Elisabeth Schwarkopf, requiescat in pace
Betty Blackhead, as opera queens used to call her, died the other day, at the age of ninety. I never heard her sing in person, but her recordings were, for quite a long time, sacred to me. They were sacred partly because hers were the only ones - most notably, of Der Rosenkavalier and The Four Last Songs (Vier Letzte Lieder), both by Richard Strauss (a composer whose brief complicities with the Nazi regime seemed to stem new recordings of all but his most popular tone poems when I was young). Inevitably, there came a time when I preferred to hear other voices sing this music, and I noticed that Schwarzkopf's voice wasn't always beautiful. But I always respected her very deeply, and I have a lot of her CDs.
Why I feel the need to recommend a must-have recording, I can't really say - except, of course, that the urge to give advice is always massaging my ego. Some would say that the recording that you must own is the Rosenkavalier recording - and then they'll argue about whether you ought to seek out the carefully restored monaural original, or whether it's all right to go with what was one of the first stereophonic opera sets to be offered. But I say, buy the album pictured here, which I've linked to Tower Records. Again, there will be argument. You can get an earlier recording of the Four Last Songs that a lot of listeners prefer. I see their point, but I prefer the warmth of the later recording's sound. Equally important as the late masterwork, however, is the suite of twelve Strauss songs with orchestral backup. Given Strauss's magical way with orchestration, I have a hard time preferring the original, piano-accompanied versions of these songs. My favorites of the ones offered here are "Die heiligen drei Könige" (my birthday is 6 January, which only makes this Epiphany song more special) and another baby song, "Wiegenlied." But everything is good, and I can't tell you how much I enjoyed listening to the album after hearing of Schwarzkopf's death.
It is true that nobody has ever sung the line that, for me, is the beating heart of Der Rosenkavalier with as much oomph as Elisabeth Schwarzkopf: "Heut’ oder morgen oder den übernächsten Tag… " (Thanks to Édouard for typing it out!)
At the other end of the spectrum, high kitsch doesn't get any more delicious than it does on Schwarzkopf's operetta-aria album. The "Nun's Chorus," from Casanova, alone...! Oh, hell; lets hear it. (An operetta with an organ solo?)
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While you're listening to that, I've got more entertainment to offer. The foregoing was written two days ago, in a spate of prolificness. I decided to save the piece for a dry patch. Which was most frustrating when the Times screwed up royally, running very much the wrong photograph in Schwarzkopf's obituary. (Anthony Tommasini, author of the obit, is currently in festival mode, bouncing between Salzburg and Bayreuth. If he'd been in town, the flub would probably not have occurred - or so I like to think.
Like everyone, I first thought that it wasn't a good picture of the late singer - it didn't really look like her (for good reason!). But I didn't really focus in until later, when, mysteriously, looking at the picture seemed more interesting than reading the obituary, which predictably belabored Schwarzkopf for her Nazi affiliations, as indeed any mention of her in the Times simply must. The first clue that something was wrong with the shot was the hussar in the background, holding a mace in ceremonial fashion. This would be unlikely to be a detail in either of the two acts of Der Rosenkavalier in which the Marschallin actually appears. Then I noticed that the lady in the big dress was holding the rose in a rapturous manner. And then the memory of a thousand LP jackets kicked in (okay, twenty), and I recognized Anneliese Rothenberger, a Bavarian soubrette who is still with us. The photograph is of the "Presentation of the Rose," a wondrously magical moment musically, at the beginning of Act II. The figure on the right - Octavian (Sena Jurinac) - has just had his heart captured by Sophie, a girl right out of a convent. He is not thinking about Elisabeth Schwarkopf's character, even though he spent much of the preceding act in bed with her. Men are like that.
I popped off an email to the Times - not the sort of thing that I go in for, but this was really gross sloppiness. What I wanted desperately to do, however, was to be the first to tell my old roommate, who lives across the street from Lincoln Center just to make it easy to attend fifty performances a year (not that he does that anymore). Not knowing many other opera lovers, I had no one else with whom to share - hmm, that's not the word, is it? - this breathtaking example of the newspaper's stumbling. But my old roommate was in a meeting - all day long. I was practically wetting my pants when I finally got hold of him in the early evening. I woke him from a nap, and he did not sound particularly interested. How deflating! But he did call back, five minutes later, properly roused and rancid.
The Times published a correction notice in this morning's paper, and, on the obituary page, a photograph of Elisabeth Scharzkopf as the Marshallin - very definitely the right picture. I'd give anything to know how many emails the paper received from "helpful" readers such as myself.
