Four Last Songs
7 min
Recording
- IV. Im Abendrot — AndanteElisabeth Schwarzkopf, soprano; Philharmonia Orchestra; Otto Ackermann · September 1953, Watford Town Hall7:19
“Im Abendrot”, marked Andante, is the fourth of Strauss’s Four Last Songs; an old couple watch the evening fade, and at the closing question Strauss quoted a melody he had written nearly sixty years earlier. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf sings the complete song with Otto Ackermann and the Philharmonia Orchestra in their 1953 recording.
Listening notes
- Orchestral prelude
The violins play a long descending line above held brass chords and a deep E♭. Woodwinds double and decorate the melody. The soprano rests through this Andante prelude and does not enter until after rehearsal B.
- First stanza, soprano
Eichendorff’s couple has travelled together through hardship and happiness. The soprano sings their story in a moving line over short phrases in the strings, which keep a walking pace beneath her.
- Montreux, May 1948
Strauss finished Im Abendrot at Montreux on 6 May 1948, a month before his eighty-fourth birthday. It was the first of the four songs to be completed. After his death the publisher Ernst Roth placed it last and gave the collection its title.
- Larks, two flutes
The poem has two larks rising above the darkening valleys. Strauss gives them to a pair of flutes, which trill above the soprano and the sustained strings.
- Quotation from Tod und Verklärung
After the final vocal question about death, the orchestra brings back the transfiguration theme from Tod und Verklärung, completed in 1889. The soprano’s part ends and the orchestra continues into a long postlude.
- Piccolo trills and final chord
The two flautists change to piccolos for the final bird calls. Their trills sound above the orchestra as the tempo slows, and the song ends on an E♭ major chord.