Golda Schultz: “These Are Not Sad Songs”

Strauss wrote his Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs) near the end of his life. What do these pieces evoke in you?

I do think about the notion of farewell, which is so present in these songs, and about what happens after you go. Because winter has come, winter passes, and it’s the next chapter. So I love the way that Strauss starts with hope immediately, like “there is something beyond this.”

It gives me this wonderful comforting sense that these are not sad songs, that goodbyes are inevitable and that’s just how life goes. Knowing that there’s another chapter beyond what we can see and what we understand, there’s profound comfort in that.

How do you balance the beauty of the music with the meaning of the text?

When I’m thinking of the text, I think about the day I’m going to die and leave the people that I care about. So it’s difficult to balance that emotion with the luscious music and keeping your voice in check, and I don’t think I get it right, actually.

But I think that’s the point: it’s not supposed to be perfect. It’s supposed to be a human being reflecting on very deep, painful, and profound things. So you have to show your humanity. That’s the only way to get through it.

Strauss wrote so beautifully for the soprano voice. What makes the vocal writing so special, and what does it demand of you as a singer?

It demands humanity, fragility, and kindness. It requires a lot of deep chest singing, which is difficult but, to Richard Strauss, it represents humanity. As people, we are completely corporeal. That’s where the Tieflage (low register) of the voice comes out, and he wants that to be expressed.

On the other hand, his songs have these wonderful floating gestures and lots of lovely interval jumps. That’s about the ephemeral, the ascent to heaven. There you have to give lightness and show fragility. I love the way he uses the image of birds throughout all the songs really. So, when I’m singing, I really am focusing on imitating how birds fly: the movements are very sharp, you have to jump down into a low part of your voice then instantly jump high.

Before becoming a singer, you studied journalism and philosophy. Does that influence the way you approach a character, a text, or a piece of music?

I’m always a little bit of a philosopher, and a little bit of an investigative journalist, because that is the interesting part of the job. Especially on pieces like this, that are so full of subtext, and so full of metaphor, expressionism, and impressionism. You have to be willing to dig like an archaeologist, to find what is at the core, or as E.E. Cummings says, “the root of the root.”

Then, I try to figure out how we, in this time, are in dialogue with that composer, and his view of the world. Here I am, a woman from Africa, in Europe, singing in a language that is not my own, but still feeling seen by this music, because of what is at the core of it.

The Four Last Songs end with a feeling a transcendence. How do you experience that final moment, and what does it leave us with?

I think it takes us back to Frühling (Spring), the beginning. To me, it’s so beautiful because it talks about life being a cycle, that there is no beginning that is not an end to something, and there is no end that is not a new beginning.

In Im Abendrot (in the twilight), he writes “Wie sind wir” and then he does this ellipsis, “wandermüde.” This ellipsis is the moment between death and the afterlife where everything stops and the question hangs in the air: “Aren’t we so tired of all this walking?”, then the answer “Is this perhaps – death?” Maybe to rest is to die, and that is a good thing, to close our eyes.

I always imagine that, one day (I hope I don’t cry when I say this), none of us will be here. At the beginning of the final song he says: we have been through everything with each other, and we have been through it hand in hand. So when I sing it, I look at everyone in the audience, try to remember them, because in this instant, we are all here together, regardless of how we came.