R Strauss Four last songs 
R Strauss Four last songs
Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
Four Last Songs
Frühling
September
Beim Schlafengehen
Im Abendrot
On 10th September 1894 Strauss married the soprano Pauline de Ahna. Theirs was not an easy marriage but it lasted, despite many rocky patches, right up to Strauss’ death, just two days before they would have celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary. They hated being apart. Distraught at the death of her husband Pauline entered a terminal mental decline and died just eight months later on 13th May 1950. Two weeks after Pauline’s own death her husband’s final work, the Four Last Songs, was premièred at London’s Royal Albert Hall by the soprano Kirsten Flagstad, for whose voice Strauss had the highest admiration, but the work had actually begun life as a gift to Pauline.
During the Second World War, Strauss had taken Pauline to Ouchy, near Lausanne in neutral Switzerland, and there, on the shores of the idyllic Lake Geneva and about as far from the horrors of war as it was possible to get in Europe, he came across Joseph von Eichendorff’s poem Im Abendrot (“At Sunset”) and began to set it to music. Their return to Germany and Strauss’ subsequent trials and tribulations when the victorious allies accused him of being a Nazi sympathiser, caused the Eichendorff setting to be forgotten, but in October 1947 he visited London at the invitation of the great English conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, for a month-long festival devoted to his music. It should have been a wonderful experience for him (although it was not until the following year that he was eventually cleared by the Allies’ “De-Nazification Panel”), but it was soured by the fact that Pauline was not allowed to travel with him. On his return the old couple wept for joy and hugged each other, in the words of one eye-witness “as if they had survived a disaster and reached a new world.” In London Pauline had been very much in Strauss’ thoughts and, recalling their holiday in Ouchy, Strauss had remembered his setting of Im Abendrot.
Reunited with Pauline he completed it in May 1948 and decided to write four more songs for soprano with orchestra, the texts taken from a recently-published collection by Hermann Hesse. He completed Frühling (“Spring”) in July 1948, Beim Schlafengehen (“Time to Sleep”) in August and September, appropriately enough, the following month. He never completed the fourth of the Hesse settings and none was ever published until, just over a year after Strauss’ death, his publisher, Ernst Roth, unearthed the manuscripts of these songs and decided to publish them as a set with the singularly apt title, Four Last Songs.
As arranged in sequence by Ernst Roth the Four Last Songs follow the progression of a human lifetime. First comes “Spring” with its luxuriant orchestral accompaniment representing the urgent, thrusting momentum of new life with snatches of birdsong and the lavish blossoming of new flowers and leaves. Next comes “September”, with its first glimpse of the approaching Autumn. Again the orchestra paints vivid aural pictures behind Hesse’s texts. There is the pattering of raindrops, the gentle falling of the leaves, and a tranquil ending from a solo horn as life begins to fade away. A weary string introduction sets the scene for “Time to Sleep” and a magical violin solo illustrates the final verse of the text in which the spirit soars freely. “At Sunset” closes the cycle with a glorious orchestral evocation of the glowing sky. As darkness falls two larks, in the guise of a pair of flutes, flutter charmingly up into the night sky where they remain even after the voice has sung the moving words “is this perhaps death?”; words which Strauss himself altered from Eichendorff’s original. |
Mahler Symphony No.6
Mahler Symphony No.6
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Timing – 77:00
Symphony No.6 in Am – “Tragic”
Allegro energico, ma non troppo
Andante moderato
Scherzo
Finale (Allegro moderato)
A composer’s relations with his wife again provide much of the impetus behind this work. On 9th March 1902 Mahler married Alma Schindler, the daughter of a landscape painter and herself a talented composer (part of their marriage agreement was that Alma should give up all vestiges of her compositional career and subvert totally to her husband’s will in matters musical). It is widely accepted that he was a bad husband (Alma later wrote that, “I knew that my marriage and my own life were utterly unfulfilled”), but he did love his wife and acknowledged his feelings for her in his Sixth Symphony, which he began the year after their marriage and worked on over the course of the following two summers. He himself conducted the work’s première in Essen, Germany, on 27th May 1906; the performance having been arranged by Richard Strauss, President of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein, a society committed to the promotion of new music in Germany and which, under Strauss’ presidency, was so strongly biased towards Mahler that it was frequently referred to as the “Allgemeiner Deutscher Mahlerverein”. (When, many years later, Alma Mahler publicly belittled Strauss’s support for her husband - and also made deeply disparaging remarks about Pauline - Strauss was bitterly upset.)
Alma herself regarded the Sixth Symphony as her husband’s most personal work; “None of his works moved him so deeply”, she wrote, “When the rehearsal was over, he walked up and down in the artist’s room, sobbing, wringing his hands, unable to control himself. On the day of the concert he was so afraid that his agitation might get the better of him that, out of shame and anxiety, he did not conduct the Symphony well. He hesitated to bring out the dark omen behind the terrible last movement”.
That last movement forms the emotional core of the work and it was to that movement that Mahler was referring when he described it as “Tragic” (a subtitle he sanctioned at the première but did not include when submitting the work for publication). However the entire Symphony is the most unequivocally programmatic one Mahler ever wrote - its programme being the hopes and ambitions of the young, recently-married composer, and how they are ultimately thwarted by the inevitability of Fate - and in his desire to express in musical terms his very non-musical programme, he brought into the exceptionally large orchestra (the largest orchestra he ever employed in a purely instrument symphony), a strange diversity of instruments including cowbells, birch twigs, and a sledgehammer.
Throbbing basses set the 1st movement off on a menacing march, which reaches a climax, after which, to the rattle of the side drum and a blazing chord from the trumpets, the timpani crash out a motiv which represents “Fate”. A quieter chorale-like passage from the woodwind leads to the soaring, passionate violin theme which Mahler told Alma represented her; “I’m not sure how well I have succeeded but you’ll have to put up with it”. In conventional Sonata Form, this is all repeated after which, as the music calms down, we hear the sound of cowbells. Mahler intended these to represent “the last earthly sounds penetrating the remote solitude of the mountain peaks.” After this magical sojourn in the mountains, we are brought back to earth with the return of the march, an ecstatic statement of the “Alma” theme and the movement ends on a note of heroic triumph.
The 2nd movement provides a tranquil episode after the rigours of what has come before. At the climaxes the cowbells make a re-appearance, but these moments of passion quickly fade and the movement’s overriding sense of profound calm is never seriously disturbed.
Pounding timpani set the 3rd movement off on a terrifying march, strongly reminiscent of that from the first movement. Grotesque orchestral effects and shrill screams from the woodwind vie with more triumphant passages until the music subsides and a delicate, pattering dance starts up (Alma wrote that this was supposed to represent the “play of little children”). This innocent dance is unable to divert the inevitable march of Fate and the movement ends with the dance descending down into the depths of the orchestra.
The vastness of the 4th movement is indicated by its very opening – shimmering strings and an expansive violin theme. A funereal dirge seems to plumb the very depths of despair, but it begins a seemingly inexorable rise to triumph, interrupted at one point by the crashing of timpani to remind us of the “Fate” motiv. However, as it reaches a triumphant climax it is abruptly felled by a devastating blow from the sledge-hammer (Mahler wrote that he wanted this to be “like the stroke of an axe”). This happens a second time, but while Mahler wrote a third hammer blow into the published score (which, Alma said, represented the hero’s death) he always omitted this from performances he directed; and, in accordance with Mahler’s own performing practice, Edo de Waart omits the third hammer-blow from this performance. The music descends back to the depths, there are the gruntings and groanings of low wind instruments and distant echoes of earlier themes, including the ringing of the cowbells, but at the end the “Fate” motiv celebrates its victory over the hero with a grim dance which ends in utter darkness.
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