Swansongs
It occurred to me a couple of days ago, as I was listening to Gundula Janowitz singing Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, that I could write an article about works at the very end of composers’ lives, which act as a kind of swansong for their careers.
We may include Monteverdi, Haydn, Rossini, Verdi and Strauss in our survey, and we might add Tallis and Byrd from the Renaissance period, if we only had more information about when they wrote particular pieces. Sadly, we don’t really have dates for the compositions and first performances of their phenomenal output of masses and motets, so no definitive swansong can be identified, although both lived to venerable ages (80 and 83 respectively).
The greatest examples to my mind are ‘Falstaff’, composed when Verdi was nearly 80 and presumed to have finished writing with ‘Otello’ in 1887, some six years earlier, and the afore-mentioned Vier Letztes Lieder, written by Strauss at the age of 84.
Claudio Monteverdi composed his last opera, ‘L’Incoronazione di Poppea’, in 1643, aged 76, and although it is now presumed to be a collaborative enterprise between the old composer and his pupils, it is still recognised as a late masterpiece, crowning his career.
Rossini famously stopped composing at the height of his powers in 1829, after the success of his opera, ‘William Tell’, but produced his Petite Messe Solennelle in 1863, at the age of 71.
Joseph Haydn doesn’t fall into the same category entirely, as his very last years were spent fruitlessly in terms of composition, due to ill health, but I have included him, as most of his major vocal works, The Creation and The Seasons, as well as the six great masses for the Esterhazy family, were all written when Haydn was in his sixties.
I’ll start with Strauss’s Four Last Songs, as it was these miraculous compositions which first got me thinking on this subject. In 1948, the old composer came upon a poem by Joseph von Eichendorff, Im Abendrot (At Sunset), in which an old couple contemplate the end of life together. In addition, he had recently been given a copy of the complete poems of Hermann Hesse (1872-1962), and decided to set three of them, along with Im Abendrot, for solo soprano and orchestra. Realising he would not live to hear them, he made arrangements for their posthumous premiere in London’s Albert Hall, to be sung by the great Norwegian dramatic soprano, Kirsten Flagstad, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, a performance which took place in May 1950, Strauss having died the previous September. I have a recording of that concert on a CD, which sadly demonstrates that Flagstad had the wrong voice for the songs. Strauss wrote the most wonderful music ever composed for soprano, and indeed his Salome and Elektra were right for the great Norwegian, but these songs need a more lyrical sound, and soon recordings appeared with the correct voice. Lisa della Casa and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf were the ideal interpreters in the years following Strauss’s death, and there have been many superb recordings in the years since. My personal preference is for Gundula Janowitz, in her 1973 recording on DG with Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. Strauss would have loved her.
The order of the songs varied from composition to publishing, and there is still no definitive order available, since Strauss died before such matters were able to be finalised. However, there is some agreement on the preferred order, and most of the recordings follow the grouping: Frühling, September, Beim Schlafengehen, Im Abendrot. The genius of Strauss, in particular his writing for soprano and his mastery of a vast orchestra, is channelled in to these four short songs, and they never cease to move me. It is remarkable to listen to so many recordings by the greatest sopranos of the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, and I would encourage you to listen to as many as possible to choose your favourite. As I said, my personal choice is Janowitz, but there are five-star performances from Schwarzkopf, Della Casa, Jessye Norman, Lucia Popp, Renée Fleming, Erin Wall and Kiri te Kanawa.
‘L’Incoronazione di Poppea’, first performed in Venice in 1643 in the last year of Claudio Monteverdi’s life, stands as a shining beacon in the history of opera. With a libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello, a Venetian lawyer and a member of several literary academies, it was the first opera to deal with real people, actual historical figures. Highly stylised and dramatised maybe, but Nero, Poppea, Ottavia and Seneca all actually lived, and such folk had never been seen on an operatic stage. The art form was still in its infancy, being less than 50 years old, but it was a dramatic departure from the gods, goddesses, nymphs and shepherds who had come before. It is also perhaps the most amoral opera in the repertoire, as it unashamedly lauds and glorifies the triumph of vice over virtue, as Poppea schemes her way to the throne, through slander, calumny, exile and judicial murder. The final duet between Nero and Poppea, one of the most sublime love scenes ever written, basically represents the moment when the weak and vacuous Nero unites in bliss with the ambitious and unstoppably duplicitous Poppea after her coronation.
I sang Seneca in Guildhall in 1980, and then took part in a marvellous staging and recording conducted by Richard Hickox in the late 1980s, singing the wonderfully flamboyant God, Mercury, who announces to Seneca that he must die, in a fabulous flurry of fast coloratura, accompanied by a harp. A superb cast led by Arleen Auger, Della Jones, James Bowman and Gregory Reinhart makes a case for ‘Poppea’ as one of the great operas. Monteverdi was 76 and in his final year of life, and although experts now think that the opera was not composed solely by Monteverdi, it is of such brilliance that he must surely have been the main protagonist. His death in the same year, and the loss of the manuscript of the opera, resulted in the world soon forgetting about the composer, until in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the three operas, ‘L’Orfeo’, ‘Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria’ and ‘L’Incoronazione di Poppea’ were discovered. Slowly, people began to realise that this long-lived Italian choirmaster from the distant past (he had been made Master of the Music at the Basilica di San Marco in Venice in 1613) was actually one of the greatest composers in history. His score of ‘Poppea’ may be seen as his swansong!
Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) had established himself as the pre-eminent composer of both comic and serious operas by the time he wrote ‘Guillaume Tell’ in 1829, and no one could quite believe when he basically retired from composition after its premiere in Paris. Ill health and a number of other factors contributed to this amazing withdrawal, but some years later, he and his second wife, Olympe, found themselves back in Paris in 1855, where they set up a Saturday salon. This was very much the place to go on a Saturday, and a fascinating progression of famous names attended, including Auber, Gounod, Rubinstein, Joachim, Verdi and Wagner. The music making at these events must have been stunning, and Rossini delighted his guests in 1864 with his Petite Messe Solennelle, an extended version of the Mass for 12 singers, four of whom were soloists, two pianos and harmonium. The ‘Petite’ was ironic as the work is quite long, but it must have come as something of a revelation from the 71 year old composer, after so long a period during which he had only written a few pieces, the so called Péchés de Vieilesse (Sins of Old Age), of which the Mass is the last. It’s not a masterpiece, like the others I have written about here, but it did show the old chap had not lost his composition skills!
Haydn’s late works were too numerous to describe as a swansong, but the miraculous choral works of his last years, composed in his late sixties are worthy of note and are remarkable for a man who became progressively more ill during this time. From 1796, he wrote the six masses for the Esterhazy family, and both the Creation and the Seasons. After the Harmoniemesse in 1802, he was physically unable to compose at all, due to dizziness, inability to concentrate, swollen legs and general weakness (all probably the result of hardened arteries) and he spent the last few years of his life, well cared for but deeply frustrated, as his imagination still pumped out musical ideas, but he was physically incapable of turning those ideas into musical form. Fortunately, we have the legacy of all those great scores that he was able to put on paper before his ailments took over.
I have kept Giuseppe Verdi’s wondrous ‘Falstaff’ till the end of this article, as I do believe it to be the greatest swansong of them all. It’s the Verdi opera which I have sung most in my career, first as Pistola and then as Falstaff himself, a role I never for a moment imagined I would sing when I was obsessed with the opera in my teens. I’ve written a much longer article about ‘Falstaff,’ which you can find on the EMR website, so I won’t go into detail again here. Suffice to say that the 79 year old composer astonished the world with this sparkling comedy, with its brilliant libretto by Arrigo Boito, bringing together scenes from Shakespeare’s ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ and ‘Henry IV’, Parts 1 and 2. The miraculous score is unlike anything seen before or after, and sometimes it puzzles Verdi fans, so different is it from all his other operas. It’s fabulous to appear in, and I must say that I found the character of Falstaff terrific fun, and an absolute honour to sing. My only regret is that I don’t have a recording of either of my Falstaff productions, in Bielefeld and Victoria, BC, although I do have a CD of my performance of Pistola in Geneva.
As a swansong, it is unparalleled in musical history, and every time we reached the final scene on stage, I wanted it to go on for ever. There are several near perfect recordings, of which my personal favourite is that with Tito Gobbi in the title role conducted by Herbert von Karajan.
