Mozart Lieder and Concert Arias
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, soprano; Walter Gieseking, piano; Alfred Brendel, piano; London Symphony Orchestra/George Szell
EMI Classics CDZ 5 74803 2 [70:49]
The first thing to understand—and Christopher Howell’s original review gets this exactly right—is that these aren’t really lieder at all. Not yet. Mozart was writing in a form that hadn’t quite found itself, that wouldn’t discover its true voice until Schubert arrived and changed everything. Most of these songs are strophic trifles meant for the drawing room, the kind of thing a young lady of quality might sing after dinner to show her accomplishments without disturbing the gentlemen’s digestion.
But then—and here’s where things get interesting—you have Schwarzkopf and Gieseking.
The 1955 recordings catch Schwarzkopf at a fascinating moment. Her voice still has that slightly acidic brightness, what some people can’t get past, that soubrette quality that makes her sound like she’s teaching you German diction even when she’s singing Italian. And yet. Listen to what she does with “zeigen” in “Das Lied der Trennung“—she sings on the “n,” which every voice teacher in the world will tell you is impossible, inadvisable, the mark of an amateur. She does it anyway and it’s gorgeous. Same with “gesundes” in “Die Zufriedenheit.” The conventional wisdom says you sustain the vowel, use the consonant as a bridge. She ignores all that.
This is what made Schwarzkopf dangerous, what kept people arguing about her for decades. The things that should be wrong aren’t wrong when she does them. It’s maddening if you’re trying to teach singing; it’s thrilling if you’re just listening.
And then there’s Gieseking, who I’m convinced doesn’t use the sustaining pedal once in the entire recital. I know that sounds impossible—surely he must have touched it somewhere?—but listen to those accompaniments. They’re bone-dry, every note articulated with crystalline precision, and instead of sounding austere or academic, they’re revelatory. We’ve all become so accustomed to hearing piano accompaniments blurred with pedal, that warm wash of sound that smooths over everything, that hearing Mozart’s Alberti basses played as actual melodic lines is genuinely startling. Listen to “Abendempfindung,” where he seems to be improvising broken chords around her vocal line—except of course he’s not improvising at all, he’s simply letting Mozart’s part-writing speak with absolute clarity.
The strophic songs become miniature theme-and-variations under their hands. She subtly darkens her tone for the more emotionally charged verses; he responds by infinitesimally adjusting his touch, his voicing, his rhythmic inflection. It’s chamber music of the highest order, two artists who (according to André Tubeuf’s note) had never even met before these sessions—though there’s a photograph of them together at La Scala two years earlier, so perhaps we shouldn’t trust everything we read in liner notes.
The concert arias from 1968 are another matter entirely. By then Schwarzkopf’s voice had filled out, lost some of that silvery brightness, gained weight and warmth. “Vado, ma dove?” is quite luminous—the sheer tonal luxury of it is undeniable. But I keep thinking about George Szell, who could be the most electrifying maestro in the world and also, on his off days, the most leaden. This was not one of his good days.
The problem becomes obvious in “Ch’io mi scordi di te?,” which Schwarzkopf had recorded seven years earlier in Naples under Carlo Franci. That version has life, forward motion, dramatic urgency. This one with Szell sounds like everyone decided to have a nice lie-down. The opening recitative gets milked for every possible dramatic inflection until it loses all shape, all momentum. It’s not that anything is technically wrong—Szell was incapable of that—but the whole thing just sits there, inert and self-regarding. The London Symphony plays with their customary polish, Brendel contributes elegant if somewhat cautious pianism in the obbligato, and the whole enterprise feels like a missed opportunity.
“Nehmt meinen Dank” suffers similarly, though less severely. When Schwarzkopf sang this a decade earlier with Ugo Rapalo (hardly a household name, but thoroughly competent), it had a freshness, a spontaneity that’s entirely absent here. Szell was in one of his Uncle George moods—that’s what the musicians called it when he became overly careful, more concerned with beauty of sound than dramatic truth.
Still, even compromised Schwarzkopf is worth hearing. Her way with text remains extraordinary—every word etched in acid, every phrase shaped with fierce intelligence. And those songs with Gieseking… they’re classics, essential documents of a vanished interpretation style. We’ve lost something in our modern approach to this repertoire, with our careful pedaling and our even tone production and our respect for the composer’s intentions. These two artists show us what can happen when you know the rules well enough to break them productively.
EMI has, surprisingly, provided texts and translations—something that’s become increasingly rare in this era of cost-cutting. John Steane’s notes are characteristically perceptive, though the French annotations contain that amusing contradiction about when Schwarzkopf and Gieseking first met. The sound quality is superb throughout, the 1955 mono recordings remarkably present and detailed, the 1968 stereo spacious if perhaps a touch too reverberant for the arias.
The songs are indispensable. The arias are… well, they’re Schwarzkopf, which means they’re worth having even when they’re not quite right. At superbudget price, you’d be foolish to pass this up.
