Photograph: Brittany Hosea-Small/San Francisco Symphony
Growing older and dying are on the heart of a few of Richard Strauss’s most well-known works. In his early shockers, Salome and Elektra, dying is grotesquely life-affirming. The title character of every experiences a transcendent second of ecstasy, because the dying they name upon time and again lastly arrives to enact their fantasies of revenge. In Der Rosenkavalier, the Marschallin has to just accept that point has handed her by: a untimely dying as her younger lover falls in love with a girl his personal age. In his string work Metamorphosen, he wrote an elegy to recollect those that died in Munich throughout World Warfare II. His closing phrase on the matter got here in his 4 Final Songs, accomplished in 1948, virtually a yr to the day earlier than he died, leaving it his final accomplished work.
We are saying full. Strauss didn’t contemplate the songs as a gaggle. To be extra exact, the tune “September” was his final accomplished work (positioned second within the closing order of the 4 Final Songs by writer Ernst Roth).
The primary three songs in The 4 Final Songs every start with a reference to endings:
In dusty vaults
(“Frühling”/”Spring”, textual content by Hermann Hesse)The backyard in mourning
(“September”, textual content by Hermann Hesse)Now that the day has made me so drained
(“Beim Schlafengehen”/”Whereas going to sleep”, textual content by Hermann Hesse)
The ultimate tune “Im Abendrot” (“Within the twilight”, textual content by Joseph von Eichendorff) doesn’t trace on the finish a lot because it seems backward (“Via adversity and pleasure/We’ve gone hand in hand”). It’s not right to say that the 4 Final Songs are collectively nostalgic; Strauss would have rejected one thing so reductive and normalized. However they do look backward in a means.
As I listened to a efficiency of the 4 Final Songs as a part of the San Francisco Symphony’s most up-to-date subscription live performance at Davies Symphony Corridor — a live performance totally devoted to 2 works by Strauss impressed by his spouse, Pauline — my thoughts traveled again a half-century to Gustav Mahler.
The earlier spring I caught the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra’s efficiency of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 additionally at Davies. It’s a type of works I’ll go and listen to each time it’s enjoying. The ultimate motion can be a tune for soprano (“Das himmlische Leben”/”The heavenly life”), a toddler’s imaginative and prescient of the afterlife. Via spritely and energetic to start, it finds a extra wistful tone by the top, fading away into the ether. It’s as if Strauss picked up this wistfulness, this ambivalence from the kid considering life after dying and carried it ahead to its conclusion within the particular person on the finish of life. Mahler ends his symphony in E main and Strauss his closing tune in E-flat main, keys of the elegant, of a kind of relaxation.
Strauss and Mahler had been deeply related as mates; they had been advocates for one another’s works, and but had been temperamentally ill-suited to working collectively (the previous along with his Bavarian pragmatism, the latter along with his embrace of Sturm und Drang). Mahler famously stated, “Strauss and I tunnel from reverse sides of the mountain. At some point we will meet.”
I believe they meet in a tune of starting and a tune of ending, each for soprano.
The soprano soloist for the 4 Final Songs was Renée Fleming, a celebrated interpreter of the composer’s work on the live performance stage and within the opera home. Fleming is within the autumn of her profession, having stepped away from staged opera performances in favor of concert events, grasp lessons, and even directing. In a way, hers is the proper voice for Strauss’ valedictory masterpiece.
It’s been some time since I heard Fleming sing reside. In truth, it was precisely a decade in the past in a recital at Zellerbach Corridor in Berkeley. Earlier than that, I caught a number of of her performances at San Francisco Opera (Louise, A Streetcar Named Need, Der Rosenkavalier, Lucrezia Borgia) and her Thaïs on the Met (an odd selection of repertoire in so some ways).
Fleming’s voice has at all times been regal, in the best way that Dame Felicity Lott’s or Lisa Della Casa’s voices had been regal. It’s a voice she by no means pushed too laborious. She by no means compromised the sound, at all times centering bel canto approach. Even in roles the place a little bit of hysteria was known as for (Blanche DuBois, Lucrezia Borgia), she by no means actually went there. She was bankable, reliable, constant. Thrilling? I believe it depends upon how we outline the time period. It’s thrilling to listen to a voice that pristine. But it surely has at all times left me feeling esteem greater than adoration.
Frankly, I used to be glad to listen to Fleming’s voice in its later, much less perfectionist iteration. As a result of it suits the true character of the music. It tells the story higher than she may have when she was in her prime, with that management and that gloss. Nobody would argue that she ought to file the 4 Final Songs proper now. However I might obtain it.
On Sunday, the sustained notes had been a bit fuzzy, and the vibrato had widened. The German diction was mushy and dispersed. And so what?
Her distinct timbre was there, all golden and heat, that roundedness because the taste bud is lifted, which, achieved in extra, may cause the “hooty” sound that typically crept in. And so what?
Fleming has at all times used her mouth, particularly laterally, virtually because the opening of a trumpet, the sound cascading out. (In my expertise, I may at all times hear her, even from the balcony.) A brightness at her very high was clear within the arching traces of “Frühling”, indicating that the voice was at its higher restrict. I cherished listening to her journey the sting a bit, dare to be imperfect, and sound barely confused, whilst her demeanor onstage by no means modified.
It was a efficiency during which we heard the mechanics of the voice, one thing Fleming in her prime would by no means have allowed. It humanized her. Here’s a 67-year-old girl who remains to be a reputable interpreter of orchestral songs. I wasn’t shocked in any respect. Singers are by no means actually achieved.
Fleming didn’t have to heat up per se, however the voice did settle in a bit extra with every tune. Although Strauss didn’t order the songs, his writer knew what he was doing. Probably the most extroverted first, the least extroverted final. “Frühling” and “September” jogged my memory how Fleming can use her breath so strategically to maintain these lengthy Straussian traces. A Strauss soprano has to have the lung capability of a swimmer or a minimum of the savvy to make use of what she has within the tank. Even because the intonation might not be what it as soon as was (and any shortfalls had been exceedingly minor), the phrasings had been pristine.
The surging heights of the third tune (“Beim Schlafengehen”) examined Fleming, however she discovered her means there. The ultimate tune (“Im Abentrot”) performed to the strengths of her voice as it’s now, because the tune sits on the decrease finish of a soprano’s vary and permits the singer to sit down again a bit, with Fleming even swaying a bit to the music, simply soaking all of it in.
What didn’t assist Fleming was the conducting. Santtu-Matias Rouvali, presently the principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, performed Strauss’ emotionally advanced orchestral songs as if he had been conducting the ultimate scene from Salome. The orchestra beneath his baton was simply so, so loud. And the San Francisco Symphony is nothing if not an orchestra of nice finesse. However an orchestra goes with the conductor and, to cite a line by the good Elaine Might, Rouvali was driving a psychotic horse towards a burning steady.
Rouvali captured the swells of the rating, and in these swells we are able to hear the advanced harmonic language of Strauss’ nice operas. However swells have to dissipate or else all the things appears dire. His conducting made Fleming appear small, even frail at instances. I might love to listen to Rouvali conduct Die Frau Ohne Schatten or Elektra, the place grandiosity (and delusions of grandeur) are central to the storytelling. However the 4 Final Songs are painfully genuine. They want a lightness of contact that Rouvali simply doesn’t have but.
Don’t misunderstand, it was thrilling to listen to an orchestra of the caliber of the San Francisco Symphony give what they needed to Strauss’ attractive rating. Rouvali is aware of the way to get a wealthy and theatrical sound out of an orchestra, and that’s no small accomplishment. But it surely’s not a rating that must be given all the things one has. There’s something to be stated for Fleming’s trademark reserve and it could have benefited the studying of the rating.
Which brings me again to Mahler. It was like Rouvali determined to deliver Mahler’s maximalism to a piece all concerning the small moments. His was a basic misreading of Strauss’ thesis. Via these songs, Strauss reminds us that endings are ambivalent, with issues left undone, accounts left unsettled. As they drew to an in depth, I used to be grateful for Rouvali’s relative deference to Strauss as the ultimate trills of the piccolos overlaid the composer’s beloved French horns. The piccolos are the center flutter of younger love, the horns the regular press of age towards relaxation, all fading to a clumsy however becoming silence.
The place Rouvali’s strategy was maybe extra acceptable was within the afternoon’s efficiency of Ein Heldenleben (“The Hero’s Life”), Strauss’ tone poem that he swore was not about him (however that can be very a lot about him). He quotes a minimum of eight of his personal compositions, making Ein Heldenleben a backward look at his personal profession nonetheless in formation—an ironic counterpoint to the backward look of the 4 Final Songs.
Photograph: Brittany Hosea-Small/San Francisco Symphony
Not all of Strauss’ sometimes-swaggering paean to his personal accomplishments swaggers. Within the third part, virtually a concerto for violin, longtime concertmaster Alexander Barantschik took on the soprano function vacated at intermission by Renee Fleming, an important artist within the autumn of her profession, handing off the baton to a different nice artist in his.
It makes good sense that this part was Strauss’s love letter to his spouse. Within the violin, we hear her lush soprano voice together with a sure impishness. Whereas the violin solos confirmed off Barantschik’s nimbleness, what was most rewarding had been the swooning traces of melody made extra magical when the remainder of the strings joined him. In sections like these — what I hear as Strauss’ homage to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade — Rouvali’s maximalist strategy labored. The bigness of his conducting contrasted thrillingly with the solo voice of the violin.
Equally enthralling enjoying got here from your entire woodwind part, at all times a specific energy of the San Francisco Symphony, because it returned many times to embody the hero’s enemies hectoring him. The brass (onstage and off) and the percussion once more confirmed Rouvali’s strategy at its greatest, thundering and marching towards the hero’s triumph.
In a sensible little bit of programming, the ultimate tune of the 4 Final Songs and the ultimate part of Ein Heldenleben are each in the important thing of E-flat main, once more that key of relaxation, that key of an finish however with the trace that there’s nonetheless extra to do. Strauss’s broad-shouldered ode to heroism ends in the identical means as his ambivalent ode to carrying on. However carrying on towards what? It’s not clear. However Renée Fleming reminds us that how a singer carries on is to sing. And we stock on by listening to the singer so long as they nonetheless have a tune to sing. And Strauss’s music? It’s going to sing without end.
