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 instances in history, tells the absolute truth. Composed between May and September 1948, performed posthumously on May 22, 1950, by Wilhelm Furtwaengler and Kirsten Flagstad at London's RoyalAlbert 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, is from 1883 - far removed from the 'idea and time of works swollen with matter and pathos, the Vier letzte Lieder revise with thedistake of age, 84 years, an idea of death that in Tod und Verklärung (1889) was tinged with romantic suffering, and arise from the "weariness of wandering" mentioned in von Eichendorff's Im Abendrot , the fourth song in the collection but the origin of the whole. Despite the more than 150 Lieder composed in his career, Strauss did not consign himself to history as a master of the genre, not as much as Mahler, mainly because of the poets he chose (he was more careful with librettists), and because his Lieder were born modeled on, better on, the performers. First and foremost was Pauline de Ahna, who became his wife as well as "Strauss's better half," according to Hanslick, and Op. 27(Ruhe, meine Seele and Morgen) was dedicated to her on her wedding day (Sept. 10, 1894). The Vier Letzte Lieder arise from the force of Von Eichendorff's verses, which catch Strauss helpless in his extreme reflections on earthly transit. Im Abendrot (At Twilight) is the first text Strauss sets to music, destined to remain alone. But three others appealed to him, by Hermann Hesse, Frühling, September and Beim Schlafengehen, and the collection was completed according to an ideal path through the idea of aSpring 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 it remained at the introductory state. It would have added nothing to the introspective sequence that leaves Im Abendrot to close with the last verse, "Is this death?" on yet another self-quotation from Tod undVerklärung. And there is no passage in which the orchestra does not move in delicate tune 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 manStrauss. They alone elevate him to the pedestal of the great liederists.