Wrecked: Why I Had to Stop Learning Strauss' Four Last Songs

Some of you know that I am, of late, a soprano. It's a long story, and it has been, to say the least, an interesting journey that has led me to, among other works, Richard Strauss' Four Last Songs. These are some of the most exquisite orchestral songs around around, and in all my years performing as an instrumentalist and now a singer, my personal experience walking around inside these songs has been unique. I wanted to share it with you, in case you ever need to remind yourself that there really is such a thing as too much of a good thing. First, just a wee bit of context.  To be sure, the first three of Strauss' Four Last Songs pose their technical challenges and call for extraordinary artistry. But the final song, Im Abendrot, stopped me in my tracks. Yes, its unrelenting lyricism at the end of a cycle known for its unrelenting lyricism calls for enormous physical and mental sustaining power. Yes, its range and perhaps ideal dynamics are, well, just don't try them at home. But what forced me to have to set this song aside, and with it the other three of the Four Last Songs, were not its technical demands, but instead its emotional ones. To being with, I blame the poetry. Im Abendrot sets a text of Joseph von Eichendorff, not exactly a pulp author.  There is no way even the most exalted human voice can achieve the spiritual ideal Strauss' score calls for for this song. Strauss has thrown down a gauntlet that can never be picked up. And even after all the philosophical wrangling he put himself through in working out his own aesthetic of program music as he composed his early tone poems, even cheesy text painting notwithstanding (Strauss was a far better composer than this, but he gets away with it because he would agree), Im Abendrot is Strauss at his most metaphysical. The song sits at the point where music really might transcend itself and these earthly climes and become pure spirit.