Rather like bookends, the genre of the song produced the first
composition that the six and a half year-old Richard Strauss
wrote: a Christmas song or Weihnachtslied to words by his mother,
in 1870. It also produced the last, the famous Four Last Songs,
written when he was eighty-four in 1948, just a year before
he died. Within that lifespan he wrote over two hundred songs,
mainly inspired by his soprano wife Pauline de Ahna, who ironically
gave up her career when she married Strauss. The Strauss song
and the soprano voice were literally and inseparably wedded.
Though the composition of songs took second place to his creative
spurts of opera composition and also the orchestral symphonic
poem, they were useful devices for the workaholic Strauss. They
became useful presents for family and friends, for singers or
for celebrated dignitaries in need of flattery in the form of
a dedication with the composer’s eye ever upon the income column
of his bank account. Whatever the reason for their various creations,
we have cause to be thankful. The orchestrations were mainly
made in the last ten years of the composer’s life, mostly by
himself but some were entrusted to his acolytes such as Robert
Heger or Felix Mottl.
The lyric coloratura soprano Diana Damrau and the Strauss Lied
fit together as a hand in a glove. Her operatic repertoire in
itself is a give-away, with many of the Strauss roles (Zerbinetta,
Fiakermilli, Sophie, Aminta, Zdenka) together with operas by
Mozart, Beethoven and Weber dominating over Italian works. Together
with the fine Strauss conductor Christian Thielemann and the
excellent Munich Philharmonic, the orchestra based in Strauss’s
home city, she has put together 22 songs, in haphazard order,
with all six of the Op.68 Brentano songs among them. It is easy
to overdose on Strauss, with his dreamy sounds and marsh-mallow
textures. These songs generally do not have the robust energy
of the story-inspired Ein Heldenleben or Till Eulenspiegel.
It’s hard to find a scherzo among them, instead there is introspection,
a soul-searching which sometimes produces agonising results.
Amor is the nearest we get to Zerbinetta, while plenty of others
approach the Marschallin. It is only - in this collection at
least - the Lied der Frauen, by far the longest at seven minutes,
which comes near to the Strauss of Salome or Elektra, with strident
discords and dramatic agonising. Damrau is a wonderful singer,
she has line in the voice, colour like a kaleidoscope, and wears
her emotional heart on her vocal sleeve. Apart from some occasional
loss of sound below the stave - and Strauss sets a very wide
tessitura in these songs - it’s a glorious sound from a singer
who, approaching 40, is vocally mature and at her peak. Like
a chrysalis, she should emerge from Sophie to become a fine
Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, or from Susanna to Countess
in Figaro. The best song on this disc, and which produces the
best singing is ‘Als mir Dein Lied erklang’, which appropriately
enough means ‘When your song rang out, I heard it’.
Christopher Fifield
Diana Damrau (soprano) 
