“Revolutionary upheaval and conservative retrenchment both move in the same direction”

For those who would concern themselves with music's meaning, the ending of Strauss's Im Abendrot, from his Vier letzte Lieder, prompts any number of questions. Many stem from Eichendorff's text. The poem tells of two individuals walking hand in hand at twilight's glow; the last line asks, “ist dies etwa der Tod?” (is this perhaps death?). Intentionally equivocal – the clause restlessly hinges on the word “etwa” (perhaps) – the poet leaves the matter open-ended. Strauss's music seems less ambiguous. Once the poetical question is sounded, the eighty-four-year-old composer quotes from a work of his written a half century earlier, Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration, 1889). A literal echo of Strauss's own past, the gesture provides compelling evidence of a person facing mortality with undiminished faith in the tenets of Romanticism. The song's retrospective sound world, a quality it shares with the three others with which it traditionally is grouped, has incited many to speculate that Strauss intended the set as a farewell to the Lied. For Paul Griffiths, “Strauss could reasonably have thought his Vier letzte Lieder … bore their epithet for the genre.” Or, as Edward F. Kravitt would have it, “Strauss's return late in life to the Lied – when it was of minor importance in the modern world – is further evidence of his conservative nostalgia for things past.” Moreover, “this yearning reminds one also of the past significance of the Lied.” But does Strauss really intend Im Abendrot as a panegyric to an art form that had had its day and expired?