Four Last Songs

Strauss, Richard

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If You Care About Melody, You Need This

With these meditations on the end of life, Richard Strauss deftly pulls off what composers had been trying (mostly in vain) to do for the previous hundred years: Write endless melodies. Not running-at-the-mouth gibberish, but substantial lines that have shape and lyricism but don't conform to conventional "song" lengths. These pieces, sung rhapsodically by Jessye Norman, seem to go on and on, always resolving yet never resolved, questing without ever circling back. Remarkably, they don't wander. As Norman finishes one of the beautiful phrases, the orchestra comes along and takes the handoff, surging just enough to earn the right to follow such a luminous presence.

The third song, "Beim Schlafengehen," is of particular note in this regard. An elegy that moves at a floating crawl, it is an engrossing processional, in which one brilliant phrase adds resonance to the preceding ones. Though the music moves slowly, Norman sings the extended lines as though spreading joy and pain evenly across the sound spectrum, taking care not to miss any spots. Her sustained notes catch all the voluptuousness of Strauss's ideas without smothering or distorting their shapes.

These songs are Strauss's last major work, finished only months before his death, at age eighty-five, in 1949. Filled with verses about coming to terms with death, they're a classic swan song. Indeed, "In Abendrot" begins with a focused burst of string tone, an enveloping sound that suggests a long look down the tunnel of blue light into the next world.

This disc also contains one of the very few concert pieces by Richard Wagner. The individual songs of Wesendonck Lieder are among the shortest stand-alone works in an output marked by its epic scale. Norman sings them as though trying to compensate for their compactness, by magnifying each emotional ripple.

Genre: Classical
Released: 1982, Philips
Key Tracks: All of them.
Next Stop: Wagner: Tristan und Isolde
Book Page: 750

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