I remember the first time I heard Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs in person. It was April 1997 at the Toledo Symphony. I attended with several high-school friends, and even though I’d been to the opera before, I had never heard anything like the Songs: a tone poem for soprano and orchestra, a human voice floating above a palette of late-Romantic warmth and love. The music stopped me in my tracks. It was tender, poignant, impossibly beautiful. I was exploring Mahler around that same time, falling completely in love with the way he wrote for voice and orchestra, and Strauss felt like a natural extension of that world—lush, inward, full of longing.

Death and Transfiguration entered my life almost simultaneously. The recording I bought back then, a famous Karajan album from the 1970s, paired the two pieces. When I later moved to Boston, I remember buying a ticket to hear Seiji Ozawa conduct Death and Transfiguration with the BSO. At the end of the piece, during that breathtaking moment of transfiguration, I watched Ozawa’s entire body release into the final gesture—absolute kinetic catharsis—and the moment lodged itself permanently in my memory. Strauss knew how to build a door to the other side and then fling it open.

These two works—an early tone poem and Strauss’s final masterpiece—speak to each other across the decades. In Four Last Songs, Strauss even quotes Death and Transfiguration, as if acknowledging the spiritual journey he began as a young man and could now finish only at the end of his life. But there is something autumnal in both works, something glowing and sunset-colored. They feel like music written in late afternoon light, the hour Strauss called “gloaming.” When my mother was dying, I listened to Four Last Songs constantly. These pieces gave voice to the impossible mixture of sorrow and acceptance, fear and peace, love and release. They still do.

It is astonishing to remember that Strauss wrote the Four Last Songs in 1948—after two world wars, and at a moment when much of the musical world was turning toward atonality and fragmentation. Yet these glorious, plump songs emerged as though washed ashore from a vanished world. While they may have felt halcyon in 1948, they sound to my ears like something far more enduring. Like any true classic, they are remarkably present and still somehow forward-searching—written for another age, for our age, and for an age still to come.

The Toledo Symphony has its own history with this music, one I think about often. Elizabeth Schwarzkopf performed the Four Last Songs here in 1961 with Music Director Joseph Hawthorne, not long after her now-legendary recordings set the standard for Strauss interpretation. The concert I attended as a teenager—the one that stopped me cold—was that April 1997 performance with Andrew Massey and soprano Jeannette Thompson. And, of course, Renée Fleming joined James Meena and the orchestra in 2017, offering a performance as luminous as anything I have ever heard. This is repertoire that seems to bring out something extraordinary in this orchestra, decade after decade.

Strauss’s texts trace a journey that feels both universal and intimately human. Frühling (“Spring”) opens with trembling wonder, a body reawakened, back into light (“you know me again”). September offers the work’s first gentle surrender—where summer smiles “astonished and weak” as it meets its end, “slowly closing large eyes grown weary”—and Strauss imbues that moment with one of the most gorgeous French horn solos in the repertoire, a mellow, sighing farewell as if the season itself takes a final breath before letting go. In Beim Schlafengehen (“When Falling Asleep”), the body loosens and the soul prepares for flight, lifted by a violin solo so tender and searching that it seems to rise out of the orchestra on its own wings before blending seamlessly into the soprano’s voice. And in Im Abendrot (“At Sunset”), two travelers arrive together at the quiet edge of existence, asking without fear, “Is this, perhaps—death?” The piccolos at the final song’s close flutter like birds toward the disappearing light.

In both text and music, Strauss’s songs move from awakening to acceptance, from the quiver of early spring to the red dusk of evening, and he sets them with a clarity so profound that the listener feels the entire arc of a life pass through them. This music is not about endings; it is music about arrival.

That is the thread that runs through this entire program. Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde blooms from the same root system: love that transcends death, music that outlasts the body. Wagner’s famous “Tristan chord” opens that story—a sound so full of ache and longing that it seems to rewrite gravity. And in the Liebestod, the boundary between love and death dissolves into something radiant. That is the experience this performance leans toward: one continuous breath, one long arc of transformation.

Angela Meade is, in her own right, a force of nature. Her voice has that rare combination of opulence and power, the ability to blaze through Wagner’s climaxes and still find purity in Strauss’s softest high notes. Alain Trudel is a great admirer of hers, and he understands how this repertoire needs both brilliance and shadow—how Wagner and Strauss rely on a voice that can lift the orchestra without losing its human core. These are works that live equally in the radiant top of the voice and the velvety, dusk-colored bottom. Ms. Meade can do both.

This is philosophical music. Music that contemplates endings with beauty, dignity, and openness. Music that asks what remains after love, after breath, after the last heartbeat. In Death and Transfiguration, Strauss paints that heartbeat: soft, irregular, fading, then transforming. In the Four Last Songs, the titles alone tell you where the composer is walking. And in Wagner, the idea of the Liebestod—the “love death”—resolves the question by dissolving it entirely. Love becomes the vessel for transcendence.

Taken together, these works lift us toward something beyond ourselves. They invite us to imagine the moment after the final exhale—not to fear it, but to listen in. And somewhere, in that boundary between sound and stillness, before light returns, we find the courage to let beauty carry us forward.

— Zak Vassar, President & CEO of Live Arts Toledo

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