Richard Strauss: Four Last Songs & Capriccio by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (2025 Remastered, Berlin 1965 & London 1953)

The final song of a Strauss contemplating the approach of death with astonishing serenity, these Four Last Songs, composed in 1948 at the age of eighty-four, rank among the most troubling and the most ecstatic pages ever written. The final line of the last Lied resonates like a farewell to life — “Ist dies etwa der Tod?” (“Is this perhaps death?”) — the voice imperceptibly dissolving into the velvet texture of the orchestra, which echoes the symphonic poem written sixty years earlier, Death and Transfiguration, and seems to cover the body and the face, until they fade away.

At the urging of her husband Walter Legge, the great artistic director, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf recorded, at the dawn of the LP era, the first version of Strauss’s Four Last Songs — a virtually definitive interpretation of these Lieder. While the later recording with Georg Szell places greater emphasis on the light of a world fading away, this one stands out for its vocal freshness and raw sensitivity, making it a landmark in the history of interpretation. Every word, every syllable, every inflection reaches absolute perfection. One must follow this voice second by second, in its intimate pulse, like a deeply moving confession of everything life embraces — sorrows, distress, love — and of time itself, fluid and elusive, until its disappearance, the voice accompanying it one last time toward evaporation: “Ist dies etwa der Tod?”

The remastering is simply sublime, allowing one to appreciate both the mono and stereo recordings without wincing when moving from one to the other. We even have a preference for the mono version. But what luxury to be able to choose between a Rolls-Royce and a Bentley — two absolutely legendary versions.