Strauss’s ‘Four Last Songs’

Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’, one of at least three symphonies he left incomplete at his death, is one of his most popular, combining private drama with lyrical sweetness. The same composer’s alarming song ‘Erlkönig’ inspired Hans Werner Henze to create his vivid orchestral fantasy evoking a terrifying, supernatural night-ride. ‘My new god’ was what Benjamin Britten discovered on hearing his first Mahler symphony soon after leaving school. His arrangement of ‘What the Wild Flowers Tell Me’, the second movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony, reclothes a piece inspired by the abundant blooms around the Austrian composer’s lakeside composing hut by the Swiss Alps. First performed at the Royal Albert Hall in 1950, Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs is the composer’s achingly nostalgic musical farewell.

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