Word: schwarzkopf
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...German lied is a highly perishable article--a gracious and intimate form of musical entertainment which, in the hands of singers less gifted than Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, rarely finds a congenial concert setting. On Wednesday night, Madame Schwarzkopf, assisted by her excellent pianist John Wustman, offered lieder of Schubert, Wolf, and Strauss to a large audience at the Harvard Square Theatre, and it is a measure of her artistry that every nuance of these songs, every dramatic point and humorous inflection, was as telling as it might have been in the living-room of someone's home...
...Madame Schwarzkopf, looking radiant and lovely in green silk, waited with queenly patience for the many latecomers who tramped in throughout the whole first section of the program, doing their best to mar the splendid repose of the opening song, Bach's Bist Du bei mir. Those who knew Madame Schwarzkopf's singing only from her recordings may have been a bit disappointed by the first two groups of songs, for her voice has not quite the purity and control of four or five years ago, and the acoustics of the HST seem bright and clear almost to a fault...
...small disappointments of the first part of the program seemed scarcely important, however, by the time Madame Schwarzkopf had finished singing Schubert's Seligkeit, one of the seven encores which she bestowed upon the audience with the charm of someone giving candy to children who have behaved well. Here her voice soared buoyantly; the pianissimi were fine-spun and beautifully controlled. This vocal gold was at the service of an extraordinary musical intelligence in the Hugo Wolf group which followed the intermission: each song, as Miss Schwarzkopf rendered it, became a drama in miniature. The alternately anguished and tender dialogue...
...Schwarzkopf's introduction to the Paris opera public came late, as have most of the debuts of her career. She took no singing lessons until she was 17; then mistakenly trained as a contralto, she lost her voice and had to begin over again. After her wartime success in Germany, she did not appear on the stage until the blanket denazifications of 1946. About the same time, she was signed to a recording contract by Record Impresario Walter Legge, whom she later married. Now she is virtually alone among big-time singers in trying to divide her time equally...
...Metropolitan asked Schwarzkopf to appear in a production of Engen Onegin, but she refused because it was to be in English ("You try to project the th sound over 14 violins"). Would she still be interested in the Met? Perhaps, but ''if it's not Marschallin, then addio. It's their loss, not mine...