Richard Strauss - Im Abendrot. Vier letzte Lieder, Four Last Songs | Jessye Norman

Richard Strauss - Im Abendrot ("Wir sind durch Not und Freude gegangen Hand in Hand"), song for soprano & orchestra, o.Op. 150/4 (TrV 296/4, AV 150/4), 1948.

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Im Abendrot

Wir sind durch Not und Freude
gegangen Hand in Hand;
vom Wandern ruhen wir
nun überm stillen Land.

Rings sich die Täler neigen,
es dunkelt schon die Luft.
Zwei Lerchen nur noch steigen
nachträumend in den Duft.

Tritt her und laß sie schwirren,
bald ist es Schlafenszeit.
Daß wir uns nicht verirren
in dieser Einsamkeit.

O weiter, stiller Friede!
So tief im Abendrot.
Wie sind wir wandermüde-
Ist dies etwa der Tod?

Joseph von Eichendorff


"Strauss' Four Last Songs. For the profundity that is achieved not by complexity but by clarity and simplicity. For the purity of the sentiment about death and parting and loss. For the long melodic line spinning out and the female voice soaring and soaring. For the repose and composure and gracefulness and the intense beauty of the soaring. For the ways one is drawn into the tremendous arc of heartbreak. The composer drops all masks and, at the age of eighty-two, stands before you naked. And you dissolve.

Philip Roth


Richard Strauss' extraordinarily beautiful Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs) (1948) for voice and orchestra are among the last music the composer ever wrote. Actually, Strauss did not intend to place the songs into this grouping in which they are best known. The title "Four Last Songs" was provided posthumously by Strauss's friend Ernst Roth, who published the four songs as a single unit after Strauss's death. Three of the settings are on texts by Hermann Hesse; the last in the group, Im Abendrot (At Dusk), is a "separate" setting of a poem by Joseph Eichendorff. (Strauss also left behind another unfinished Hesse setting, Nacht. ) Still, given the themes of the Hesse songs - "Frühling" (Spring)," "September," and "Beim Schlafengehen" (Time to Sleep) - the inclusion of the Eichendorff song seems a natural extension of and appropriate end to the cycle.

The Four Last Songs are virtually indistinguishable in technique and musical language from the fine songs Strauss wrote 50 years earlier. They are, in short, rich and fully Romantic, expressive in feeling and symphonic in sound. As such, they might well be thought of as the final masterpieces of the line of German Romantic Lieder that began with Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebter. The final words of Im Abendrot are "Is this really Death?" Here, Strauss inserts the famous yearning theme from his own Death and Transfiguration, providing what can only be regarded as a most fitting epitaph to his own life and work.

Towards the end of "Im Abendrot", exactly as the soprano's final intonation of "der Tod" (death) ceases, Strauss musically quotes his own tone poem Death and Transfiguration, written 60 years earlier. As in that piece, the quoted six-note phrase (known as the "transfiguration theme") symbolizes the fulfillment of the soul into death.

Strauss died in September 1949. The premiere was given posthumously at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 22 May 1950 by soprano Kirsten Flagstad and the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler.