The Four Last Songs | Australian Festival of Chamber Music

At the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, the performance of Richard Strauss’s *Four Last Songs* was more than a musical highlight – was a deeply moving meditation on beauty, loss, and memory. The connection to Stefan Zweig’s *The World of Yesterday* was inescapable. Both works, created in the long shadow of European collapse, are radiant farewells to a world that once held promise and civility.

Zweig and Strauss were children of the same Vienna – of art, intellect, and cosmopolitanism. They watched that world dissolve in the flames of war and exile. In response, each crafted a final work of breathtaking dignity. Zweig, in his memoir, offered prose of classical elegance and tragic clarity. Strauss, in his *Four Last Songs*, composed a transcendent farewell – music that seems to hover between this world and the next.

This performance, however, owed its emotional power not only to Strauss but to the brilliance of the chamber arrangement by James Crabb. His reimagining preserved the lushness of the original orchestration while offering new transparency, letting each line breathe with intimacy. It was Strauss, distilled – fragile, glowing, deeply human.

And then, there was Carolyn Sampson. Her voice was spellbinding – at once pure and saturated with emotion. She floated above the ensemble with the ease of a bird in late summer, and in moments like the final line of *Im Abendrot* – “Ist dies etwa der Tod?” – time seemed to pause. Her interpretation didn’t merely evoke Strauss’s farewell to life; it *embodied* it.

To experience *The Four Last Songs* in this setting, then reflect on Zweig’s *The World of Yesterday*, was to understand how art can offer something close to grace. Both works gaze back at a shattered world – not with anger, but with love – and in that, they offer a kind of redemption.