Classical Music | Soprano

Recorded on 06/13/2009, uploaded on 06/06/2012

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Vier letzte Lieder (“Four Last Songs”), completed in 1948, was Richard Strauss’s last completed composition before his death in September of the following year. Though its four songs—“Frühling” (“Spring”), “September,” “Beim Schlafengehen” (“When Falling Asleep”), and “Im Abendrot” (“At Sunset”)—are now ubiquitously seen together, there is no indication Strauss intended them as a unified set. “Im Abendrot,” the first of the songs to be composed, is also the only one based on a poem of Joseph von Eichendorff, while the other three followed later, and are on texts by Hermann Hesse. Indeed, until 1954, the three Hesse songs were listed separately from the earlier Eichendorff setting, and it was not until Strauss’s friend Ernst Roth, chief editor of Boosey & Hawkes, collected the four works under the title “Four Last Songs” that the performance order usually encountered today was established.

Strauss scored the Four Last Songs for soprano accompanied by a sizeable orchestra force that included a full complement of woodwinds and brass, harp, and celeste. Before his death, Strauss requested that the Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad should premiere the four songs with a “first-class conductor and orchestra.” Thanks to a generous donation by the Maharaja of Mysore, the performance was made possible, and Flagstad premiered the Four Last Songs at the Royal Albert Hall on May 22, 1950, accompanied by the Philharmonia Orchestra under the direction of Wilhelm Furtwängler.       Joseph DuBose

Ooh La La Opera Presents

Recorded by Tom Barnes

c. 2009 Stephanie Piercey