Walter Legge & Elisabeth Schwarzkopf

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf

The distinguished soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was born on 9 December 1915 in Jarotschin, which used to be a part of Prussia but has been annexed by Poland several times over the years and is now well and truly in Central Poland. But don’t call Madame Schwarzkopf ‘Polish’ or say she was born in Poland or she will come down from wherever she now is and give you a slap.

I have a few bits and pieces to say about Schwarzkopf but nothing as substantial as I had to say about her husband Walter Legge. In fact, a great deal about ES is already in the public domain and I have just been looking at Norman Lebrecht who reminded us when she died about the Nazi associations in her youth when she was establishing herself as a soprano in Nazi Germany. She claims she had no alternative as a young girl with no power or influence but to sing for the Nazis and join the party in 1933 if she wanted to get along in her career. Alan Jefferson wrote a biography of Schwarzkopf on the basis of the evidence he had accumulated about ES’s Nazi connections although, on legal advice, he decided not to publish all of what he had found and this must remain hidden during his and her lifetimes but he did publish his book, which upset ES greatly. She sat down with Alan Sanders and went through the book word by word and set down a 133-page private rebuttal of practically everything Jefferson in the book although she never challenged the book in court. Alan told me that she was almost distraught as she went through what Jefferson had written, being offended by sentence after sentence.

Walter Legge had first encountered Schwarzkopf when he went to Berlin for HMV to supervise the recording of Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte in 1937 conducted by Beecham and Schwarzkopf was a very junior member of the chorus. They met properly when Legge went to Vienna immediately after the Second World War looking for artists to sign to record for EMI and his main prize was Herbert von Karajan, who was unable to conduct in public until he was de-Nazified but because Legge was in Vienna as an employee of EMI’s Swiss company called Turicaphon he was able to circumvent the political hurdles posed by Vienna being a city divided between the British, the Americans and the Russians. The story of how Schwarzkopf auditioned for Legge to win a recording contract is told in both ‘Elisabeth Schwarzkopf: A career on Record’ and ‘On and Off the Record’.

It amazes me how and why Schwarzkopf held Legge in such high esteem, not just for his understanding of music but at a personal level. There is a video interview of the two of them together where this normally strong and self-possessed woman is seen being humiliated by Legge at his most blustery as he corrects her on minor matters and she reacts like a chastened schoolgirl but this is apparently how they usually behaved when together.

I will start with an anecdote by one of the Abbey Road engineers who worked with them a number of times in the stereo era. I will call him BG. Unfortunately I cannot remember the precise details but I will elaborate it as best I can. It begins when Legge and Schwarzkopf start a session to record some German Lieder with either Gerald Moore or Geoffrey Parsons. They begin with Schwarzkopf singing straight through the song once. BG tells me it sounds wonderful: ES is in fresh voice and brings the song beautifully to life. “Ah” says Walter. “We have a lot of work to do on this song, Elisabeth!” So off they go. Every single word is examined for its musical and dramatic purpose. Walter tells ES literally how to sing each note and she dutifully writes down dozens of detailed instructions on her copy of the music. Eventually they get to the end and the whole page is covered in hand-written instructions. Then Walter says something like: “Now don’t forget that this is a song about unrequited love” (or whatever he said) and as there is now no room left anywhere on the body of the page she turns the music over on its side on the music stand and writes: “Unrequited love” down the side margin. “So sing it now, Elisabeth” orders Legge, and Madame then goes through it with all the accents and hairpins and changes of tone and interpretative details that she has been given. BG says that compared with the first run through it sounds arch and contrived and has lost all its initial freshness. “Yes” says Legge. “That’s much better. Now let’s go for a take.”

So a few more stories on no particular order. As I have already said about Legge, he worked in the mono control room up to the end of the 1950s even though recordings from about 1956 in London were being made simultaneously in mono and stereo and the 1956 Rosenkavalier gave particular problems for the stereo engineer who was trying to edit a stereo version from the stereo tapes as best he could. ES always resented the fact it was the stereo version that remained on the LP catalogue long after the mono one had been deleted and it was of course the stereo version that was digitally remastered for release on Compact Disc. For one of Schwarzkopf’s milestone birthdays, the then head of EMI Classics decided as a special treat for her he would arrange for the original mono tapes of Rosenkavalier to be remastered and released on CD. Always taking everything very seriously, Madame booked herself into the remastering suite at Abbey Road with one of the best classical remastering engineers and brought along one of the old German engineers who had been present at some of her recording sessions in Germany and was therefore familiar with what Walter Legge wanted to achieve in his recordings of Schwarzkopf’s voice. She was nothing if not thorough and she and Herr Matthes and the Abbey Road engineer spent a great deal of time doing the remastering in fine style, with the clock ticking away as she worked meticulously through every note and every bar of the recorded music until she declared herself satisfied. The mono remastered set was then released on CD, after which she announced that she was now ready to do the same remastering job on the rest of her stereo recordings for which Walter had originally approved the mono masters. There was no way that the remastered mono Rosenkavalier was ever going to recoup the cost of the studio work, let alone a pile of mono Hugo Wolf recitals to be remastered! She was not best pleased to have her request refused but there was nothing she could do and my boss’s good natured gesture on the Rosenkavalier rather rebounded on him and ended up with the great lady quite disgruntled.

And she was also disgruntled when she told the same EMI Classics executive that she had decided she was unhappy with a number of her published recordings and would therefore like the company to delete them and destroy the masters! Those of you who have seen ‘Elisabeth Schwarzkopf: A Career on Record’ will know what a harsh judge she is of her own singing and it seems she got more and more critical of her own work as she got older and started giving master-classes. Top of her list to be destroyed was the Second Act of Les Contes d’Hoffmann in which she sings Giulietta. There had always been a rather fanciful idea during the 1950s that EMI should record this opera with its three great divas: Schwarzkopf, Callas and De los Angeles. Quite honestly I think this was a misplaced idea at the best of times and by the time it did get made in 1964, Callas was off the scene, De los Angeles was in a poor vocal state and Schwarzkopf was very unhappy. The recording was made in Paris by a team from EMI France and Schwarzkopf’s sessions were among the very few EMI ones of her entire career not produced by Legge (the Klemperer Zauberflöte where she sings First Lady being another). In ‘A Career on Record’ she says she did her best with Giulietta but she was not a genuine French singer and it wasn’t her piece at all, nor was her voice sufficient for it. So here she was at the end of her career making a rather exaggerated claim that this and a number of her other published recordings should now be unapproved and therefore deleted and the masters destroyed. Not surprisingly, my boss explained to her that an approved master could not be unapproved and, apart from the Hoffmann, all the other things she was now dissatisfied with had been approved by Legge. Again there was nothing she could do but again she was a disappointed diva.

Talking about her strict views on her own singing, I know a little about how Testament managed to get her to approve a number of her previously unpublished EMI recordings and, with the agreement of EMI, eventually released four CDs of arias, songs and Bach Cantatas. This required a vast amount of dedicated work on both sides involving quite a number visits to her home in Switzerland with copies of the various takes including where possible the final versions that Legge had edited. Schwarzkopf listened to everything with meticulous care and then explained what she thought was wrong and what needed to be done to rectify the faults. This was not always possible, but in some cases Testament’s skilled engineer was able to make changes either by editing from other takes or by changing the equalisation or other technical adjustments until the diva was willing to approve the new masters. As far as I know, this is the only time with EMI recordings by any artist that such an extensive exercise has been successfully carried out. The LP ‘Callas by Request’ was produced by Callas listening to unpublished tapes at Abbey Road but with only a relatively small amount of further editing and technical intervention.

I met Schwarzkopf briefly on only one occasion. This was in the EMI offices in September 1981 when EMI Classics had released on LP a set of recordings of Hugo Wolf songs that Legge had produced under the auspices of the Hugo Wolf Society back in the 1930s. These Society Editions were a device instituted during the great depression whereby customers were asked to pay in advance to guarantee that a particular classical recording would be made and it is believed that they contributed to the survival of EMI’s classical business in that era. It is claimed that the idea was dreamed up by Legge but there is evidence that it had already been suggested in The Gramophone magazine but it was Legge who proposed it to the management of EMI with great success. The very first Society Edition was Volume 1 of the Hugo Wolf Society in 1931 being an album of six 12” 78s of Wolf Songs sung by Elena Gerhardt, and the customers had to buy 500 copies of the album in advance. The Wolf Society went on to six volumes of six discs with many famous singers and over the next decade (up to the start of the war) Society Editions covered many categories including the complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas by Schnabel, the first complete Mozart operas from Glyndebourne, Albert Schweizer playing Bach organ music, an extensive collection of the music of Sibelius largely conducted by Beecham, and much else.

It was just a small gathering of EMI staff to make a presentation to Schwarzkopf linked with the Hugo Wolf reissue and for some reason that I can’t recall Shirley, Lady Beecham, was there as well so maybe there was also a box of LPs of the Sibelius Society. I will change my avatar for a while to a not very flattering picture of Elisabeth and Shirley with yours truly peeping in at the right hand side. It's the only photo of that occasion which I managed to get into.

My last contact with Schwarzkopf was on the occasion of my early retirement from EMI in 1991 when my boss collected greetings from EMI colleagues around the world and a few other characters as well, including Jackie Callas (the sister of Maria) and Schwarzkopf, for whom I had just found a copy of a deleted CD set of her recordings that she wanted. I was also the person who had been signing the covering letters on her royalty statements. She sent me a charming letter typed by her secretary as follows:

“I hear you are leaving and I would like to say just a few words of thanks for your loyal service to an artist long departed from the lime-light and making it possible for me from the royalties still arriving every half year (so far!) to help young singers without asking for a fee from them.

I hope your life will still be filled with music because I personally think life without it is not worth it, especially in our days . . . .

Warmest good wishes,

Yours,

Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Legge-Schwarzkopf
Kammersängerin

(signed in her own large round hand)
(Dame)! Elisabeth Legge Schwarzkopf”

So despite what Alan Jefferson and Lotte Klemperer and Norman Lebrecht and the others all said, she wasn’t such a bad egg after all!

Now can we please have some lists of favourite Schwarzkopf recordings, which will all be Legge recordings as well!