If you like classical music, Youtube is great. I heard D. grumbling, because the internet connection in her teaching room is so lousy. She likes to let her students listen to many versions of the same piece. That’s how she taught me to listen to music. The wonderful thing about Youtube is its immense backlist of examples of people’s very particular taste. Not so great when it concerns animated lolcatz clips, but wonderful if you’re searching for that one version of Vier Letzte Lieder by Richard Strauss. Four Last Songs is Strauss’s last work, composed in 1948. A farewell to music and a farewell to life, for Strauss was 84 when he wrote these and died before their premiere, in 1950. The Lieder are four poems, one by Eichendorf (Im Abendrot), the others by Hesse. Im Abendrot (At Sunset), was the first song Strauss composed but it is the last of the set to be performed. Four Last Songs was written for soprano and orchestra, and the voice is carried by the orchestra. The effect is a sense of acceptance and calm in the face of impending death. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf is often thought to be the ideal interpreter of these songs, but in the 1980s Jessye Norman performed them spectacularly, and we have a version by Elly Ameling too, which is wonderful. But the best version, in my opinion, is the one by Lucia Popp. Popp is often thought as a singer of “light” classical repertoire, yet her interpretation has a depth and an intuitive character that brought me to tears when I first heard it.
Originally posted 2008-06-18 07:47:43.