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🔥🎧 Full Album available // Richard Strauss: Four Last Songs & Capriccio by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf
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Richard Strauss (1864-1949) Vier letze Lieder, Op. posth. TrV 296
00:00 I. Frühling (2025 Remastered, London 1953)
03:25 II. September (2025 Remastered, London 1953)
07:35 III. Beim Schlafengehen (2025 Remastered, London 1953)
12:05 IV. Im Abendrot (2025 Remastered, London 1953)
Soprano: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf
Philharmonia Orchestra
Conductor: Otto Ackermann
Recorded in 1953, at London
New mastering in 2025 by AB for https://classicalmusicreference.com/
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Strauss and Mozart, Schubert and Wolf provided the cornerstones of Schwarzkopf's career, with Strauss carrying double weight from both sides of the repertoire, opera and song. The association was inevitable: Strauss’s love for the soprano voice continued to be expressed in works written during Schwarzkopf’s lifetime, and indeed all the music heard in this present collection belongs to that period. Her voice possessed exactly the clarity and soaring quality he wrote for, and, as a singer of rare intelligence, she was exceptionally capable of doing justice to his meticulous attention to words and the intellectual ideas underlying them.
In her early years, she sang many of Strauss’s songs, and one of her first operatic roles was the demanding coloratura part of Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos. Through her great teacher, the soprano Maria Ivogün — described by A. P. Hatton as “an Ariel of the opera world” — Schwarzkopf enjoyed a more direct connection with the composer, who had hailed Ivogün as “a genius of a rare order.” Accompanied by Ivogün’s husband, Michael Raucheisen, she gave wartime recitals in which Strauss songs, from celebrated works such as Morgen to lesser-known pieces like Schlagende Herzen, held a regular place.
Schwarzkopf made her debut at the Vienna Opera as Zerbinetta and shortly afterward added Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier to her repertoire. The Marschallin followed, along with the Countess in Capriccio as her other major Strauss stage role. Her recordings also included Ariadne herself, and she became especially renowned for Strauss’s orchestral songs. Most famous among these were her two recordings of the Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs): the second, made in 1965 with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra under Szell, and the earlier version — heard here — recorded in September 1954.
Her association with these songs actually began even before their premiere, which was given not by Schwarzkopf but by Kirsten Flagstad on May 22, 1950, at London’s Albert Hall. Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra, founded in 1945 by Schwarzkopf’s husband, Walter Legge. Legge himself possessed a particular affinity for Strauss, both as conductor and composer. He believed that even had Strauss never composed a note, his gifts as an interpreter alone would have made him world-famous. Fascinated by every detail of Strauss’s orchestration — which he often praised provocatively at Mahler’s expense — Legge considered it one of the highest honours of his career that the premiere of Strauss’s final great work had been entrusted to his orchestra, together with the leading Wagnerian conductor and singer of the age. Schwarzkopf was thus able to study the score and soon afterward make one of the earliest commercial recordings of the songs.
It is worth remembering that of the four songs, the last was actually composed first. In Eichendorff’s poem, an elderly couple gaze peacefully toward the sunset and quietly wonder whether this might perhaps be death. Even the radiance of the opening song and the serenity of the others remain touched by an awareness of transience.
🔥 Full Album available // Richard Strauss: Four Last Songs & Capriccio by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf
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Other Album available // Richard Strauss: Also Sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30 by Herbert von Karajan
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