More Richard than Strauss. First the man than the "revered maestro", as Arbasino would say. The opera numbers in this extraordinarily eccentric and revelatory programme are three different pages of an intimate diary, now light, now boundlessly profound; some of them bending over small everyday things, others hovering over the thoughts of a man in the twilight of life. The author of fearsome but respected lengths and complexities, the demiurge of symphonic poems on a hero's life and on the word of Zarathustra according to Nietzsche, the man of the theatre who shook the 20th century stage with the madness of Salome, decollator of prophets, and the baleful wrath of Elektra, implacable avenger, in these passages looks at himself in the mirror and tells his story. Traümerei am Kamin - we could say "Dream of a Home Hearth" - is an instrumental interlude from the opera Intermezzo (1924), one of four that Strauss also published to accompany (264a) what he decided halfway through his career should be a "Bourgeois Comedy with Symphonic Interludes" (op.72 and number 264 of the 298 that make up his catalogue). Composed from the only libretto Strauss had written since Guntram (1894) - both Bahr and Hofmannsthal decided it would be better if he did it himself - Intermezzo is Strauss' most "prose" work. Certainly the most self-referential of the fifteen. 

Intermezzo tells the small story of a marital crisis, transposed from the true story of a letter that a woman mistakenly sent to Strauss and that Pauline interpreted as proof of a betrayal that was not there. Mr and Mrs Strauss' marriage really danced on the edge of divorce in 1905, and Intermezzo is its belated exorcism, written when the plate of private life could be eaten cold. The domestic crisis transits through the opera with few masks: Strauss becomes Storch, risking no small semantic improvement (in German, from Ostrich to Stork), and Pauline becomes Christine. 

As a reflection of the "Konversationston", the conversational touch that moves the singing, a line of clarity runs through all the instrumental writing, which can also be read by isolating Traümerei am Kamin, the most beautiful and inspired of the four interludes: a symphonic jewel in its own right, stretched out in long arches that demand the orchestra's best legato skills. Timbres, colours and calibrated dynamics set the almost minimalist thematic material vibrating from within, in a charged and sorrowful expressiveness that easily takes Traümerei am Kamin out of the work for which it was written, and places it, as pure music, in Strauss's most composed and essential line; the one that in 1945 will be sublimated in the masterpiece Metamorphosen. 

The Vier letzte Lieder bear a title that is not Strauss's, but which, unlike other cases in history, tells the absolute truth. Composed between May and September 1948 and performed posthumously on 22 May 1950 by Wilhelm Furtwaengler and Kirsten Flagstad at London's Royal Albert Hall, eight months after the musician's death, the Four Last Lieder for soprano and orchestra are the end of the journey, the farewell to music, the last glimpse of life. More than sixty years after the first collections for voice and piano -Op 10, in which the jewel Zueignung, orchestrated in 1940, appears, dates from 1883 - far removed from the idea and the time of the works full of material and pathos, the Vier letzte Lieder revise with the detachment of age, The Vier letzte Lieder revisit, with the onset of age, 84 years, an idea of death that in Tod und Verklärung (1889) was tinged with romantic suffering, and are born of the "weariness of wandering" of which von Eichendorff's Im Abendrot , the fourth song in the collection but the origin of the whole, speaks. Despite the more than 150 Lieder he composed during his career, Strauss did not go down in history as a master of the genre, not as much as Mahler, mainly because of the poets he chose (he was more careful with the librettists), and because his Lieder were modelled on, or rather on, the performers. First and foremost Pauline de Ahna, who became his wife and 'Strauss's better half', according to Hanslick, and Op 27(Ruhe, meine Seele and Morgen) was dedicated to her on their wedding day (10 September 1894). The Vier Letzte Lieder arise from the force of Von Eichendorff's verses, which capture Strauss helpless in his extreme reflections on the transit of the earth. Im Abendrot (At Dusk) is the first text Strauss sets to music, destined to remain alone. But three others attracted him, by Hermann Hesse, Frühling, September and Beim Schlafengehen, and the collection is completed along an ideal path through the idea of a Spring of life(Frühling), Autumn(September) and Evening(Beim Schlafengehen) as an opening to sleep and dream, the state closest to coming out of oneself. A fifth Lied was supposed to complete the cycle, but remained in the state of introduction. It would have added nothing to the introspective sequence that leaves Im Abendrot to close with the last verse, "Is this death?", on the umpteenth self-quotation from Tod und Verklärung. And there is no passage in which the orchestra does not move in delicate harmony with the crepuscular thoughts of the cycle. Four years earlier, the Metamorphosen had been the instrumental swan song. The Vier letzte Lieder are the final song of the musician and the man Strauss. They alone raise him to the pedestal of the great Liederists.