EThe year before Theodor Adorno wrote his cardinal statement in 1949 that writing another poem after Auschwitz would be barbaric, which would shape the aesthetic discourse for decades, Richard Strauss had composed the “Four Last Songs”. With their opalescent colors and their path (or their escape) into a chimerical beauty, they seemed as if they had fallen out of time – like “a requiem for themselves” (Karl Schumann). They were not intended to be a cycle. They owe their title to publishing strategy. The fact that Strauss had written his last song – “Malven” – later, at the end of 1948, only became known in 1984.
It was found in the safe of the soprano Maria Jeritza with the dedication: “To the beloved Maria, this last rose. . . the most beautiful woman in the world”. She was one of the singers who inspired the composer's love for the soprano voice – like his wife Pauline de Ahna, to whom he gave four songs as a wedding present in 1894. With the last four, based on poems by Joseph von Eichendorff and Hermann Hesse, written between May and September 1948, he has written a transfiguring memory of the shared journey through life.
Since the premiere in London's Royal Albert Hall on May 22, 1950 with Strauss' chosen Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad, who was accompanied by the Philharmonia Orchestra under Wilhelm Furtwängler, they have been one of the great challenges for all lyric-dramatic sopranos. The discography includes more than 80 recordings – now also one with Asmik Grigorian. After her magnificent Salzburg Salome (2018), this wonderful singing actress is increasingly exposed to the intrusiveness of praise. The dangers of fame lie in its own dynamics, including the turn into complacency. Was she herself who came up with the precious title “Laws of Solitude” for her Strauss CD – and the equation 4 + 4 = ∞? What infinity is meant by this symbol – that of “solitude” (loneliness)?
In the brief foreword, she justifies the fact that, in addition to the orchestral version, she also recorded the piano version prepared by Max Wolff and John Gribbon with the assertion that these versions “each require different timbres”. But even Markus Hinterhäuser, who she praised as a “magician in everything he does,” is unable to convey the timbre charms and instrumental effects of the orchestral version on the piano: the transparency of the sound glowing in pastel colors; the contrasts; the refined illustrations, for example when the flutes “sing” the trill of the larks. The attempt seems like an analytical commentary or like a dress rehearsal for a performance, especially through excessive stretching of the tempi. In the piano version, “September” is almost two minutes longer than in the orchestral version.
The magic again: It doesn't want to happen because, on the one hand, the color spectrum of the voice is too narrow to allow the red-gold Indian Summer colors to shine, and on the other hand, because the ability to expand the sound is missing. The range of the songs is almost two octaves: from low C to high B. One of the problems is that the low register – for example in “September” or “Im Abendrot” – should not be sung with the chest voice, but with a high one Placement, but with a sound that ensures relief to the word. In this recording, in the lower third of the first octave – for example in phrases such as “in twilight tombs” or “the rain sings coolly in the flowers” – the words drift away in a breath.
Image: Alpha Classics (Outhere)
The greatest sources of danger are many melismas, which give lines of the same length turn into phrases of different lengths – infinity phrases that look as if they were written for a violinist with a mile-long bow. In practice, the difficulties have mostly proven to be insoluble: for example in the eight-bar phrase “Your blessed presence” (“In the Spring”) or in “deep and a thousandfold” (“When going to sleep”). They are shaped by Asmik Grigorian with remarkable certainty, sometimes with intensity, but it is a tight and cool sound that cuts through the orchestral fabric. And only if you read the texts can you hear that there are words framed by consonants.
Was the music for the Radio France orchestra terra incognita? The fact that it plays with professional competence is a lot, but not enough. And it becomes mixed praise when the singer praises her conductor Mikko Franck for “making everything simple, like the really important things on this earth.”
In these four symphonic poems, the sound panorama of a large orchestra must be played with chamber music delicacy. This includes, just one example, that the voice has an intimate, delicate dialogue with the horn – even if the horn player at the end takes up the motif that (and how it) was sung by the voice in the first song – as can be heard, for example in the first Schwarzkopf recording with the London Philharmonia Orchestra and Dennis Brain.
If sheet music is something “like a check that must be cashed by each singer in his own way” (Paul Valéry), it can be done with the sublime and precious artificiality of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf; with the grande dame elegance of Lisa della Casa; with the silky shine of Kiri Te Kanawa or the resplendent splendor of Jessye Norman, who along with Kurt Masur performs the songs in cinemascope format, so to speak. If the question were asked about the recording of all the photographs: It would be that of Gundula Janowitz under Herbert von Karajan, in which an art fair is celebrated with unruffled devotion.
Richard Strauss: Four Last Songs. Asmik Grigorian, Orchester de Radio France, Mikko Franck. Alpha Classics ALPHA 1042 (Naxos)
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