Archives for August 4, 2006

I wonder how kindly Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who died yesterday at the age of ninety, will be treated by posterity. In her lifetime she was widely–if by no means universally–regarded as one of the greatest sopranos of her generation. Yet even at the height of Schwarzkopf’s career, there were plenty of critical naysayers who found her singing fussy and mannered to the point of archness, and since her retirement in 1975, it’s my impression that their point of view, which I share, has come to prevail.

Schwarzkopf was also a great beauty, which doubtless contributed to the effect she had on live audiences. Alas, I never saw her on stage or in recital, only on film, so I can’t say whether she made a stronger impression in person. I’ve heard most of her major recordings, though, and I find that I rarely return to any of them save to listen to her colleagues. For my money, Herbert von Karajan’s first recordings of Falstaff and Der Rosenkavalier are the best things she ever did in the studio, and her singing is by no means the most memorable aspect of those deservedly admired performances.

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. Sooner or later a frank, fully informed biography of Schwarzkopf will be written, and my guess is that it will prove devastating to her reputation. (Alan Jefferson’s 1996 book didn’t fill the bill, but it was a start.)

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. As I wrote in Commentary a few years ago apropos of those French artists who collaborated with the Nazis:

One thinks, for instance, of Colette, who blithely published in anti-Semitic magazines during the German occupation, or of the great pianist Alfred Cortot, who went so far as to serve as Vichy’s High Commissioner of Fine Arts and to perform in Nazi Germany….Indeed, the most troubling thing about Colette, Cortot and their fellow collaborationists is that they were not second-tier figures but creative and recreative geniuses whose work remains to this day representative of the quintessence of French art.

On the other hand, none of that stops me from reading Colette’s novels or listening to Cortot’s recordings. We are all flawed creatures, and one of the impenetrable mysteries of beautiful art is that it can be made by ugly souls. So feel free to mourn the death of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and to speak admiringly of her artistry–but when you do so, remember that there was more to her than the music she made.

As Clement Greenberg told an interviewer in 1969:

There are, of course, more important things than art: life itself, what actually happens to you. This may sound silly, but I have to say it, given what I’ve heard art-silly people say all my life: I say that if you have to choose between life and happiness or art, remember always to choose life and happiness. Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art.

UPDATE: Anthony Tommasini’s New York Times obituary, which is both lengthy and candid, is here.

For a sympathetic but equally candid appreciation by Tim Page of the Washington Post, go here.

Here’s my first official report from last weekend’s voyage to the outskirts of hell, a review of Shakespeare & Company published in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. As you can see, I didn’t let my manifold travails interfere with the pleasure I took in what I saw on stage:

Western Massachusetts has long been a center of classy summer theater. In the past two seasons I’ve seen Barrington Stage Company and the Berkshire and Williamstown Theatre Festivals, and last week I made it to Shakespeare & Company, where I saw back-to-back performances of “Hamlet” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” two Shakespeare plays that have about as much in common as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Nor were the productions alike save for their excellence–a sign of the adventurousness of the 29-year-old Lenox-based company, which more than lived up to its reputation.

I admit to having had my doubts about Eleanor Holdridge’s staging of “Hamlet.” To begin with, Jason Asprey, who is playing the title role in Shakespeare & Company’s first-ever production of that most familiar and formidable of tragedies, just happens to be the son of Tina Packer, the company’s founder and artistic director, who in turn is playing Queen Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother. As if that weren’t suspicious enough, Ms. Packer’s husband, Dennis Krausnick, is playing Polonius. Having digested all this information, I opened my program and found a note explaining that the production “centers the play in the electrical synapse impulses of Hamlet’s dying brain.” This is a family newspaper, so I won’t tell you what I muttered to myself as I read those words, but it wasn’t optimistic.

All at once the theater went dark, followed by an explosion of chilly fluorescent light and a mega-decibel electric-chair zzzzap! Young Hamlet started reciting “To be or not to be.” Then the rest of the cast appeared, bedecked in stylized modern dress with mod touches

In my next “Sightings” column, to be published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I take note of two developments in Atlanta:

– The Atlanta Ballet has fired its orchestra and will henceforth dance to recorded music.

– The Atlanta Opera is selling its midtown headquarters and moving to a new suburban arts center, in which it will give all of its performances.

Both companies are in financial trouble–but whose fix is smarter? For the answer, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal, where you’ll find my column in the “Pursuits” section.

“I have never thought that painting a picture has anything to do with self-expression. It is a communication about the world to someone else. After the world is convinced about this communication, it changes. The world was never the same after Picasso or Mir