September

By all these lovely tokens
September days are here
With summer’s best of weather
And autumn’s best of cheer.

September is an interesting and unsettling month, and a favourite subject for artists and musicians who wish to draw the easy parallel between the dwindling embers of summer and the melancholy way that tempus seems to fugit.

Richard Strauss was one such artist to grasp September strongly as a metaphor for the dying of the light – most literally in his case, as his lieder September was written only months before his death. Strauss had something of September about him; it could be argued that he was part of the last great flourishing of classical composers and bridged the transition between the sun-dappled uplands of music’s Victorian heyday and the barren winter of discordant modern classical music that was to follow.

The Four Last Songs for soprano and orchestra, of which September is a part, were his final completed works, composed in 1948 when Strauss was 84. They are remarkable, not only for their beauty, but also for the fact that they were made by an octogenarian. Strauss did not live to hear the premiere. His Four Last Songs symbolize the fulfilment of the soul into death; there is no Romantic defiance here; these songs are suffused with a sense of calm, acceptance, and completeness. They constitute the composer’s own requiem – a self-conscious farewell to existence, given loving expression by an idealised soprano voice.

The author Philip Roth, in his Septembery Exit Ghost, 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-four, stands before you naked. And you dissolve.

The songs are “Frühling” (Spring), “September”, “Beim Schlafengehen” (Going to sleep) and “Im Abendrot” (At sunset). There is no indication that Strauss conceived these songs as a unified set. The overall title and playing order of Four Last Songs was provided by an editor at Boosey & Hawkes.

In my opinion, the greatest version of the Four Last Songs remains the 1973 recording with Gundula Janowitz and Herbert von Karajan. The whole performance seems warmly, wistfully autumnal.

“September”

(Text: Hermann Hesse)

The garden is in mourning.
Cool rain seeps into the flowers.
Summertime shudders,
quietly awaiting his end.

Golden leaf after leaf falls
from the tall acacia tree.
Summer smiles, astonished and feeble,
at his dying dream of a garden.

For just a while he tarries
beside the roses, yearning for repose.
Slowly he closes
his weary eyes.

And here, just because I love it, is another – the third of the four last songs, “Beim Schlafgehen”, again performed wonderfully by Janowitz and Karajan. The other two lieder are equally great if you want to search them out.

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About Author Profile: Worm

In between dealing with all things technological in the Dabbler engine room, Worm writes the weekly Wikiworm column every Saturday and our monthly Book Club newsletters.

16 thoughts on “September

  1. Brit
    September 23, 2010 at 15:41

    Ah me, that’s bittersweet stuff, Worm. Heady indeed.

  2. Worm
    September 23, 2010 at 16:43

    Thanks Brit – I also really love the lieder ‘im abendrot’ – partly because the opening section is used in one of my all-time favourite movies, David Lynch’s
    ‘Wild at Heart’

  3. johngjobling@googlemail.com'
    malty
    September 23, 2010 at 16:47

    Autumn, the season of mellow fruitfulness, as was von Karajan, ever the eye for a well turned ankle or in Mutter’s case a well strung bow. Gundula, with Mathis brought Figaro’s finest aria to the silver screen via Shawshank Redemption, wonderfull singer, don’t make ’em like that any more.

    Strange how we do not have a direct equivalent of Lieder in Britain although this lassie comes very close, a much under rated composer and recently rediscovered by Linn.
    Excellent choice of Strauss music and yes indeed, the finest rendition. Funny, the way Strauss composed Also Sprach Zarathustra late in life, too late to see the movie though.

    Probably Karajan’s finest recording is his 1975 version of Lohengrin with the BPO, Rene Kollo and Anna Tomowa-Sintow contains the greatest prelude in opera.

  4. finalcurtain@gmail.com'
    mahlerman
    September 23, 2010 at 18:07

    As I agree with all your sentiments Worm, I’m tempted to leave this space blank. Strauss was a fascinating character in so many ways, and the very last throw of the dice in the game called German Romanticism. Reading Norman Del Mar’s book years ago it was clear that all the toxic Nazi stuff that Strauss endured was probably down to his political naivety and, broadly speaking, his almost complete lack of interest in National Socialism. He was famous as a conductor, but when you see the newsreels of his technique he seems to be doing nothing, just standing in a catatonic trance, with the end of the stick moving just a few inches; he didn’t believe that conductors should ‘sweat’. But how does this square when you hear just a few bars of any of the tone poems, music that is practically aural perspiration? And what of his relationship with his battle-axe wife Pauline, and his willingness to be completely dominated by her, to the point of humiliation? She once said to him ‘Strauss – go compose!’ And he did. How does a man, willing to subjugate himself in that way, rise up and produce music such as he you put in your post?

  5. Worm
    September 23, 2010 at 18:54

    malty – thankyou so much for the link to the figaro duet – amazing!!!!

    mahlerman – as ever, elucidating comments! Regarding your comments on his ‘battle-axe wife’ – Seeing as Strauss composed all of his operas around a dominating soprano voice, could one perhaps posit that he was a masochist who revelled in the fantasy of a domineering woman and used it as a lifelong motivation?

  6. Gaw
    September 24, 2010 at 05:50

    A beautiful post in just about every way. I’ve always been pretty ignorant about classical music but The Dabbler is helping rectify that with every week that passes.

  7. September 24, 2010 at 07:10

    malty : Regarding Muriel Herbert, her daughter Claire Tomalin wrote a piece about her in the Grauniad when the CD was released last year.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/may/09/muriel-herbert-musical-compositions

    It includes this splendid memory of childhood: “She was a loving but not a practical mother. I remember how one day she took a little woollen jacket out of a drawer, wrapped in tissue paper, and as she buttoned it up on me it began to move: it was full of hatching moths’ eggs.”

    In view of the earlier post by Martin Wainwright, The Dabbler is clearly the essential blog for those interested in that cultural space where moths and music collide.

  8. johngjobling@googlemail.com'
    malty
    September 24, 2010 at 10:41

    Good point Frank, the music would of course be produced in the Chrysalis Records studios. Interesting link to Muriel Herbert, the Guardian does have some use after all, the Linn piece on her concentrated more on how she was dun wrong as indeed she was. How much talent I wonder, never surfaced for lack of elbow room.

  9. markcfdbailey@gmail.com'
    Recusant
    September 24, 2010 at 11:50

    Oh thank you for that Worm. I had always rated Jessye Norman’s version with the Leipzig band the best, closely followed by Schwarzkopf. All changed now. She makes Jessye appear unsubtle. Her ‘Im Abendrot’ is utterly sublime, to the point of breathlessness.

  10. buckley.stephen1789@gmail.com'
    September 24, 2010 at 12:20

    And then there’s this:

    Oh it’s a long, long while
    from May ‘till December
    And the days grow short
    When you reach September.
    When the Autumn weather
    turns the leaves to flame
    One hasn’t got time
    For the waiting game.

    For the days dwindle down
    To a precious few…
    September…November…
    And these few precious days
    I’ll spend with you.
    These precious days
    I’ll spend with you.

    When you meet with the young men
    Early in Spring,
    They court you in song and rhyme.
    They woo you with songs and a clover ring,
    But if you examine the goods they bring,
    They have little to offer but the songs they sing
    And a plentiful waste of time of day…
    And a plentiful waste of time…

    But it’s a long, long while
    from May ‘till December

    When the Autumn weather
    Turns the leaves to flame

    For the days dwindle down
    To a precious few;
    September…November…
    And these few precious days
    I’ll spend with you.
    These precious days
    I’ll spend with you!

  11. johngjobling@googlemail.com'
    malty
    September 24, 2010 at 13:03

    Reculsant, now we are truly among the goddesses, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf is undoubtedly one of the greatest singers of Mozart opera, her Donna Elvira in the 1961 Giovanni with Giulini and Fiordiligi in Karl Böhms 1962 Cosi Fan Tutte are sublime as is her Ariadne in the 1954 Strauss Ariadne Auf Naxos with Karajan.
    It is possible that Cosi in particular with Christa Ludwig as Dorabella and Hanny Steffek as Despina is the greatest performance there has ever been, produced as it was by her husband Walter Legge, founder of the Philharmonia orchestra and a man to whom we are deeply indebted.
    If I knew how to upload stuff onto that Youtube thingy I would send the appropriate bits winging through the ether. In fact, I think that I will have a bash.

  12. Worm
    September 24, 2010 at 13:09

    stephan – is that Lenya….or Ferry?

    Malty – as Recusant mentioned, the Schwarzkopf version of the Four Last Songs is always considered one of the best, but personally I think that when you compare her voice to Janowitz it just can’t compete; she sounds much more bellowy and brittle. But I will gladly seek out more of her stuff

  13. finalcurtain@gmail.com'
    mahlerman
    September 24, 2010 at 16:28

    OK Malty/Worm – you are thrashing around like kittens in a sack, but you fail to mention the soprano perhaps most closely associated with Strauss’ music, Lisa Della Cassa, who committed these transcendent songs to disc with the VPO and Bohm fifty years ago and, to my knowledge, it has never been out of print. John Steane remarked that her voice had ‘that touch of spring and silver that Strauss loved’, and although that suggests a certain lightness in the voice, which may not chime with our expectations today, her ‘cool and impersonal’ singing is the ideal of many, who oppose the more explicit emotion of Schwarzkopf and Janowitz. How lucky we are that, with a couple of clicks, we can hear any of them, and more.

  14. johngjobling@googlemail.com'
    malty
    September 24, 2010 at 17:45

    Ferrets, if you don’t mind mahlerman. Thing is though, could Lisa of the house do a proper Nazi salute like Liz could?

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