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December 29, 2024
The Gaggle Music Club

As 2024 winds down to its last hours, The Gaggle Music Club has selected Richard Strauss's "Four Last Songs" (Vier letzte Lieder) as a fitting coda to the year. "Four Last Songs" are among Strauss's most moving and most celebrated works, epitomizing his late Romantic style.

Written in 1948, near the end of his life, the songs express themes of farewell, parting, acceptance and transcendence. Strauss died in 1949 before the songs could be performed. The first performance took place in London on May 22, 1950, with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, and soprano Kirsten Flagstad.

Composed after the devastation of World War II, the songs reflect the pain and sadness Strauss felt that the carefree and delightful world that he had once written operas about and for was lying under the rubble of a devastated Europe. It was a world gone forever.

Strauss was unfairly attacked for collaborating with the Nazis, though--to their credit--the Allies cleared him of any wrongdoing.

The texts of three of the songs (Frühling, September and Beim Schlafengehen) are settings of poems by Hermann Hesse, a German-Swiss author whose works explored themes of spirituality and self-discovery. The fourth song (Im Abendrot) is a setting of a poem by Joseph von Eichendorff, a Romantic poet who was much preoccupied with nature.

The songs were not initially conceived of as a unified cycle but were posthumously titled Four Last Songs by Strauss's friend Ernst Roth.
The orchestral score demonstrates Strauss's mastery of lyrical expression, blending simplicity with Wagnerian richness.

The first song, "Frühling" (Spring) is a lyrical celebration of renewal and nature, tinged with nostalgia.The soprano’s line shifts between yearning and fulfillment, capturing the joy of life's fleeting beauty.

The second song, "September" explores autumnal decline. Strauss paints a melancholic yet serene atmosphere, with lush string writing mimicking the falling leaves and the stillness of nature preparing for dormancy.

The third song, "Beim Schlafengehen" (At Bedtime) conveys longing for rest and release from life's struggles. The song is famous for a radiant violin solo, symbolizing the soul’s ascent. The soprano’s voice, introspective at first, blossoms into a transcendental affirmation of peace.

The fourth song, "Im Abendrot" (At Sunset) is a serene farewell and a confrontation with the sublime. In Eichendorff’s poem, the protagonists are an elderly couple contemplating the end of life together. Strauss quotes his "Death and Transfiguration" tone poem in the final orchestral bars, suggesting an ultimate transformation.

Though "Four Last Songs" express Strauss’s farewell to life, they are not at all morbid. Instead, they radiate acceptance, gratitude, and spiritual resolve.

This performance from the Alte Oper Frankfurt in 1992 features soprano Julia Varady and conductor Kurt Masur with the Orchestra of Leipzig.

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This week's selection of The Gaggle Music Club is Ottorino Respighi’s "Ancient Airs and Dances." The composition consists of a set of three orchestral suites composed between 1917 and 1932, based on lute pieces from the 16th and 17th centuries.

Ottorino Respighi (1879–1936) was an Italian composer, musicologist, conductor and orchestrator. He studied composition in Bologna and later trained in orchestration under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in Russia. The Russian master-orchestrator strongly influenced Respighi's approach to tone color. Respighi went on to become one of the most important figures in Italian music in the early 20th century. A significant part of Respighi’s output was devoted to reviving and reinterpreting early music. He created orchestral versions of lute pieces, Gregorian chant and harpsichord works. Unlike his contemporaries in Italy, he had little time for atonality and serialism.

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(except Canada Aug 1)

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More Leftie Than Thou
"Jacobin" Magazine Celebrates A Strike Against Ol' Blue Eyes

Here at "The Gaggle" we have very little time for the "more Leftie than thou" school of thought--that's the approach to life according to which the only thing that matters is whether you take the right position on every issue under the sun from Abortion to Zelensky. No one in the world meets the exacting standards of this school of thought; any Leftie leader anywhere is always selling out to the bankers and the capitalists. The perfect exemplar of this is the unreadable Jacobin magazine. 

The other day I came across this article from 2021. It's a celebration of trade union power. And not simply trade union power, but the use of trade union power to secure political goals. Of course (and this is always the case with the "more Leftie than thou" crowd), this glorious, never-to-be-forgotten moment on the history of organized labor took place many years ago--in the summer of 1974 to be exact. Yes, almost half a century has gone by since that thrilling moment when the working-class movement of Australia mobilized and prepared to seize the means of production, distribution and exchange. 

Well, not quite. Organized labor went into action against...Ol' Blue Eyes, the Chairman of the Board, the Voice; yes, Frank Sinatra. Why? What had Sinatra done? Sinatra was certainly very rich, and he owned a variety of properties and businesses. But if the Australian trade union movement were, understandably, searching for the bright, incandescent spark that would finally awaken the working class from its slumber there were surely richer, greedier, more dishonest, more decadent, above all more Australian individuals it could have discovered. Australia was never short of them. Rupert Murdoch immediately springs to mind. Why Sinatra?

 

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