A cadenza shrill and sharp
Pizzicato from the harp
Andante and legato
Swan song from the cello.
Clefs, chords and counterpoint
From fiery exposition to development
Magnificent muti-tonal orchestration
Tumultuous recapitulation.
Finally four last songs
Lamenting loss, lyrical and forlorn
Musical maverick Strauss is gone
The garden mourns.
© Alison Jean Hankinson
This is for Real Toads, where the theme is Chaos. Bjorn talked of physics and mathematics, and it brought me round to music. Music is very mathematical and can be very precise and beauty and precision is borne from weaving together many delicate strands. It reminded me of two great twentieth-century composers who pushed music to its chaotic and mathematical limits. Alban Berg and Richard Strauss. Alban Berg’s Violin concerto is a masterpiece of mathematical precision, but I opted for Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs. The final line is from these and is the first line of September, written by Hermann Hesse.
These are my late September images…
Hues of Hankinson 