PERFORMANCE

Carnegie Hall
International Festival of Orchestras

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra
Mariss Jansons - Chief Conductor
Diana Damrau - Soprano

R. Strauss - Four Symphonic Interludes from Intermezzo
R. Strauss - Four Last Songs
Brahms - Symphony No. 4

"Brahms looks back while Strauss soars to unprecedented heights in this concert. Brahms envisioned a symphony built around a Bach theme, and in the final movement of his last symphony crafted an epic passacaglia (variations over a repeating bass line) on the master’s melody, building to a devastating emotional climax. Autumnal sentiments are also present in Strauss’s gorgeous Four Last Songs, sung here by Diana Damrau who, according to Opera News, can “do anything she wants with any note at any given time.”

"Like Delius’s Songs of Farewell, Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs) are the final creations of a composer who knew he was at the end of his life—his death completing the farewell gesture. (Mahler, addicted to goodbyes, wrote more than one farewell to the world, “tempting fate,” as his wife complained.) Strauss began the last song first, basing it on the Eichendorff poem “At Sunset,” which depicts an elderly couple seeing a sunset as a harbinger of death. Next, he set three Hesse poems that also drew analogies between death and states of nature, then began a final Hesse setting that he did not live to complete. The myth that Strauss wrote these songs for an idealized soprano has recently been debunked; he apparently composed them specifically for the renowned Wagnerian singer Kirsten Flagstad." 

About the Music

The final standard-bearer for Austro-German late Romanticism, Strauss is known for lush, formidable orchestrations, but his final creations—the Duett-Concertino and the Oboe Concerto, in addition to these songs—are surpassingly intimate and delicate. For better or for worse, they reflect none of the postwar troubles and traumas of the era, including Strauss’s exile in Switzerland to escape the denazification program. (For what it’s worth, he was cleared by the board.) They are also entirely removed from the serialism, primitivism, expressionism, and other modernist fashions of the century, though the concertos certainly partake of the late-1940s vogue of neoclassicism. 

A Closer Listen

Knowing these songs are final testaments makes them uniquely poignant, but without their dramatic circumstances, they would still be among Strauss’s most exquisite creations. Balancing serenity and melancholy with precise equilibrium, they project none of the darkness and terror found in near-death works such as Tchaikovsky’s “Pathéthique” Symphony. Like Delius, who invokes late Whitman for his last songs, Strauss faces death with equanimity and with neither bitterness nor soothing thoughts of an afterlife.

The scoring is transparent and crystalline even though it offers Strauss’s customary cushions of sensuality. The opening “Spring” features trembling high strings “drenched in light.” In “September,” a horn gently plummets, “longing for rest.” In “Going to Sleep,” a solo violin ushers the “soul, unguarded” into “night’s magic circle.” The final song, “At Sunset,” with its soaring soprano line and trilling skylarks, floats toward an orchestral quotation from Strauss’s 1889 tone poem Death and Transfiguration, the “deliverance from the world” forecast in that visionary work finally attained.