughter-in-law Alice and with deliberate—if not mock—abruptness stated, “Here are the songs your husband ordered.” The other three songs in this group are settings of poems by Hermann Hesse: Frühling (“Spring”), Beim Schlafengehen (“Upon Going to Sleep”), and September, completed in July, August, and September 1948, respectively. According to Strauss’s wish, Kirsten Flagstad premiered these songs under Wilhelm Furtwängler.

For anyone who knows these works, that blunt statement by Strauss to his daughter-in-law seems totally at odds with something so sublime. But that is the essence of the ironic, poker-faced Richard Strauss, who liked to present the image of a composer who merely viewed composing as everyday work. To the contrary, at the end of Strauss’s life, we see a composer, like Mahler and his Das Lied von der Erde, turning to the genre of orchestral song, setting poems that contemplate the meaning of death through nature. In Ernst Roth’s sequence for these songs, he pairs two works that pertain to the change of seasons: Frühling celebrates the sound, sight, and fragrance of spring; September looks at the change from summer to autumn, as the garden comes to its annual end: “Summer remains standing, longing for rest. Slowly its large, tired eyes are closed.” At this point we hear one of the shortest, yet most beautiful of Strauss’s solos for the French horn, the instrument of his father, yet in this context, it might well represent Strauss; those large tired eyes are those of the composer himself.

The second pair of these Four Last Songs concerns the desire to sleep. “Now the day has made me tired,” the soprano sings in Beim Schlafengehen. “All my senses want to sink in slumber,” she continues midway through the poem. As she sinks we hear a violin solo, a musical reference to his wife of nearly sixty years; this is the most poignant Strauss violin solo of all. Im Abendrot, composed first but always played last, presents a silent landscape on the verge of night, bringing us to the end of our journey. The first song, Spring, was our introduction, the next song, September, focused on the composer, and Going to Sleep referred to his wife.

This final poem, the only one not by Hesse, begins with the word “we.” The poem unites husband and wife; it tells of a couple, who—through joy and sorrow—have traveled a life together; they see two larks (articulated by two flutes) climbing in the sky dreaming of night. “How tired we are from wandering, could this perhaps be death?” The music on that final word, “Tod” (“death”), carries us back sixty years to the world of Death and Transfiguration, with the famous theme of the “Ideal” now in the soft, mellow range of the English horn. From Till Eulenspiegel to the Four Last Songs spans some fifty years of a life fully lived: from humor and passion to acceptance, serenity, and perhaps even transfiguration.

Bryan Gilliam

Professor Emeritus of Music at Duke University, Bryan Gilliam is a scholar of 19th- and 20th-century German music. He is the author of The life of Richard Strauss in the Cambridge Musical Lives series as well as editor of several volumes of Strauss scholarship. His most recent book is Rounding Wagner’s Mountain: Richard Strauss and Modern German Opera.

Texts and Translations

Translations by Marc Mandel

German texts set to music by Richard Strauss copyright Boosey & Hawkes, Inc., ©1950, renewed 1977.