This is a slightly perplexing record, but one I have now played several times, with increasing pleasure. ‘Unpublished’ is a word to warm the hearts and imaginations of collectors, though it has to be said that more often than not one can tell just why a record was rejected. The first track here is a case in point, the aria from Schubert’s Claudine von Villa Bella was a favourite with Schwarzkopf, but if one compares this recording from 1961 with the one eventually issued, made four years later, the 1965 version is more relaxed, having more of a sense of the surging lover’s declaration. Persevere, though, and there are gems to be found.
Wolf’s ‘Die Zigeunerin’ was one of Schwarzkopf’s standbys. I can recall her singing it at the end of the first half of her last Royal Festival Hall concert in 1975. This was often a great moment in a Schwarzkopf recital, all nerves by then banished, the voice under control, she would play with the acoustic of the hall, using little echo effects that are caught on this recording. The reason it wasn’t used, I imagine, as in several other cases on the CD, is that the voice is a little too far forward, the pianist seeming to be banished to halfway back in the studio; but this gives a lovely sense of presence.
In other cases, I would guess the songs were discarded because there simply wasn’t room on the LP. One of these is the single track which is not accompanied by Gerald Moore, Un moto di gioia, part of her famous Mozart programme accompanied by Walter Gieseking. It is a joy, as is Warnung with Moore. The other ‘encore’ pieces by Flies, Bizet and Parisotti must surely have been intended for the LP called Songs You Love, a Cook’s Tour through song. In Se tu m’ami there is a slight fluff on one of the little laughs which perhaps led to its exclusion, but in every other way it is as charming and beguiling as any light-hearted song Schwarzkopf ever recorded.
The Brahms group is absolutely compelling. This was the beginning of a project to record a whole LP of Brahms songs with which she continued into the 1970s, though only a few songs were ever released (on the fourth and final ‘Songbook’ LP). Strauss’s Zueignung seems awfully slow, and less involved than one would expect. Since she and Moore had already recorded a published version of this, I wonder if it was made as a test in some way?
Wagner’s ‘Traume’ is the one instance of the unpublished take being preferable to that issued. Again, one can see why the later recording is a more dramatic reading, but here the voice is poised with such lightness and it’s so intimate – if you’re in doubt about the prospect of this CD, listen to that followed by the Bizet Pastorale and then ‘Die Zigeunerin’. At once one is in the presence of the great singer, a perfectionist in everything she did, as hard on herself when judging her records as she sometimes could be on her students. She would shake her head after some lovely piece of pure vocalism and murmur, ‘Ah, but that’s the easy part’.'