Classical music
Richard Strauss
Richard Strauss (1864-1949) spent the last years of his life in Switzerland, and Montreux holds a precise place in that final stretch. The final sketch of “Im Abendrot”, the song that closes the “Four Last Songs”, is inscribed “Montreux, 27 April 1948”. He was eighty-three and would die the following year. Those four songs, published after his death, are regarded as his farewell and as a last love letter to his wife, the soprano Pauline de Ahna, whom he had married nearly sixty years earlier.
Richard Strauss: “Montreux, 27 April 1948”
A date written on a score
Montreux’s trace in Richard Strauss’s work is not a hotel anecdote: it is written on the manuscript. The final sketch of “Im Abendrot”, on a poem by Joseph von Eichendorff, is dated “Montreux, 27 April 1948”. The full score was completed on 6 May.
The composer was then eighty-three. He had been living in Switzerland since the end of the war. His son Franz had urged him to stop writing letters and return to composing, suggesting he take up the lied again.
The Four Last Songs
“Im Abendrot” came first, yet it closes the set in concert. The three other songs, on poems by Hermann Hesse, followed during 1948: “Frühling”, completed at Pontresina on 18 July, “Beim Schlafengehen” on 4 August, “September” on 20 September.
Strauss died on 8 September 1949 without having heard them. The set was published posthumously as “Vier letzte Lieder”. Eichendorff’s text, describing two old companions watching the sunset and asking “is this perhaps death?”, gives these pages their testamentary weight.
What remains in Montreux
His bust, by the Montreux sculptor Bernard Bavaud, was unveiled in 2013 on the Quai de Vernex, in front of the Auditorium Stravinski. It was given by the Friends of Richard Strauss association.
It faces the bust of Miles Davis, by the same sculptor: classical music and jazz look at each other by the lake.
Related places
▸Buste de Richard StraussBustOpen the place →
© mymontreux.ch The German composer, a faithful guest of Montreux, sculpted by Bernard Bavaud, facing the bust of Miles Davis.
▸Fairmont Le Montreux PalaceHistoric hotelOpen the place →
© Visit Montreux The Belle Époque grand hotel of the stars: Michael Jackson lived there for two weeks in 1997 during his Mountain Studios sessions.
