Four Last Songs (1959-1980) - II - Four More Last Songs

Another quartet of beautiful songs that were the last things their composers wrote.

ASIDE: It’s now two years since the first post on Music Makes Me. It doesn’t feel like real time, web time. And does MMM really look that much older?

Edelweiss (Rodgers & Hammerstein, 1959)	Simple and stately, a wonderful distillation of what was best about this most famous of partnerships of composer and lyricist. Despite being in a musical by R&H at the height of their fame, people often assume this must be a real Austrian folk song. It can be read as a crystallisation of everything Hammerstein wrote and believed in: the masterfully understated touch.
That’s a Fine Kind o’ Freedom (Harold Arlen, 1965)	You can trust Arlen to go out with a bang. An amazing song, yet full of Arlen’s hallmarks: the African-American vernacular, the chord sequence in the release, the middle section that is a little firecracker in itself. And I can’t imagine a more perfect version than Streisand’s.
An Old-Fashioned Wedding (Irving Berlin, 1966)	This, too, is an appropriate way to bow out: a double song, a form Berlin seemed proud of to the point of competitiveness (if Bergreen is to be believed). Berlin didn’t die for another 23 years (at the ripe age of 101), but this is the last song he ever published. Maybe he wrote hundreds more – he once said he wrote a song every day – but after he published this, he felt the public no longer wanted his kind of music and quietly ‘packed his stall away’.
South – To a Warmer Place (Alec Wilder, 1980)	Devastating. The strings conjure up the barrenness of love gone cold, the voice cracks with heartbreak, and Wilder strews thorny intervals across the vocalist’s path in the middle eight. The incredibly prolific Wilder wrote no more. A swansong this certainly is. Doubly apt because it may also be the last masterpiece Sinatra ever recorded.

There is a cabaret-style version of the Wilder song on YouTube here, as performed by Catherine Russell, with Dick Hyman on piano.

The original post, Four Last Songs 1937-1958, is about George Gershwin, Al Bowlly, Jerome Kern and Cole Porter.

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