Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, 90, Top Lyric Soprano

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Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who has died at 90, was a lyric soprano whose aristocratic purity of tone and attention to detail made her the supreme female exponent of the songs of Strauss and Wolf and produced some of the most authoritative operatic performances of the postwar era.

In the words of her husband, the British record producer Walter Legge, Schwarzkopf possessed “a brilliant, fresh voice, shot through with laughter, not large but admirably projected, with enchanting high pianissimi”. It was Legge who revived the beautiful young singer’s career after the embarrassment of her wartime association with the Nazi party, and, together with Herbert von Karajan, encouraged her to develop a formidable gift for characterization that only occasionally spilled over into artfulness.

During the peak of her operatic career in the 1950s and 1960s, Schwarzkopf concentrated on five roles: Donna Elvira in “Don Giovanni,” the Countess in “The Marriage of Figaro,” Fiordiligi in “Cosi fan tutte,” Countess Madeleine in “Capriccio,” and, above all, the Marschallin in “Der Rosenkavalier.” It seemed fitting that four of these characters were noblewomen: Schwarzkopf possessed a patrician manner which, coupled with a generous measure of self-esteem, earned her the reputation of opera’s most intimidating grande dame.

Among her recordings, her ravishing version of the Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss, recorded with George Szell and the Berlin Radio Orchestra, became one of EMI’s best-selling classical discs — “a desert island recording if ever there was one” as the Penguin Record Guide pointedly observed.

Olga Maria Elisabeth Frederike Schwarzkopf was born to highly-educated Prussian parents on 9 December 1915 at Jarocin, Poland, and sang her first operatic role, Eurydice in Gluck’s “Orfeo,” as a schoolgirl in Magdeburg. In 1934 she entered the Berlin Hochschule fur Musik, where her singing tutor Lula Mysz-Gmeiner made the bizarre decision to train her as a mezzo-soprano. Fortunately, no damage was done; Schwarzkopf became a pupil of Maria Ivogun and in 1938 she joined the Deutsche Oper as a coloratura soprano.

After the war she made her Covent Garden debut as Donna Elvira in 1947. She was lucky to be allowed to perform in Britain at all, for her involvement with the Nazi party had been at least as intimate as those of Karajan and Furtwangler. Its full extent was revealed in Jefferson’s controversial 1996 biography, which made extensive use of the 200-page file on Schwarzkopf kept by the Nazis. From this it appears that she applied to join the party in 1938 and quickly attracted the attention of Goebbels; she also acted, sang and played the piano in propaganda films. When she was questioned by Allied authorities in Austria about her party membership, she produced a succession of lies and half-truths. These were swiftly uncovered, and Jefferson finds it strange that someone as intelligent as Schwarzkopf should have resorted to such “clumsy methods of fudging her past.” He speculates that she was attempting to hide more than NSDAP membership: there were rumors that she was the lover of a senior Nazi.

Her meeting with Walter Legge in 1946 saved her career. The owlish, coarse, thick-spectacled Legge, then with Columbia Records, was in Vienna scouting talent; he already knew about Schwarzkopf from soldiers who had heard her on German radio broadcasts.

During a two-hour audition, Legge made the soprano spend the best part of an hour and half experimenting with different ways of coloring a single phrase in a Wolf song — “pure sadism,” said Karajan, who was listening. Legge was intolerant of the slightest fluff, and at one post-recital reception years later was overheard telling Schwarzkopf that “you sang that last Wolf Lied like a pig.”Yet her singing of Hugo Wolf was thought by many to be her highest achievement.

Under Legge’s tutelage, Schwarzkopf’s international career raced ahead. Legge, later artistic director of EMI records, would sit in a stage box while Schwarzkopf sang, watching for the exact moment when women fumbled in their handbags for handkerchiefs and men tugged them from their breast pockets. He recalled: “We tried for years and once or twice succeeded in achieving Pamina’s “Ach, ich fuhl’s” so heartbreakingly that there was no applause.” Some critics felt that there was element of calculation in this which robbed Schwarzkopf’s performances of their spontaneity; but what no one could deny was that over the years her voice became richer, warmer and ever more accurately focussed.

Schwarzkopf’s most celebrated role was Strauss’s Marschallin, whom she made winningly flirtatious. Her 1956 collaboration with Karajan and the Philharmonia remains most collectors’ first choice of recording; Legge described the music and text as “honey for a fine Lieder singer’s subtle art.”

Schwarzkopf’s other great partnership was with Karajan, who directed her in over 20 stage productions and, during the years of Legge’s ascendancy at EMI, persuaded her to record as many works as possible. During the 1950s, Karajan frequently occupied the spare bedroom of the Legge’s Hampstead house, and Schwarzkopf always spoke well of him during his lifetime; but after his death in 1989 she revealed her bitterness at his neglect of Legge in later years.

“I do have to say, Karajan was an utterly bad character,” she declared. “In my case and in the case of my husband it was utterly awful. Although he was a great conductor, the behavior of Karajan was such that we have no reason, even after his death, to say he was a great man. He was not.”

Schwarzkopf was matched only by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in her superb articulation of German texts; unfortunately, like the great baritone, she continued to perform Lieder in public long after the intelligence of her readings ceased to compensate for the loss of vocal bloom. Her last recitals, in the 1970s, were sad affairs; her master classes, on the other hand, provided magnificent insights into her art, and sometimes revealed the gulf between her own rigor and the glib facility of her pupils.

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf married Walter Legge in 1953; he died in 1979. There were no children. She retired to Zurich.


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