Beim schlafengehen
"Going to Sleep"
Richard Strauss 🎼 Diana Damrau
"Beim Schlafengehen"
Vier letzte Lieder
Recorded at the Philharmonie de Paris in February 2020, Diana Damrau performs Richard Strauss's Vier letzte Lieder with the Münchner Philharmoniker and conductor Valery Gergiev.
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A lied from Strauss’s cycle ‘Vier letzte lieder’. Text by Herman Hesse referring to death, the end of the day and at the same time reflecting part of Strauss’s life: his wife a soprano and these songs are written for a soprano, and his father a famous French Horn player, an instrument that plays a very large part in this cycle.
Richard Strauss and Pauline and Franz -1910
While the cycle has death as an underlying subject, the music is warm and doesn’t make us feel afraid. On the contrary it always reminds me of a warm summer’s evening, the sun dying in the West, the sounds of the day gradually disappearing to leave nothing but the warmth of the air, a dark fading orange light, and how peaceful everything becomes.
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"Beim Schlafengehen"
Composed: May 6, 1948
| Nun der Tag mich müd gemacht, soll mein sehnliches Verlangen freundlich die gestirnte Nacht wie ein müdes Kind empfangen. Hände, laßt von allem Tun Stirn, vergiß du alles Denken, Alle meine Sinne nun wollen sich in Schlummer senken. Und die Seele unbewacht will in freien Flügen schweben, um im Zauberkreis der Nacht tief und tausendfach zu leben. |
Now that I am wearied of the day, my ardent desire shall happily receive the starry night like a sleepy child. Hands, stop all your work. Brow, forget all your thinking. All my senses now yearn to sink into slumber. And my unfettered soul wishes to soar up freely into night's magic sphere to live there deeply and thousandfold. |
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The Four Last Songs (German: Vier letzte Lieder) for soprano and orchestra were the final completed works of Richard Strauss, composed in 1948, when the composer was 84.
Strauss died in September 1949. The premiere of the work was given posthumously at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 22 May 1950 by the soprano Kirsten Flagstad accompanied by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler.
The songs are "Frühling" (Spring), "September", "Beim Schlafengehen" (Going to sleep) and "Im Abendrot" (At sunset).
Background
Strauss had come across the poem Im Abendrot by Joseph von Eichendorff,
which he felt had a special meaning for him. He set its text to music
in May 1948. Strauss had also recently been given a copy of the complete
poems of Hermann Hesse, and he set three of them – Frühling, September, and Beim Schlafengehen – for soprano and orchestra. (According to Arnold, a fifth song was unfinished at Strauss' death.)
There is no indication that Strauss conceived these songs as a unified set. In dictionaries published as late as 1954, the three Hesse songs were still listed as a group, separate from the earlier Eichendorff setting. The overall title Four Last Songs was provided by his friend Ernst Roth, the chief editor of Boosey & Hawkes. It was Roth who categorized them as a single unit with the title Four Last Songs, and put them into the order that most performances now follow: Frühling, September, Beim Schlafengehen, Im Abendrot.
It has been reasoned by Timothy L. Jackson that the song Ruhe, meine Seele! should join the other four as a prelude to Im Abendrot.
Subject matter
The last three songs deal with death and were written shortly before Strauss himself died. However, instead of the typical Romantic defiance, these Four Last Songs are suffused with a sense of calm, acceptance, and completeness.
The settings are for a solo soprano voice given remarkable soaring
melodies against a full orchestra, and all four songs have prominent
horn parts. The combination of a beautiful vocal line with supportive
brass accompaniment references Strauss's own life: His wife Pauline de Ahna was a famous soprano and his father Franz Strauss a professional horn player.
Instrumentation
The songs are scored for piccolo, 3 flutes (3rd doubling 2nd piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets in B-flat and A, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns in F (also E-flat and D), 3 trumpets in C, E-flat and F, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, harp, celesta, and strings.
Recordings
One of the last wishes of Richard Strauss was that Kirsten Flagstad
should be the soprano to introduce the four songs which he finished in
1948, the year before his death at 85 . "I would like to make it
possible," he wrote to her, "that [the songs] should be at your disposal
for a world premiere in the course of a concert with a first-class
conductor and orchestra."
The unveiling of the epitaph was made possible due to magnanimous effort of the then Maharaja of Mysore, His Highness, Sir Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar
Bahudar. Though he could not be present, the music-loving maharaja had
put up a $4,800 guarantee for the performance, so that the Four Last Songs could be recorded for his fabulous (then estimated at around 20,000 records) personal collection and shipped off to him in Mysore.
Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar Bahadur
Maharaja of Mysore
Maharaja of Mysore
Cultural references
- Beim Schlafengehen is featured in Peter Weir's film The Year of Living Dangerously.
- The third of the four songs, Beim Schlafengehen, is playing quite loudly as Meryl Streep's character Clarissa Vaughn is preparing for a party in the film The Hours. It is a favorite of Streep's, who played it often on the set of the film while preparing for the role.
- In Philip Roth's Exit Ghost, he suggests the Four Last Songs as the ideal music for a scene his character has written:
Music: Strauss' Four Last Songs. For the profundity that is achieved not by complexity but by clarity and simplicity. For the purity of the sentiment about death and parting and loss. For the long melodic line spinning out and the female voice soaring and soaring. For the repose and composure and gracefulness and the intense beauty of the soaring. For the ways one is drawn into the tremendous arc of heartbreak. The composer drops all masks and, at the age of eighty-two, stands before you naked. And you dissolve.
- The composition was referenced in the English film Four Last Songs (2007).
- Referenced in at least two of the Inspector Morse novels by Colin Dexter, as one of Morse's favorite pieces of music.
- The beginning of Im Abendrot appears in the soundtrack of David Lynch's film Wild at Heart and Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of The killer inside me.
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Richard Strauss
by Max Liebermann 1918
Now that I am wearied of the day,
my ardent desire shall happily receive
the starry night
like a sleepy child.
Hands, stop all your work.
Brow, forget all your thinking.
All my senses now
yearn to sink into slumber.
And my unfettered soul
wishes to soar up freely
into night’s magic sphere
to live there deeply and thousandfold.
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf
Szell
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