Program Notes - Valentine’s Weekend: Four Last Songs

Don Juan, Op. 20
Richard Strauss
b. Munich, Germany / June 11, 1864
d. Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany / September 8, 1949

Don Juan is Strauss’ second tone poem, following immediately after the completion of Macbeth. By the time he put the finishing touches on it, he had taken up the position of assistant conductor at the opera house in Weimar, Germany. Naturally, he planned to perform Don Juan there but his wish nearly came to grief when the members of the orchestra balked at the high technical demands it placed on them. One of them cried out during a rehearsal, “Good God, in what way have we sinned that you should send us this scourge!” Strauss remained calm throughout the preparations. At one point he told them, “I would ask those of you who are married, to play as if you were engaged, and all will be well.” The sensationally successful premiere on November 11, 1889, and the many other performances which quickly followed, catapulted the 25-year-old genius into the world’s musical spotlight.

Inspiration for it lay in dramatic verses written in 1844 by Austrian author Nicolaus Lenau. Reflecting the growing psychological and moral complexity of the time, Lenau depicts Don Juan as more than simply the heartless, high-born rake of earlier treatments. Lenau makes him something of a philosopher, seeking through his many conquests the “ideal woman.” Disillusioned and weary of his aimless, unsatisfying life, this Don Juan allows himself to be killed in a duel. Whether one chooses to approach Strauss’ Don Juan as dramatic narrative or absolute music, it has much to commend it. Orchestrated by the hand of a master, it overflows with energy and ardent emotions.


Four Last Songs
Richard Strauss

Like his eminent predecessors, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms (as well as his contemporaries, Hugo Wolf and Gustav Mahler), Strauss made major contributions to the repertoire of German art songs (lieder). He composed some 200 of them in all.

Toward the end of 1946, four years after he had composed his most recent songs, he came across Im Abendrot (In the Evening’s Glow), a poem by Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857). Its mood suited his world-weary, post-war frame of mind perfectly. The characters, an elderly couple gazing into the sunset, reflected his and his wife Pauline’s situation like a glove. He completed his setting on May 6, 1948.

An admirer had recently sent him a volume of poems by Hermann Hesse (1877-1962). From it, he chose four pieces, possibly intending to join them together with Im Abendrot to form a song-cycle; He completed only three of them: Frühling (Spring) on July 18, 1948; Beim Schlafengehen (Falling Asleep), on August 4; and September, on September 20.

He died without hearing them in concert. He left no indication that he intended them to be performed together, and therefore no sequence of presentation. His publishing company, Boosey and Hawkes, decided that they formed a cycle. The first performance took place in London on May 22, 1950, eight months after his death. Soprano Kirsten Flagstad was the soloist and Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra.

These mellow, achingly beautiful and voluptuously orchestrated works represent – consciously so – Strauss’s musical last will and testament. In them he put aside the realistic horrors of mid-twentieth century life and returned to the ripely Romantic style of his own early music, supplemented by vast intervening experience.

Spring, the first song, pays rapturous, nostalgic tribute to that glorious season of the year, one that seems full of hope after the chill of winter. The cycle of seasons continues in September, the second song. As summer turns inexorably to autumn, text, atmosphere and music darken and decay, as the poet begins to accept the inevitable end of all things. A solo passage for horn – the instrument Strauss’ father Franz played brilliantly, and so often the younger Strauss’ favorite color – adds a final benediction.

Falling Asleep, the third song, continues the poet’s journey towards the afterlife. Strauss features another of his most beloved instrumental voices: solo violin. In the Evening’s Glow completes the voyage. After the soprano has sung the final words, “ist dies etwa der Tod?” (can this, perhaps, be death?), Strauss quoted the “transfiguration” theme from Death and Transfiguration, a tone poem he had composed 60 years previously.

As he lay on his deathbed, he said to his daughter-in-law, Alice, “Dying is just as I composed it in Death and Transfiguration.” Pauline died less than a year later, nine days after the first performance of the Four Last Songs.


Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 97 (Rhenish)
Robert Schumann
b. Zwickau, Germany / June 8, 1810
d. Endenich, Germany / July 29, 1856

In September 1850, Schumann and his wife, Clara, moved to Düsseldorf, where Robert had been engaged as conductor of the local orchestra and chorus. Enchanted with the city and the welcome opportunity of having his own orchestra to work with, he promptly began to compose again, something which recent illness had kept him from doing.

First came a cello concerto, completed in two concentrated weeks. Then he set down his impressions of his new home and its verdant setting on the banks of the Rhine river (as well as his happiness in being there) in a new symphony. This is the source of its nickname, the “Rhenish” or “Rhineland” Symphony. The creation of this broader canvas occupied him for four weeks. “I cannot see that there is anything remarkable about composing a symphony in a month,” he wrote to a friend. “Handel wrote a complete oratorio in that time. If one is capable of doing anything at all, one must be capable of doing it quickly, the quicker the better, in fact. The flow of one’s thoughts and ideas is more natural and more authentic than lengthy deliberation.” He conducted the premiere himself, in Düsseldorf, on February 6, 1851.

It is the only one of his symphonies with five movements rather than four, a possible nod to Beethoven’s Sixth, the similarly picturesque and rustic “Pastoral” Symphony. The opening section, a sweeping piece with a genuine sense of joy, lays claim to be his finest orchestral creation. Renowned British musicologist Sir Donald Tovey draws a parallel between it and the first movement of Beethoven’s Third, the “Eroica” Symphony, with which it shares the same key. Although Schumann called the second movement a scherzo, it has the leisurely air of a country dance rather than the boisterous energy of a musical joke. His original title for it was Morning on the Rhine.

The first of two slow movements is a lyrical song without words, similar in character to his vocal and piano romances. The second is virtually a miniature tone poem or mood picture. It was inspired by a ceremony – the elevation of Archbishop Geissel to the office of Cardinal – that the Schumanns had witnessed the previous September at the magnificent (although at that time, unfinished) Gothic cathedral in the nearby city of Cologne. The addition of trombones to the orchestra lends it an aptly solemn, stately air. Schumann returns us to the sunlight of the Rhine valley for the vigorous and cheerful finale.

© 2009 Don Anderson. All rights reserved.