Although it is not clear that Strauss really intended them to be a set, this is the fourth (although first-composed) of Strauss’ “Four Last Songs,” the last compositions he is known to have written: one year before he died, two before Kirsten Flagstad and Wilhelm Furtwängler premiered them, and only three after Strauss’ miserable and barely-tolerated existence under the Third Reich came to an end. Accordingly, it often bothers me that my favorite recording of the cycle is by a Former Party Member, but Schwarzkopf was the perfect mezzo for this music: fully rounded and technically flawless but with an evanescence in her timbre that allowed her to just evaporate on the diminuendos, notably the last line of this particular lied: “How weary we are of wandering---/ Is this perhaps death?” This is the only one of the four not set to a Hermann Hesse poem, and it is “final” in a way the others are not. The voice makes it what it is. Never rising to more than a ghostly murmur and barely floating over the orchestra, it describes a twilight walk in the mountains that seems to erase everything that came before it. Except for sadness.
Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.
No comments:
Post a Comment