7th Symphony Concert

An evening poised between farewell and the allure of the unknown: Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs are regarded as a poignant retrospective and artistic legacy of his life, which spanned over 80 years. Composed in 1948 while in exile in Switzerland following World War II, these songs—based on poems by Hermann Hesse and Joseph von Eichendorff—blend a premonition of death with an unshakable hope for the afterlife. When the question is posed at the end: “Is this perhaps death?”, the horn responds with the Transfiguration motif from Strauss’s tone poem Death and Transfiguration, composed six decades earlier.

Richard Wagner offers a foreshadowing of this redemption with the prelude to his opera Lohengrin. Here, according to Wagner, resounds the “miraculous descent of the Grail, escorted by a host of angels.” In shimmering lines and soaring harmonies, a music unfolds that Friedrich Nietzsche compared to a drug-induced high, “blue, with an opiate, narcotic effect.”

Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade concludes the evening with vibrantly colorful storytelling. The four-movement symphonic poem brings the fairy-tale world of One Thousand and One Nights to life in an opulent orchestration influenced by Wagner’s music dramas and interwoven with Slavic color. The solo violin embodies the wise Scheherazade, who, as the narrator, inspires the orchestra with each new chapter to create sparkling soundscapes—from stormy seas and lavish feasts to mysterious nights.