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When Richard Strauss composed his Vier letzte Lieder (1948) he was 84 and psychologically exhausted by the sufferings of the war years and subsequent isolation. The four songs are not really a cycle and perhaps not even 'Lieder' in the traditional sense of the word (eminent musicologists prefer to call them Gesänge); however, they undoubtedly represent Strauss's farewell to life and art. Sunset, autumn and the approaching night which is first and foremost a leavetaking from life: on these themes, which connect together the three poems by Hermann Hesse and the fourth, Im Abendrot, by Joseph Eichendorff, Strauss resorts to a musical symbolism that trascends the borders of each Lied, and transforms coloraturas into idealised, rarefied arabesques. The systematic interweaving of instrumental and vocal singing also reaches such a degree of parity as to make the customary concept of accompaniment wholly inadequate and incongruous. On the one hand, Strauss takes up elements that had been dear to him since his youth, on the other, he rethinks and surpasses them by imagining a vocality that borders on abstraction: the words themselves become mere sound. In the Vier letzte Lieder there is a transparency of writing typical of the late style of the great composer in which the technical dominance is such that it goes unnoticed and becomes a spontaneous reinvention of a past that is irrevocably lost, but still alive in memory: so much so that all of the last Strauss seems to find a synthesis in these four truly 'last' pages of metamorphosis and farewell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Throughout the 1920s, German-language film journalism addressed fundamental questions about the encounter between music and cinema. Prominent composers, musicologists, and film theorists contributed to this broad discussion on the proper role and design of silent film music, encompassing a wide range of arguments and perspectives. The essay outlines the development of the film-music debate on the film journal Reichsfilmblatt from 1924 to 1929 with a special focus on the dialectical interplay between theoretical concerns and compositional issues in Hans Erdmann's film music criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay aims at investigating the style of the musicologist Mario Bortolotto, which is full of references and hard to read: the textuality, syntax and lexicon used by the musicologist help to create a style that reflects his critical and antidogmatic attitude, carefully putting the musical language in a precise historical context at the centre of his research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses music philosophy and the history of music, beginning in the 20th century. Topics discussed include the musicological views of French composer Olivier Messiaen on music of the 20th century, the concept and role of electronic music, and the application of the idea of business continuity to theories of music.

The Museo Pinacoteca della Santa Casa di Loreto holds a musical ex voto, the work of a local painter of the second half of the sixteenth century, that depicts in the upper section a pilgrim at the feet of the Virgin and in the lower section the musical notation of a «Canon quinquae quintus» on the invocation Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis. The picture has been for nearly three centuries at the center of a debate among musicologists on the identification of the author -- for whom the name of the Florentine musician Giovanni Animuccia was suggested -- and on the solution of the canon, which appears incomplete. The coat of arms, which was not seriously considered by scholars, reveals that the composer is Orlando di Lasso, who was a pilgrim in Loreto in 1585: the iconography of the musician in old age also corresponds with the Loreto depiction. Compared with the published works of Orlando, the ex voto offers a composition unknown until now. Together with a contemporaneous letter of the Flemish musician, the painting sheds new light on the Loreto devotion of Lasso and on the presence of his works in the Archivio Musicale della Santa Casa. The solution to the problem of attribution opens further questions about a second musical ex voto from the second half of the sixteenth century, also conserved in the Museo Pinacoteca. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a profile of musicologist and university professor Giovanni Morelli. Topics discussed include Morelli's philosophy of musicology and approach to his work, Morelli's teaching style, educational approach, and rapport with his students, and concepts of the synthesis of meaning and form.