R. Strauss's Four Last Songs in Year of Living Dangerously(1982)

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Billy Kwan (played by Linda Hunt) tries to cope with the death of his adopted daughter and reaches a grim resolution. The music, Beim Schlefangen (On Going to Sleep), is by Richard Strauss, from his Four Last Songs

The film uses Strauss's music for more than just atmospherics. Kwan introduces Hamilton (Mel Gibson) to the music of Strauss earlier in the film. The effect is to inform the audience that not just is Billy more informed than Hamilton and his colleagues about Indonesian culture, but also more informed about Western culture as well.

Strauss's Four Last Songs was composed during World War II, completed in 1948, by the aging R. Strauss. It was his last work, and the death metaphors of the music suggest he knew it would be that. It also may have represented a final epitaph for the culture that had produced him and his music. That Billy is even aware of this music tells us early on that he's a man with a far more complicated soul and agenda than we had first realized. Perhaps too complicated for his own good, as it turns out.

In the clip, as he bangs on the typewriter, he repeats the question, "What must we do?" This is a reference to a passage in Luke, which Leo Tolstoy had used for the title of a book about poverty in nineteenth century Russia, a book which Billy admired and had earlier recommended to Hamilton (Mel Gibson).