page_title: Four Last Songs
section_title: Premiere and first recording
hierarchical_section_title: Four Last Songs / Premiere and first recording
caption_attribution_description: Tittel / Title: Portrett av Kirsten Flagstad (1895-1962) Beskrivelse / Description: Bildet har en delvis uleselig dedikasjon på forsiden. Dato / Date: ca 1940-45 Fotograf / Photographer: ukjent / unknown Eier / Owner Institution: Nasjonalbiblioteket / National Library of Norway Lenke / Link: &lt;a href="http://www.nb.no" rel="nofollow"&gt;www.nb.no&lt;/a&gt; Bildesignatur / Image Number: blds_05688_a
context_page_description: The Four Last Songs, Op. posth., for soprano and orchestra are – with the exception of the song "Malven", composed later the same year – the final completed works of Richard Strauss. They were composed in 1948 when the composer was 84.
  The songs are "Frühling", "September", "Beim Schlafengehen" and "Im Abendrot". The title Four Last Songs was provided posthumously by Strauss's friend Ernst Roth, who published the four songs as a single unit in 1950 after Strauss's death.
  Strauss died in September 1949. The premiere was given at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 22 May 1950 by soprano Kirsten Flagstad and the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler.
  The work has no opus number, and was published in 1950 after Strauss's death. It is listed as AV 150 in von Asow and Hermann's thematical index, and as TrV 296 in the index of Franz and Florian Trenner.
context_section_description: One of the last wishes of Richard Strauss was that Kirsten Flagstad be the soprano to introduce the four songs, which he finished in 1948, the year before his death at 85. "I would like to make it possible," he wrote to her, "that [the songs] should be at your disposal for a world premiere in the course of a concert with a first-class conductor and orchestra."
  The premiere was given posthumously at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 22 May 1950, sung by Flagstad, accompanied by the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. The performance was made possible by a magnanimous effort of the Maharaja of Mysore, Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar Bahudar. Though he could not be present, the music-loving maharaja put up a $4,800 guarantee for the performance, so that the Four Last Songs could be recorded for his large personal collection – then estimated at around 20,000 records – and the recording then shipped to him in Mysore.
  The performance was recorded on acetate discs. They became badly worn before the first LP transfer, which was generally considered very poor. Subsequent restorations using modern digital technology were effected in 2007 by Roger Beardsley for Testament Records, and in 2014 by Andrew Rose for Pristine Audio.
caption: Kirsten Flagstad (c. 1945)
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