Day 1 — Frühling (from the Four Last Songs)

Our Advent journey begins, perhaps fittingly, at the end. Indeed each Sunday will feature one of Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs. In 1943, in the midst of the Second World War, Strauss orchestrated his ‘Ich liebe dich’, an 1898 setting of a poem by Detlev von Liliencron. The previous year he had penned two settings of poems by the Austrian Josef Weinheber, but these were rarities in a life now dominated by opera. Five years passed before he arranged the pacific ‘Ruhe, meine Seele’, written in 1894 as a wedding present to his wife Pauline. It is the perfect introduction to the mood and manner of the four new songs Strauss was to compose that year.

Originally written for soprano (Strauss’s wife’s voice), orchestra and horn obbligato (his father’s instrument), the songs set three texts by Hermann Hesse, who had been banned by the Nazi party – in what could be read as Strauss’s acknowledgment of the political equivocation of his late years – as well as one by Josef von Eichendorff. The composer died in 1949, before hearing their first performance at the BBC Proms in 1950.

‘Frühling’ emerges from a stirring cloud of C minor, shot through with A flat minor, appearing in the second bar. This tertiary harmonic juxtaposition adeptly describes the dusky vaults of winter, to which Hesse's first lines refer. Those darker thoughts and tones are soon soothed by the appearance of spring (and perhaps the loved one), eliciting bursts of ecstasy, in a long-spun, seemingly breathless vocalise. Ultimately it is to another tertiary relationship that the song turns, A major, prefaced, however, in its final cadence by the subdominant minor, momentarily recalling the initial harmonic instability.

Click here to listen to the song on Spotify.
Click here to order a copy of Jessye Norman's, for me, matchless performance.
The painting is 'Frühling' by Ferdinand Hodler.

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