Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra

A year of great changes here. Nationalization. In the enormous Soviet Union, comrade Zhdanov reads out at a plenary session the names of the deplorables: Shostakovich, Prokofiev… they surrendered to bourgeois tastes. In the West, impatient young composers consider everybody obsolete, they only have a good word for Webern, who died three years earlier. Overseas, John Cage composes for prepared piano. It is 1948. An old Bavarian gentleman acts as though nothing is happening. He continues to believe that music should be beautiful. Richard Strauss has survived Webern, Bartók, Berg. He’s ancient. When a lady reporter asks him what his future plans are, he replies: “Oh, to die”. But that is still a few months away. He is engaged in songs. He writes three to the poems of his contemporary Hermann Hesse, while the 19th century Eichendorff inspires the fourth. They speak of the passage of time, in a hopelessly old conservative musical language. Postromantic, the young ones shrug. Or has the old man seen even further? A musicologist recently came up with the perfect expression for the style that Strauss largely followed after Der Rosenkavalier. ‘Premature postmodern.’ Now I get it, we don’t have to be ashamed if we like it...  Let’s just be happy that we can hear Andrea Rost sing the Four Last Songs (as the pieces were called after the death of the composer in 1949). Before them, Wagner, after, Schumann. Meistersinger Overture and Rhenish Symphony, respectively.