Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (1915-2006):
an obituary
Try for a moment to
imagine the landscape of singing in
the twentieth century without the presence
of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. It is almost
impossible to do so; such was her impact
upon the development of vocal art. There
are those whose impact is beyond dispute
when considering specific musical forms
or composers, but there are very few
artists whose mark has been left with
equal care across opera, operetta, orchestral
song and lieder in the German, French,
Italian and English repertoires.
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf
died peacefully in her sleep on 2 August
2006 at her home in Schruns on the Austrian-Swiss
border. She was 90. Her legacy is one
of transformation in terms of a listener’s
experience, a rich and varied body of
recordings and several carefully selected
pupils.
Olga Maria Elisabeth
Frederike Schwarzkopf was born on 9
December 1915, in Jarotschin, Germany,
now in west-central Poland, to Prussian
parents. Her father Friedrich Schwarzkopf
was a school teacher whose work necessitated
much travelling in the years of Elisabeth’s
childhood. Her mother took principal
charge of the home and the guiding of
her young daughter’s musical talents.
In 1928 the family settled in Magdeburg,
Germany, where Schwarzkopf pursued studies
in piano, guitar, viola and organ and
developed a naturally high, light voice.
1933 saw a move to Berlin and enrolment
at the Berlin Royal Augusta School before
admission to the Hochschule für
Musik. In The following year saw her
first contact with England – by taking
part in a cycling and camping trip funded
by the League of National Socialist
Students. It was on this trip that she
learned English.
Her teacher at the Hochschule für
Musik, Lula Mysz-Gmeiner, somewhat inexplicably
thought that Schwarzkopf would become
a contralto. In 1938 she began singing
with the Berlin State Opera. Her first
recordings, from 1939 and 1940, are
of highlights from Lehár’s Paganini
and Das Land des Lächelns
with tenor Rupert Glawisch. Schwarzkopf
recalled being "totally nervous,
totally awestruck" by the experience
of recording and that it was largely
the support of Glawisch that got her
through it. What is striking about these
early recordings is the assurance of
the high lyric voice, a complete absence
of any suggestion of contralto tendencies
and how unlike her later self Schwarzkopf
sounds. There is almost no dissection
of the text in evidence.
Over the past twenty
years or so much – perhaps too much
– has been made by biographers and academic
researchers of Schwarzkopf’s allegiance
with the Nazi Party between 1935 and
1945. The facts are these: under the
Nazi regime all students attended daily
ideological lectures; in 1935 Schwarzkopf
joined the student association of the
National Socialist Party; on 26 January
1940 she applied for full Party membership;
was accepted on 1 March, and assigned
membership number 7548960. In the years
since her retirement such matters have
diverted attention away from her artistic
achievements. But Schwarzkopf, like
Herbert von Karajan, only made things
worse by evading the questions when
they were first asked. Three separate
Allied questionnaires from 1945 deny
Party membership or association. When
explanations were offered, she claimed
that she ‘thought nothing of it’, that
it was ‘like joining a union, in order
to have a job’ and, later she took to
quoting from Tosca: ‘Vissi d’arte’
– ‘I lived for art’.
The years 1940 to 1947 mark the establishment
of Schwarzkopf’s career on an international
level. The coloratura role of Zerbinetta
in Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos
attracted attention of Maria Ivogün
in 1940, where after Ivogün took
on Schwarzkopf as a private pupil. Their
work together focussed on the high soprano
repertory and lieder singing. Engagements
with the Vienna State Opera soon followed
and at the first post-war Salzburg Festival
in 1947, where she worked with the conductor
Wilhelm Furtwängler. The Vienna
State Opera toured to London in 1947
and Schwarzkopf performed at Covent
Garden in Don Giovanni and Fidelio.
The success of these performances led
to an invitation to join the Covent
Garden company. She sang with them for
the next five years, performing in English
a wide range of German repertory and
other roles including Violetta, Mimi,
Gilda, and Massenet’s Manon.
Her period in London
though was but a prelude to the 1950s,
60s, and 70s – throughout which she
was a dominant force. It is no coincidence
that these decades saw the forming and
deepening of musical relationships that
bore artistic results that it is not
easy to dismiss. Often her chosen musical
partners were forceful personalities,
like Schwarzkopf herself, and she must
have seen this in them: conductors Karajan,
Böhm and Szell and baritone Dietrich
Fischer-Dieskau certainly shared her
probing approach to music and text.
Wilhelm Furtwängler and Gerald
Moore might not have been such dominating
personalities but they did demand the
highest performance standards.
The other person it
is impossible to separate from Schwarzkopf’s
achievements is Walter Legge. Astute
in his musical judgements Legge brought
the talents of Schwarzkopf and her collaborators
before the public in a great sequence
of recordings for the EMI label that
traversed the change from mono to stereo
technology and captured her voice at
its finest. Favouring the process of
recording after a series of live performances,
Legge hoped to maintain the improvisatory
live feeling in the studio. One example
of this approach was the 1968 recording
of Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn,
with Fischer-Dieskau and Szell.
Public success though
often hid no so private recriminations
between Legge and Schwarzkopf even though
they married in 1953. Once during a
joint filmed interview Legge said, perhaps
slightly jokingly, "Without me
you’d be nothing, you know?" "Yes
dear, I know", came the meek reply,
but behind the eyes daggers were barely
concealed.
Whatever the situation
of her private life Schwarzkopf’s career
went from strength to strength, admired
in a diverse repertoire that included
over 70 roles from 50 operas. Mozart
(Fiordiligi, Donna Elvira and Countess
Almaviva), Richard Strauss (Ariadne
and the Capriccio Countess) and
Wagner (Eva and Elsa) formed the backbone
of her stage appearances. Some measure
of her willingness to move outside the
standard repertoire is provided by her
portrayal of Anne Trulove in the world
premiere of
Stravinsky’s The Rakes Progress
in Venice, 1951.
Thankfully many of
these and other roles were captured
either live and / or in the studio.
In comparing available live and studio
versions one becomes aware of her vocal
consistency. For opera-goers at the
time her beautiful looks and assuredness
in acting – she starred in several films
when younger – must have added to her
attraction. Operetta remained in her
repertoire, recording and later appearing
on stage in works such as Die Lustige
Witwe and Die Fledermaus.
Her recordings of both works are references,
even though the 1955 Fledermaus
with Karajan can sound too echt-Viennese
for modern taste. "To perform operetta
is much more difficult than opera. The
rules are not so strict […] you have
seemingly a lot of freedom, but you
have to know which freedom to take and
which not", she once said. There
can be little doubt she consciously
took the right choices for her and the
music.
Arguably though her
greatest contribution was in the area
of lieder. With Fischer-Dieskau, Schwarzkopf
succeeded in redefining how lieder was
sung. Their starting point, taken as
given, was the flexibility of the voice
and its ability to do whatever was asked
of it. Beauty of tone, evenness of production
across the range and at whatever required
dynamic were put to the service of the
music and text. One can imagine Fischer-Dieskau
and Schwarzkopf as surgeons over an
operating table as they dissected their
lied subject of the moment, laying its
entrails bare to with a depth of interpretation
that had rarely been heard before. Some
call theirs a ‘psychological’ approach
to singing because it so succeeded in
getting under the skin of the material
they interpreted. She became for many
a priestess of lieder in much the same
way Maria Callas was in the operatic
sphere. The two even recorded together
once – in Turandot – with Schwarzkopf
singing Liu alongside Callas’ hauty
ice maiden.
As ever, Walter Legge
influenced the choice of repertoire:
her Mozart song disc with Walter Gieseking
(1952) and Schubert partnered by Edwin
Fischer (1957) stand out, as do both
recordings of Strauss’ Vier letzte
lieder. But for me the really distinctive
contribution was made in songs of Hugo
Wolf. One only has to compare the live
recording of Wolf lieder accompanied
by Furtwängler (1953) with those
made by Erna Berger and Michael Raucheisen
around a decade earlier to hear the
difference in approach to two singers
had. Berger, for all her beauty, sounds
bland alongside Schwarzkopf’s unerring
knowledge of just what it is she wanted
from each song. But listen more closely
still and you’ll hear Furtwängler’s
piano playing as the true advocate in
their recital, with Schwarzkopf often
taking her cue from it for her interpretations.
By the 1960s and ‘70s
critical opposition to her style of
performance was becoming more widely
voiced in the press. It was not uncommon
for critics to use words such as ‘arch’,
even ‘vocal fetishism’ to describe what
they heard. She became for one critic
‘the Prussian perfectionist’, whose
extreme vocal nuances are an end in
themselves, getting in the way of the
music without adding much to the text.
Some of the Strauss lieder she recorded
in 1966 with Szell and the Berlin RSO
are compromised in this way. Another
critic wrote in 1981 that ‘intelligence
and willpower triumphed over what was
basically an unremarkable voice’. Ultimately
though such remarks can say more about
their authors than they do about their
subject. Gerald Moore presented his
impressions by calling her "the most
cruelly self-critical person imaginable,
[capable of] impaling her scores with
arrows, stabs, slashes and digs." His
farewell recital from 1967 shows again
how merciless she could be with Wolf
and Schumann, but equally how disarmingly
humorous she could be in Rossini’s ‘Cats
duet’ with Victoria de los Angeles.
A recital tour in 1977-78
marked her retirement, accompanied by
Geoffrey Parsons, who later partnered
her farewell recital, held in Zurich,
March 1979. The years since retirement
were occupied with largely with teaching.
Even in later years she was uncompromisingly
tough on her pupils, once dismissing
a singer from a London master class
for breathing that was ‘inappropriate
for Mozart’. Pupils were not the only
object of attack when teaching: colleagues
past and present also came under fire
for perceived deficiencies. The hard
reputation did little to stop sufficiently
talented singers viewing Schwarzkopf
and Fischer-Dieskau master classes as
the vocal finishing schools of choice
in recent years. Among those artists
to progress their careers this way is
Matthias Goerne, every inch the heir
of both singers.
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf,
a British citizen through her marriage
to Legge, was made a Dame of the British
Empire on New Year’s Day in 1992. Controversially,
when asked to appear on Desert Island
Discs she chose eight of her own recordings
to accompany her: "memories of
great moments in my creative life",
she called them. She leaves no immediate
survivors, though she is rumoured to
be a great aunt to US General ‘Stormin’’
Norman Schwarzkopf. Asked whether she
held regrets that she had no children
she replied, ‘I have 500 children, they
are the songs I sing’.
Evan Dickerson
Essential listening - a personal
selection:
Dvorak, Monteverdi, Carissimi, Humperdinck
and R Strauss: Soprano duets with
Irmgard Seefried; Gerald Moore (piano);
Philharmonia / Josef Krips; Vienna PO
/ Herbert von Karajan. Recorded 1955
(Moore) and 1947 (orchestral). Mono.
EMI
Lehár: Die Lustige Witwe
(Hanna Glawari): Philharmonia / Otto
Ackermann. Recorded 1953. Mono. EMI
Mahler: Des Knaben Wunderhorn:
with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau / LSO
/ Szell. Recorded 1968. EMI
Mozart: Don Giovanni: (Donna
Elvira): Vienna PO / Wilhelm Furtwängler.
Various live recordings 1953.
Mozart: Don Giovanni: (Donna
Elvira): Philharmonia / Giulini. Recorded
1961. EMI
Mozart: Cosí fan tutte:
(Fiordiligi): Philharmonia / Karl Böhm.
Recorded 1955. EMI
J Strauss II: Die Fledermaus
(Rosalinde): Philharmonia / Herbert
von Karajan.
Recorded 1955. EMI
R Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier
(Die Feldmarschallin): Philharmonia
/ Herbert von Karajan. Recorded 1956.
EMI
R Strauss: Capriccio (Grafin
Madeleine): Philharmonia / Sawallisch.
Recorded 1959. EMI
Wolf: 22 lieder with Wilhelm
Furtwängler (piano). Live recording
18 August 1953 EMI
Gerald Moore – a tribute: Recorded
1967. EMI
Further reading:
|
Alan Sanders, J.B. Steane,
and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf:
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf: A career
on record. Amadeus Press,
London; 1996.
Alan Jefferson: Elisabeth
Schwarzkopf. Gollancz, London;
1996.
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf:
On and Off the Record – A memoir
of Walter Legge. Scribner
Verlag
|
