"Do you still sing 'Four Last Songs'?
Jessye Norman - I only do them with conducters who really understand what's happening with them. I don't want to say this condescendingly, but so many regional orchestras feel that if I show up, we're sound like Sergiu Celibidache in Munich. But that's not quite the way it works. There was one bright, lovely man who was conducting 'Four Last Songs' for the first time, and he had a vision the night before that it would be slower. And I said, "I really appreciate that you're having an artistic moment, but it's marked Allegretto"

How long will you continue to sing?
J.N. - As long as it make sense.

Jessye Norman Interview to "Gramophone" IX.2010, p.39


"Strauss' Four Last Songs. For the profundity that is achieved not by complexity but by clarity and simplicity. For the purity of the sentiment about death and parting and loss. For the long melodic line spinning out and the female voice soaring and soaring. For the repose and composure and gracefulness and the intense beauty of the soaring. For the ways one is drawn into the tremendous arc of heartbreak. The composer drops all masks and, at the age of eighty-two, stands before you naked. And you dissolve.

Philip Roth