The Schwarzkopf Tapes An artist replies
Published by Classical Recordings Quarterly and The Elisabeth Schwarzkopf/Walter Legge Society. Paperback, 136 pages, ISBN 978-0-9567361-0-9. Price £9.95 (price including postage £11.00 to UK, £12.50 to Europe and £14.00 to Rest of World). Available from CRQ, 8 Locksmeade Road, Richmond, Surrey TW10 7YT; e: editor@crq.org.uk; tel: +44 (0)20 8940 1988. Payment by PayPal, cards, or Sterling cheques, payable to “Classical Recordings Quarterly”. In 1933, shortly after the Nazis came to power, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s father, a local school headmaster, was dismissed from his position by the new ruling authorities for having refused to allow a Nazi party meeting at his school. He was also banned from taking any new teaching post. In order to try and find other work he and his wife and daughter moved from their home in the east German town of Cottbus, and with the support of family and friends, they settled in Berlin. Prior to Friedrich Schwarzkopf’s dismissal, the probability was that the 17-year-old Elisabeth would have studied medicine after passing her Abitur, but now, as the daughter of a banned schoolteacher, she was not allowed to enter university and – fortunately for posterity – she commenced music studies at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. After completing her studies, Elisabeth attended an audition at the Berlin Deutsches Opernhaus in April 1938 and was made a probationary junior soprano in the company. When war broke out her father was sent to war zones, where his duties involved identifying those who had been killed in the conflict, notifying relatives and returning bodily remains to them. In the light of his own experience he warned his wife and daughter that they must obey the authorities in all respects and with as much conviction as they could muster, since they were all under surveillance. In 1940 Elisabeth was awarded a full contract with the Deutsches Opernhaus, a condition of which was that she had to join the Nazi party. Over the next few years she and her mother lived together in conditions which became worse as the war turned against Germany. In 1943 Elisabeth contracted tuberculosis and her career came to a temporary halt. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf left no personal account of her early years or her youthful experiences as a singer. The Schwarzkopf Tapes records her reactions to the 1996 biography by Alan Jeerson, whose work is demonstrated by the singer to be inaccurate and canted against her. In her often vigorous rebuttals of the book’s so-called facts, Schwarzkopf calls on fascinating memories of her childhood, her friends and colleagues in her early career that have never been revealed before. What could have been merely a negative response to a “hostile biography” emerges not only as a document of historic importance but also as a fascinating portrait of the singer’s personality as she conversed informally in her home environment.
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