Дуга на заласку сунца: Фантазијски свет у Четири последње песме Рихарда Штрауса

Abstract

Four Last Songs for soprano and orchestra of Richard Strauss represent composers final opus and his farewell to life and music. Composed during penulitmate year of Strauss’s life, shortly after the Second World War is finished, they reflect his attempt to recreate for the last time already vanished late romantic world to which he truly belongs. Therefor he had to design specific inner world of his ultimate work, tremendously different from the outer world then, in terms of language and style. This inner world of Strauss’s Four Last Songs I labeled fantastic because it shares many imortant features with definition of term fantasy taken from Milan Vujaklija’s Dictionary of Foreign Words and Terms and with concept of fantastic from the book The Processes of Pan-stylistic Musical Thinking by Tijana Popović Mlađenović. Their explanations of terms fantasy/fantastic would be my basic theoretical frame and starting point for the further musico-poetical analysis of Strauss’s Four Last Songs, in which I will emphasize highly metaforical dimension of the work. Thus, I would make attempt to answer the following ensential questions: what possible reasons enforced Richard Strauss to create fantastic world in Four Last Songs, which musical and poetical resources he used to achieve that goal and what at all does this world signify? Beside musical analysis, I will make brief but important reference to socio-historical context as a wellspring for the creation of final artistic statement and deeply personal and moving piece, such as Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss.