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Very sad news, richard53dog. A great artist has left us. At least she lived a long, full life.

I'm sure others will comment, and also post links as the obituaries and commentaries come in, but I would like to remind everyone that ideally when we post follow up links, we try to include comments or otherwise ensure that the thread doesn't become a list of links. Thank you very much!

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Seeing Schwarzkopf's Marschelin in the Rosenkavalier film in the early as a youth was one of my earliest experiences of actually falling in love with an opera, a performance, and the performer herself. It happened while she sang "Ja Ja" in Act I. It sounded rather like "Zza Zza," and was heartbreaking.

She did a run of Rosenkavalier peformances at the Met shortly after that, and I travelled down from Boston to catch one of them.

But it's the film I think of when I hear Strauss's score or attend other performances of Rosenkavalier.

There is a wonderful interview with her in the July 2006 Opera News. The interviewer, Charles Scribner III, visited her at her home in the Vorarlberg, Austria, shortly after her 90th birthday. (You have to be an Opera News subscriber to get access to the internet archives, but it should be easily available in better libraries.)

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The New York Times obituary, by Anthony Tommasini, which delves into the disagreements about Schwarzkopf’s voice and approach, and the Nazi thing. He also discusses her husband, the late Walter Legge, who had a profound effect on her career. He did better by Schwarzkopf than Callas, IMO:

Opinion is divided about the effect of Mr. Legge on Miss Schwarzkopf as an artist. Though he avowed his love for her, he tended to treat his wife as a musical and intellectual inferior and was capable of berating her in public when she failed to meet his approval. But he introduced her to a wealth of repertory, especially the songs of Hugo Wolf, and, as artistic director of EMI Records, he supervised every recording she made, coaching her in detail, and assuring that the engineers captured her voice at its best. As a record producer he was at once enlightened and intrusive, and performed much the same role in the studio for Maria Callas, von Karajan, and other major artists.
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No ballerina records well, alas; at least we have the records of Schwarzkopf, which will last as long as people love music. She is the greatest singer I've ever encountered.

I had never heard such intelligence in singing before in my life as I did in her performance -- especially in her passionate, shimmering, profound version of Strauss's "4 Last Songs," which I encountered first in my twenties and listened to nearly every day for a year. I later discovered that her 4 last songs had this place in the lives of many closeted homosexuals, such as I was then, for whom it seemed that finally we'd been understood. She cared so much about the words she sang, you could hear the poetry through the music, the actual value of each word, and she had mastery of emotional coloring like John Gielgud's, it was as if she were just as much talking as singing. Especially the emotions on the scale from weariness to exhilaration -- you could actually hear the smile in the voice on "Sommer laechelt" ("the summer smiles"), and feel her eyes closing as she sang "die mud-gewordnen Augen zu," especially pushing up the scale (like pushing a stalled car uphill) on the repeated phrase "langsam die Augen," then reaching the peak exhausted and coming back down the other side on hte word "zu."

Oh what a great poetic artist. There was really no-one like her -- not just a voice or a technique. Her Donna Elvira sounded like she was really out of her mind. (Lotte Lehmann could do that too, but who else?). Mozart and Strauss and Bach, and then the lieder -- not a huge repertoire, if you think of songs as small things -- but it's huge is every song is a whole world in itself, and that's what she did with them. She sang everything as if it were worthy of your complete attention -- hers and yours, so the effect is sometimes as if she's holding up a jewel for you to look into, and making sure that you see every angle. It IS a seductive, calculated way of performing -- you can tell she's manipulating your emotions -- but for me, the test was whether or not there was virtue in the interpretation, and the answer always seemed to be that she was putting herself at the service of hte art, and that the interpretation was incredibly valuable.

She overlapped in her repertoire with both Lotte Lehmann and Elisabeth Schumann, both of whom outsang her on certain key songs -- Lehmann was truly heroic (she sang a whole Dichterliebe, which is a man's cycle, as if it didn't matter what sex she happened to belong to, and when she threw herself at the feet of the beloved, it was total; Schwarzkopf put herself up against THAT), and Schumann was by several magnitudes more lovable. Schwarzkopf DID essay some of Ms. Schumann's great songs -- "Wie glaenzt der helle Mond so kalt und fern", by Hugo Wolf, which contains more drama within 2 minutes than all of Pelleas and Melisande in 2 hours, and made a smaller but within its limits still perfect world, with respect for those emotional effects Schumann commanded which she herself could not reach.

It's not fashionable right now to give Schwarzkopf her due as an artist -- judged by the product, it WAS an art-for-art's-sake career, and no working critic with a job and a mortgage can afford to countenance that. Tomassini's obit is particularly stingy. Funny, the ballerinas like Kolpakova who were clearly ACTIVE Soviet party bullies get a much freer ride than a young singer who may have joined the Nazi party because it was the only way ahead. She lied about her connections; but look, her party connections only interest us because of the staggering quality of the performances she gave in opera and lieder. If it turns out that she was a major spy, and sold her nearest and dearest into captivity, well maybe so, then I'll change my mind. But it STILL won't vitiate the performances. There IS dark material in Schwarzkopf's psyche, tremendous will and ambition and competitiveness, no doubt -- but any classical art requires those traits (look at Fonteyn). And if it turns out that she belongs in hell, well, still, I won't feel guilty for praying that they offer her a little brandy from time to time. There are times when listening to her sing made me feel less like killing myself, and I owe her a lot.

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Even in recording you can hear why her voice generated such powerful responses -- it feels like the ultimate example of that kind of singing -- a kind of Platonic example.

I'd happened to go to a dress rehearsal of the Seattle Opera the night before the news broke of her death -- Rosenkavalier, with Carol Vaness doing a wonderful job. When I head of Schwarzkopf's death, I was so glad I'd been listeneing to singing the night before.

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She sang everything as if it were worthy of your complete attention -- hers and yours, so the effect is sometimes as if she's holding up a jewel for you to look into, and making sure that you see every angle.

Paul, thank you for your eloquent words about Schwarzkopf. For me, too, she was one of the greatest of singers. She was one of those very rare artists who could make craftsmanship itself a thing of transcendental beauty. I hope we will finally get a DVD release of her famous Rosenkavalier film. In the meantime, I'm making do with a DVD called "Elisabeth Schwarzkopf - A Self-Portrait". It begins badly, with Schwarzkopf getting defensive right off the bat, saying "My family never had any interest in politics," and in general it's a bit skimpy on the details of her life. But the reason to watch it is for the priceless performance clips, which are just such a joy. I also highly recommend, if you can find it, a very wonderful disc of Wolf lieder she made with Furtwängler at the piano. And her famous album of operetta favorites is indispensable. (The way she takes advantage of German sibilance! And such style! Has anybody else ever made "Meine Lippen, sie küssen so heiß" so irresistably seductive?) For me, though, she was at her very greatest as a Mozart singer--that long, perfectly focused line, the exquisite phrasing, the attention to words--and those are the recordings I'm listening to today.

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Funny, the ballerinas like Kolpakova who were clearly ACTIVE Soviet party bullies get a much freer ride than a young singer who may have joined the Nazi party because it was the only way ahead. She lied about her connections; but look, her party connections only interest us because of the staggering quality of the performances she gave in opera and lieder.

Martin Heidegger and Leni Reifenstahl were also extremely gifted people who were well-connected Nazis. It's important to know about in all these cases, but not always to be more obsessive about than 'active Soviet party bullies', as you aptly term them. Arletty had a Nazi lover and was imprisoned after 'Children of Paradise,' and the list goes on. It's impossible not to admire Marlene Dietrich a little more than Leni Riefenstahl, even if she didn't get an in-depth analysis and dissection by Susan Sontag.

If it turns out that she was a major spy, and sold her nearest and dearest into captivity, well maybe so, maybe then I'll change my mind. But it STILL won't vitiate the performances. There IS dark material in Schwarzkopf's psyche, tremendous will and ambition and competitiveness, no doubt -- but any classical art requires those traits (look at Fonteyn).

Fonteyn had those qualities of will, etc., but I don't think you mean the 'dark qualities' in the same sense. The philosopher Althusser killed his wife Helene in one of his bouts of depression; that has not made his analytical work less important even though it was a horrible crime.

And if it turns out that she belongs in hell, well, still, I won't feel guilty for praying that they offer her a little brandy from time to time. There are times when listening to her sing made me feel less like killing myself, and I owe her a lot.

Yes, and I do agree that her Marschallin is peerless in that film, even though 'Der Rosenkavalier' is my least favourite of all famous operas. However, I don't otherwise know her work as well as several of you do.

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Funny, the ballerinas like Kolpakova who were clearly ACTIVE Soviet party bullies get a much freer ride than a young singer who may have joined the Nazi party because it was the only way ahead. She lied about her connections; but look, her party connections only interest us because of the staggering quality of the performances she gave in opera and lieder. If it turns out that she was a major spy, and sold her nearest and dearest into captivity, well maybe so, then I'll change my mind. But it STILL won't vitiate the performances. There IS dark material in Schwarzkopf's psyche, tremendous will and ambition and competitiveness, no doubt -- but any classical art requires those traits (look at Fonteyn). And if it turns out that she belongs in hell, well, still, I won't feel guilty for praying that they offer her a little brandy from time to time. There are times when listening to her sing made me feel less like killing myself, and I owe her a lot.

I have never lived under a totalitarian regime and so have no idea how I would act if I did so. Dame Elizabeth Schwarzkopf aunt to General Norman Schwarzkopf had this to say about her nazi past, "After her retirement, she admitted she had applied to join the Nazi Party in 1939 - something she said was "akin to joining a union".

"I applied for membership when I was 24, in my second year at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin," she said. "I was told that I must do so if I wanted to continue my career. The membership card never reached me." This defence, however, did not stop the New York Times dubbing her the "Nazi Diva".

When immediately after the UK's 1939-45 war with Germany, America recruited Nazi German scientists to develop a rocket programme, nobody in the USA as far as I know criticised this. My family home in London was destroyed by a rocket those scientists created yet I hold no bitterness towards Germans today. The experience that people have in totalitarian states should not be compared to the life we in the UK or USA have experienced. Not everyone has it in them to become a martyr.

In Russia it became impossible for some dancers to travel abroad if they were not card carrying communists who toed the line. Nureyev would like other dancers, never been allowed to travel abroad again if he had not defected. Most of the famous dancers of the Kirov and Bolshoi were card carriers and as such once they attained certain status in the company were required to act in a way that I personally feel is reprehensible. My absolutely favourite classicist Irina Kolpakova's reputed denunciation of Valery Panov is in the telling quite apalling if true. I have heard other stories of another famous Russian ballerina's telling the mother of a dancer to beat her to bring her to her senses. Apalling if true. Unless you have walked in the shoes of some one else you may comment but it is impossible to judge using the values we have in a free society.

How on earth Dame Margot Fonteyn got into this discussion I do not know?

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[. Dame Elizabeth Schwarzkopf aunt to General Norman Schwarzkopf had this to say about her nazi past, "After her retirement, she admitted she had applied to join the Nazi Party in 1939 - something she said was "akin to joining a union".

"I applied for membership when I was 24, in my second year at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin," she said. "I was told that I must do so if I wanted to continue my career. The membership card never reached me." This defence, however, did not stop the New York Times dubbing her the "Nazi Diva".

I believe , but am not sure, that ES is not an aunt but rather a more distant relation of Norman Schwarzkopf, not that I see how it matters all that much about anything anyway .

What angers many people about ES is that, as you say, she admitted joining the Nazi Party AFTER retiring.

Earlier she always dodged the question. If it was so harmless, and like joining a "union", why did she hide it?

Why did Rudolph Bing refuse to engage her to sing at the Met until 1964? In his book 5000 Nights(Knights?) at the Opera He claimed she did "more than she needed to" to support the German war effort. He engaged other singers active in Germany during the war much earlier, some in the early 50s.

Well, certainly many other artists made political decisions based on career directions, so she wasn't alone.

Richard

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Leonid is right. It is really impossible to judge the actions of people who've lived in repressive regimes if you haven't lived in one yourself.

On the other hand, when I was growing up in the south in the 50s I saw my father (a white man) take some very firm stands in favor of hte civil rights movement, and I know the Klan hounded him and my mother, tried to kill him, terrorized her, and saw that destroy my mother's faith in my father's willingness to put her first, which led to the decay of their marriage and my father's nervous breakdown and bankruptcy, so I think I have some idea how these pressures work.

True, the seductive quality of Schwarzkopf's work has always made her seem dangerous. She's that kind of artist, like Dietrich. And the incredible depth of her interpretations suggest that she knows too much about pain -- after such knowledge, what forgiveness? And indeed, how can someone have lived through the Nazi era, thrived in the midst of it, without seing things that would leave you much less naive.

But I haven't heard anything that makes me think her worse than my own mother....

Are her lies/cover-ups more serious than Rock Hudson's marrying a woman he did not "love" in order to put a heterosexual cover on his career? Nobody on the inside got hurt much by that. (I don't mean that Hudson was an artist of Schwarzkopf's calibre. he wasn't bad in the Sirk movies, but.... Schwarzkopf in her repertoire was the greatest artist of her era.)

If you haven't heard her, here's what I'd recommend --

A) with orchestra:

Strauss's 4 last songs (any of the versions, collect them all

She was very great in Mozart operas, as the Countess in Figaro,

as Fiordiligi in "Cosi fan Tutte," (get the version conducted by Karl Bohm, unbelievable), as Donna Elvira in "Don Giovanni"

B) with piano:

the above-mentioned Wolf album, accompanied by Furtwangler on the piano; unparallelled. She makes those songs (which are really difficult to appreciate) intelligible, as Balanchine made the music of Agon intelligible.

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Paul, I will definitely seek out the Last Songs. I've heard this only in a mangled recording that accompanies performances of Ben Stevenson's ballet. I agree about ES's interpretation of the Countess. This shares many personal qualities with her Marschallin (especially the ability to accept and transcend disapointments in their relationships, and to gain wisdom without ever losing grace and the ability to love and to sacrifice).

Although I find these performances "seductive," I've never really thought about the possibility that seduction was precisely what was intended. It's an intriguing thought.

Thanks also for your memoir of your father and mother in the time of Jim Crow. We Americans find it easy to point fingers at those who had to find a way to carry on their with their lives during the dark days of Nazism and Facism in Europe. We are not so happy to remember that we had our own home-grown version of this tragic dilemma -- and of the poison that produced it -- in our own not-so-distant past.

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Are her lies/cover-ups more serious than Rock Hudson's marrying a woman he did not "love" in order to put a heterosexual cover on his career?

Yes.

For what my two cents are worth, I think leonid and richard53dog (and others who've weighed in similarly) are both right. We should be careful about making facile judgments, and very few of us are heroes or heroes-in-the-making -- but I also suspect that Bing had the lady's number.

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I see two distinctions being made: admitting to joining any political entity to survive as a performing artist vs. lying about it after the fact, and survival as an artist vs. using membership to obtain more acclaim, wealth, apartment, etc. I would say that there is a third flavor, which is usually associated with the mafia: take the goodies or we'll exile your family, but anyone who is associated with a party publicly doesn't have plausible deniability at having joined, regardless of the reason.

I think the issue in Schwarzkopf's case is her denial, rather than her participation.

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A full and free post-war disclosure might have won her understanding -- or she might have been out of work for good. Perhaps she didn’t care to take the risk. After all, Legge hired her and others like Karajan when no one else would. She may have believed her career was at stake.

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I'm not so much bothered by Schwarzkopf's membership, or even her denial, as her excuse when confronted with the facts. Long after her career was over. She said it was like "joining a union" (it wasn't), and then pulled out the "I lived for art" line. True, maybe, but so many years after the fact, and when her career was no longer at stake, it seems rather disengenuous.

I'm also bothered by the fact that she was hired to spy on her colleagues. That strikes me as a line I personally wouldn't cross, especially in a totalitarian regime. She might have truly endangered the lives of her friends and colleagues.

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I'm not so much bothered by Schwarzkopf's membership, or even her denial, as her excuse when confronted with the facts. Long after her career was over. She said it was like "joining a union" (it wasn't), and then pulled out the "I lived for art" line. True, maybe, but so many years after the fact, and when her career was no longer at stake, it seems rather disengenuous.

I'm also bothered by the fact that she was hired to spy on her colleagues. That strikes me as a line I personally wouldn't cross, especially in a totalitarian regime. She might have truly endangered the lives of her friends and colleagues.

Can't that also be said about Russian artists who joined the party?

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then pulled out the "I lived for art" line. True, maybe, but so many years after the fact, and when her career was no longer at stake, it seems rather disengenuous.

I agree, and not to mention tacky and using the Puccini version for it. I don't even know if she sang Tosca, but either way 'I lived for art' is never fully convincing, as it does not serve as an excuse (even if it 'worked' to deflect, etc.)

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I'm also bothered by the fact that she was hired to spy on her colleagues. That strikes me as a line I personally wouldn't cross, especially in a totalitarian regime. She might have truly endangered the lives of her friends and colleagues.

Can't that also be said about Russian artists who joined the party?

Well, I don't think I would make any judgements on Russian performers who joined the Communist Part. First it was in business many times the life span of the Nazi party and I do believe it was more entrenched and harder to avoid.

But, like canbelto, those who would spy on collegues I have a problem with. To me that's a bad line to cross.

Galina Vishnevskaya, the soprano, talks at great length about dodging requests to spy in her autobiography

Galina. It's almost comical. Then she got a high ranking protector (I think I'll leave that alone)

The irony is that Vishnevskaya was more than willing to rat out on her collegues that were willing spies.

Still it seems that neither she nor Rostropovitch were willing to carefully walk the party line.

Richard

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Can't that also be said about Russian artists who joined the party?

No I find this akin to Elia Kazan 'naming names' for the HUAC. There were plenty of Republicans in Hollywood, but not all of them crossed that line into actually naming names and thus ruining careers (and also, lives). In a totalitarian regime, Schwarzkopf could not have been as naive as to think that her 'informing' on a colleague would be totally innocuous.

Plus, she got her facts wrong. Joining the party was actually a priviledge, not an obligation, by the time ES applied. It might have furthered her career, but she made it seem like she would have been kicked out of Berlin Opera had she not joined, which is not true.

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The troublesome question for me is always, how much should I allow my knowledge of the person affect my response to his or her art? Actually, my response isn't really voluntary, it just happens from the gut. I have to admit, deeply as I have always loved her, I have a little bit of a problem separating Schwarzkopf the person from Schwarzkopf the musician, because in her singing I can hear that Teutonic scrupulousness, the coolness and self-containment, maybe a whiff of arrogance. Combine that with her physical beauty and the sexy allure of the voice, and she can seem positively dangerous, the Hitchcock blond of sopranos. On the other hand, I don't have any problems with Kazan's movies, Karajan's conducting, Prokofiev's music. Others do, and not only can I respect that, it can make me feel ashamed of myself.

I don't know what it's like to be gifted with the vision, talent, and drive it takes to be a great artist. When I try to imagine it, I think I can see how I might, more easily than I'd like to admit, make moral compromises to advance my career. Even without any kind of genius as an excuse I don't do very well. When my own country has been (in my opinion) seriously oppressive, immoral, inhumane, even murderous, what have I done? I've bellyached about it with like-minded friends, tried to keep up with the news, voted. Not much of an effort from me considering what the stakes are for other people. I don't know if that means I should be more judgmental about myself, less judgmental about others, or (probably) both at once, but the sad fact is I don't think I've changed much in all my years.

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because in her singing I can hear that Teutonic scrupulousness, the coolness and self-containment, maybe a whiff of arrogance.

I think that's true, especially of the Marschallin. The arrogance makes this even more fantastically supercilious than could have been otherwise. Life works like that though. That was the price she paid. I find this performance hypnotic more than moving, but I think it does work as result of the less admirable qualities you named, if the reality is looked at head on and without any flinching. The opera I find extremely superficial and sterilized because de-sexed: they never manage to get Octavian to seem male at all, so it's this ridiculous stretch you have to make for the sake of Strauss writing this kind of flashy music. In 'Arabella', the 'pants-role' is within the story itself, and there I haven't any difficulty with it, because the characters know it themselves, whereas 'Rosenkavalier' makes the audience do all the work of imagining that this is an affair between a man and a woman. I think it comes across as something vaguely 'latent Lesbian,' so, since the music is so gorgeous, I would much rather just listen to it and forget about the 'action,' such as it is (not much of it in my book.) Ms. Schwarzkopf pulls off this kind of sterilization beautifully.

I actually think Leni Riefenstahl was a more honest Nazi. She had made 'Triumph of the Will', of course, so she could hardly pretend not to know something about what Nazism comprised in its darkest areas, but even though she wouldn't talk all that much about it later, she did say that she never turned against it, and that is at least better than 'Vissi d'Arte..'

Liked your thoughtful comment though. I still like Ms. Schwarzkopf's work, and all sorts of other reprensible artists' work too (although not only those, I'm happy to say.)

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The troublesome question for me is always, how much should I allow my knowledge of the person affect my response to his or her art?

That's a very old question and there is definitely more than one answer to it. And you certainly don't need to feel ashamed of yourself -- that's your considered and thoughtful response, and it's a legitimate one.

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From everything I've read about Schwarzkopf, this is why I think she joined the party: ES was an only child of a schoolteacher and a "stagemom." I think she went to the Berlin Opera more than a bit spoiled and confident in her abilities to become an instant star. She was very young, and very good-looking. She was probably used to flattery and success. But once she got to the Berlin Opera, things did not go as planned. She didn't get along with the management, she didn't get along with her colleagues, she wasn't getting the right roles, they couldn't even figure out her fach. She also, I think, came down with tuberculosis. I think Schwarzkopf was an opportunist (nothing really wrong with that, per se), and saw that party membership, which required elaborate proof of 'Aryan' background, might finally get her career off the ground. She might have thought volunteering to 'watch' her colleagues would bring her closer to management and VIPs. She also wanted to get into a possible film-making career, and actually did make a few films, I believe. She probably saw this as a great networking opportunity. Is this honorable behavior? No. Was ES truly malicious? Hard to say.

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