SCHWARZKOPF

posted by James Reel

    Soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf died Thursday; news services assiduously tell us that “no cause of death was reported,” but she was 90, for crying out loud. What’s more important than the cause of death was the career, which was thoroughly documented via recordings, which you should hear without delay, particularly her performances of Strauss and Mahler.
    Not everyone appreciates her art; here’s Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times setting out the matter even-handedly:

    For a singer of such unquestionable stature, Miss Schwarzkopf’s work was controversial. In her prime, she possessed a radiant lyric soprano voice, impressive technical agility and exceptional understanding of style. From the 1950’s until the 1970’s, she was for many listeners the high priestess of the lieder recital, a sublime artist who brought textual nuance, interpretive subtlety and elegant musicianship to her work.
    But others found her interpretations calculated, mannered and arch (the “Prussian perfectionist,” one critic called her), and complained that in trying to add textual vitality, Miss Schwarzkopf resorted to crooning and half-spoken dramatic effects.

    Such arguments are fair enough, but Terry Teachout dislikes her work for the wrong reasons:

As for her private life, suffice it for now to say that she was a Nazi, that she lied about it for as long as she could get away with it, and that she admitted her youthful affiliation with the Nazi Party grudgingly, evasively, and only when confronted with incontrovertible documentary evidence. … Such things may not matter to you, but they do to me, all the more so in light of the fact that Schwarzkopf was so gifted and admired an artist.

    This from a man who in the same post praises recordings by Herbert von Karajan, who joined the Nazi part twice, and, like Schwarzkopf, chronically lied about it. Evaluating an artist on the basis of his or her political activities is foolish. Consider the case of Dmitri Shostakovich, who inserted passages of utter banality into even his finest works. He was roundly criticized for this in the West back when he was thought to be a Soviet lackey. But once somebody floated the theory that Shostakovich’s banality was actually satirical, intended to mock Stalin and his cronies, Westerners began hailing the claptrap passages as daring acts of secret dissidence. The music itself never changed; only its reception did, and that tells us more about the audience and critics than about the composer.
    This is aesthetic hypocrisy. Either the music is good or it isn’t, whether the composer or performer was a good person or not, and plenty of people realize that. Isn’t it time for somebody to form a club called Jews for Wagner? There’s a remarkably large potential membership.