A lament for London

Most of us will never be lucky enough to be invited to share our eight favourite recordings on Desert Island Discs, but almost all of us, of whatever musical persuasion, will at some time have toyed with our choices, either in our minds or discussing them with others. Often it can be just as hard deciding what to omit, as what to include.

Schubert’s Great C Major Symphony and Bach’s St.Matthew Passion would be my only non-negotiable entries, but after that, I’m just as likely to need Aretha Franklin or Annie Lennox on a desert island as Mozart, Chopin and countless others. Deciding what to leave out becomes a difficult exercise.

Unless, or maybe especially if,  your name happens to be Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, one of the very finest lyric sopranos of the last century. In July 1958, she was welcomed on to the programme by its creator, Roy Plumley, after the deliciously formal introduction of  “How do you do, ladies and gentlemen?” She then went on to select her eight favourites – of which only one did not feature her own voice. In later years, she would protest that the format had not been explained to her properly, and that she had understood the brief was to select from her own recordings the ones which had come to mean the most to her.

Methinks, however, the lady doth protest too much. First, she was gracious enough to include one other piece (not a singer, of course); and secondly, you only need a couple of minutes of listening to be clear that she is attempting to justify her approach from the start.

Which some might say was not entirely inconsistent with her personality. When writing about Schwarzkopf, an artist no longer with us, I find myself torn between not speaking ill of the dead, and knowing that the deceased cannot be libelled. But only briefly: by most accounts, she was a fairly ghastly woman, an unrepentant member of the Nazi Party, and something of a bully in masterclasses. She was, however, blessed with a lovely face and the most exquisite singing voice, which was enough to melt the heart of my late father when he picked up her telephone call at work some twenty five years ago.

And so there are times we just have to suck up our prejudices in order to enjoy the output, even if I’ve always found it easier to appreciate a performer in any artistic field if he or she seems, well…likeable. Shallow, maybe, but true.

Anyway, as Ronnie Corbett might have said in this context, I digress, so back to the music. Twentieth century opera can spook a lot of people, not without reason, but there are some notable exceptions who stood up for melody against a background of fashionable atonality. One such champion was the Austrian-born and US naturalized Erich Korngold (1897-1957), who was declared a genius by Mahler before he was 10; and so gifted a pianist that when his mother was asked how long he’d been playing the piano, she’s reported to have replied “Erich has always played the piano.”

Against such head-inflating odds, Korngold turned out to be a thoroughly engaging, likeable man, in much demand as a composer of countless film scores, earning him Oscars and further nominations, as well as other chamber music and a popular violinconcerto. Compilers of indices are not over-tarried when it comes to composers beginning with the letter K, but I hope you will spare yourself a few minutes to indulge in this real gem.

Marietta’s Lied, from his opera Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City), composed 1916-20,  pays more than a nod to the greatest of all writers for soprano, Richard Strauss. It is about the dream of a widower who falls in love with a dancer, Marietta, who is the double of his late wife, the two of them becoming rivals in the dreamer’s eye. It is an aria with a gorgeous, almost aching tune, a hymn to times past and the frailty of human life.

This recording did not catch Schwarzkopf’s selector’s eye. With its horribly ironic title and underlying message, it now forms a fitting lament to the tragedy in London. Though sorrow becomes dark, come to me, my true love…Death will not separate us. If you must leave me one day, believe, there is an afterlife.