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The Four Last Songs (German: Vier letzte Lieder), Op. posth., for soprano and orchestra are – with the exception of the song "Malven" (Mallows), composed later the same year – the final completed works of Richard Strauss. They were composed in 1948 when the composer was 84.
But he did compose four, although they weren’t linked as a group until after his death when Strauss’s publisher named them ‘Four Last Songs’. The Eichendorf poem which translates as 'At Sunset' is fittingly the last of the four, with the first three songs all settings of poems by Herman Hesse.
Universally considered among the composer’s most beautiful, profound, and human works, Strauss's Four Last Songs were among his last compositions and served as a final love letter to his wife of nearly 60 years, the soprano Pauline de Ahna. Quick Facts.
Oct 4, 2017 · Scored for twenty-three solo string instruments, it’s a requiem for a shattered world that would never return. But it’s the Four Last Songs, written by the 84-year-old Strauss a year before his death, which offer the ultimate farewell to that old pre-war world and to life, itself. Unabashedly embracing the old tonal harmonic language, this ...
May 4, 2019 · It can be said, and I will say it, that Richard Strauss was the last great German Romantic composer. These works, the Four Last Songs, were his last to be written. They are magnificent, transcendental works. The poem “Im Abendrot” was the first to be written. The others followed.
The soprano voice, whose range occupies (roughly) two octaves upward from middle C, can float above a large symphony orchestra with ease, allowing for that long-breathed cantilena which forms such a central characteristic of the Four Last Songs.
Strauss was at the home of banker Adolf Jöhr on 28 July 1948 while working on one of the Hesse songs in this set, according to Jöhr's account (Richard Strauss and His World, p.108 et seq) though Jöhr does not specify which one, and Strauss dedicated the manuscript of that song to Jöhr and his wife.
