A year before his death in 1948, Richard Strauss composed his masterpiece, Four Last Songs, expressing a calm acceptance of the inevitability of his own death. Meditations on life, death and the transition into ‘the magic circle of the night’, the songs among the most haunting music ever written. In contrast the six Brentano-Lieder are playful, incandescent and virtuosic settings of Clemens Brentano's deeply romantic poems.