Richard Strauss's “Four Last Songs”

Extract

The musical creation of Richard Strauss has been revealed over a space of about seventy years. His two periods of greatest activity, the first of which is dominated by the Symphonic Poems, the second by Opera, have as “Prologue” his youthful work (up to, say, op. 15) and as “Epilogue” everything which comes after the opera Capriccio (1940–41), to which he gave no opus numbers and which he designated as his “inheritance.” In each of the four periods one special type of work dominates, but through all of them runs the Song. Even in the boy's and young man's earliest essays in composition it plays its part, and then in the 'nineties and around the turn of the century—that is to say, during the first decade of Strauss's married life—it comes to full flower. Naturally it receded somewhat when Strauss was dedicating his creative powers to opera above all else, yet even in the years between Salome and Capriccio he published several collections of songs. From his final working years (that is, after 1941) there are only, apart from two as yet unpublished songs to words by the Austrian poet Josef Weinheber, these Four Last Songs for soprano and orchestra. Not merely do they represent Strauss's last contribution to the Song, but they are, above all, the last compositions that he—in the year before his death—completed.