Michele Mariotti

At the end of 1946, Richard Strauss set to music Joseph von Eichendorff’s poem At Sunset. In 1948, he read the lyric works of Hermann Hesse, and only a few months later, at the age of 84, he had already completed three songs based on Hesse’s poems. After Strauss’s death in September 1949, his publisher Ernst Roth gathered these orchestral works under the title Four Last Songs, a magnificent epitaph to the Romantic Lied in which the composer even quoted his symphonic poem Death and Transfiguration, written 60 years earlier. “Nothing original” or “the first true musical event of the 20th century”? Gustav Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, composed in 1899 and 1900 as a symphonic humoresque, left audiences perplexed. The work dispenses with Romantic pathos, the orchestral forces are reduced, and at first glance the program is not apparent. The extravagant funeral march (Totentanz) in the second movement is followed in the finale, the true centerpiece toward which everything converges, by the song Der Himmel hängt voller Geigen, from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. “We dance and we skip,” rejoice the angels in heaven, to music that, as it gradually fades away, seems to stand in contrast to such naïve, childlike humor. This is how Mahler described the topsy-turvy world he portrayed: “Everything is upside down, there is no longer any causal connection! It is like suddenly catching sight of the hidden side of the moon.”