Renowned American soprano Renée Fleming joins James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, February 11-13, for concerts featuring Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, which the composer wrote as something of a late-life love letter to his wife Pauline de Ahna. Continuing a multi-year survey of the symphonies of Mahler, Levine and the orchestra also perform the composer’s Symphony No. 4, featuring Ms. Fleming as soloist in the work’s final movement. Mahler and Strauss were contemporaries at the center of Austro-German musical life at the turn of the 20th century, and the program also includes a work by another influential composer of the time, Alban Berg, whose use of orchestra in his Three Pieces for Orchestra was heavily influenced by both Mahler and Strauss.
The Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss (1864-1949) were in fact the composer’s last creative effort, completed in 1948 just a year before he died. Strauss never had the opportunity to hear them performed, but he did choose the singer who would premiere them roughly eight months after his death, Kirsten Flagstad. Entitled Frühling (“Spring”), Beim Schlafengehen (“Going to Sleep”), September, and Im Abendrot (“At Sunset”), these four ravishing, emotionally powerful settings are considered one of the composer’s finest achievements.
Though Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 was predominantly written between 1899 and 1901, the song that serves as the finale of the symphony, “Das himmlische Leben” (Heavenly life) was completed in voice and piano form in 1892. The song was a setting of a poem from an anthology of seven hundred traditional German poems known as Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The youth’s magic horn), from which Mahler drew almost exclusively for song settings for more than a dozen years. Mahler held the song back when his Wunderhorn settings were to be published, deciding instead to use it as the finale of his Third Symphony. Ultimately, however, he saved it for the finale of the Symphony No. 4.
Alban Berg (1885-1935) wrote his Three Pieces for Orchestra in 1914 as an offering for the 40th birthday of his “teacher and friend Arnold Schoenberg in immeasurable gratitude and love.” Berg’s lush, impressionistic score features a brilliant and innovative use of orchestra that nonetheless draws on precedents from Schoenberg, Mahler, and Strauss.
![[James Levine]](/images/_images/_musicians/JamesLevinex156.jpg)
