The songs are gentle, sensuous, sweet, lyrical, and feature delicate textures. Musicologist Herbert Glass writes, “The sublime Metamorphosen and Four Last Songs are retrospective, drenched in a sense of what was and never will be again.... But they are indeed songs of farewell – to life, to art, to a vanished world.... To more than one observer, Strauss saved his best for the very end.”
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.
I love Mahler.
Mahler is my guy. My favorite composer. My personalized license plate.
His music isn’t everyone’s cup of tea; it’s thick, personal, and philosophical. For some, his symphonies are a hot drink, not easily consumed. But the Sixth Symphony? It’s pure drama. It soaks you to the bone and makes eighty-five minutes disappear.
The only thing Mahler asks of his listeners (at first!) is that you listen openly. He wrote, “At a first performance … the principal thing is to give oneself with pleasure or displeasure to the work, to allow the human-poetic in general to affect one, and if one then feels drawn to it, to occupy oneself with it more thoroughly…. One must bring along one’s ears and heart and, not least, surrender willingly…. A bit of mystery always remains – even for the creator!”
