“Classical music is one of the highest expressions of our humanity - it defines us and tells so much about who we are and what makes life worth living. Classical music is as necessary to our happiness, inspiration and understanding of life as the paintings of a great artist like Van Gogh or a natural wonder like the Grand Canyon....”

你好 I came across this quote from Alan Gilbert, Chief conductor and artistic advisor to the Royal Stockholm PO, and music director of Santa Fe Opera as I was listening to Strauss’ music and it stopped me in my tracks. Because if there ever was a musician whose life was a terrible expression of humanity it had to be Richard Strauss.

Perhaps there were people in Germany who really didn’t know what was going on during the Nazi reign, but Strauss was not one of them. As fellow composers, conductors and musicians were kicked out of their jobs and either fled or were carted away to the concentration camps, Strauss did absolutely nothing. It meant the end of competition; more goodies for him – more conducting fees, more performances of his music, and more honors. As the crown jewel of German music, Strauss could have done any number of things to save some of the greatest musicians and musical minds of the century, but he never lifted a finger. Not even when his own mother-in-law was carted away.

Strauss was interested in one thing and one thing only, his music – and the fees he could make from his music. If the Nazi regime meant that the writing and performing of practically all 20^th century music was forbidden, leaving little but Strauss’s music and his forebears’, he was fine with it.

Let’s not mince words, the man was totally self-involved and if you can be evil without actually picking up a weapon and killing people, Strauss was as evil as they come.

When Germany was bombed into defeat, Strauss was a sick, crushed man living in exile, hiding from his past. The cities and concert halls where he had been acclaimed were rubble. People were starving in the streets. His dreams of a musical culture with him at its head turned to dust.
And yet out of that came some of the most magnificent, most moving things he ever wrote. Case in point, what’s in our player now:

R. Strauss: Four Last Songs etc., Elisabeth Schwarzkopf – Soprano/ Philharmonia Orchestra –Ackermann, Conductor EMI CDH 7610012

No discussion of the world’s greatest music could be complete without Schwartzkopf’s incredibly moving readings of the Four Last Songs; Beim Schlaffengehen (On going to Sleep), September, Fruhling (Spring) and Im Abendrot (At Dusk). In 1948 Strauss wrote them separately, not thinking of them to be performed as a cycle. There have been arguments about the order of the songs, but the issue seems at least to me to be meaningless. Strauss might have had some ideas on the subject, but he never lived to hear these songs performed.

You don’t have to know German or the poetry Strauss picked, to understand in Schwartzkopf’s beautiful, limpid tones that float high over the crescendos of the orchestra, that this was a man who knew his life was coming to a close and that he was about to face death. That’s particularly true in Im Abendrot. Written in 1946 as the first of the four songs, (but always performed as the last one) Strauss saw death as a serene, peaceful leave taking, not a resignation to savage forces greater than he. And even at the edge of darknesss, there is some hope. You can hear it in the birds chirping in the distance at the very end of the song.

This (mono) recording communicates all that. Some conductors treat the four songs as one long dirge, taking them so slowly that the musical phrases practically fall apart, but not this rich, warm version, which moves you while at the same time avoiding the melodramatic.

Expressing what cannot be put into words is what music at its greatest can do. Listen to this a few times, until you get accustomed to its scope and its emotional vocabulary and you will see for yourself. When a man dies, a light leaves the world. Richard Strauss may have stood for everything that’s evil, but you have to hand it to him, he could write music like a god.

J Mark Goldman