Ever since I read Alan Jefferson’s Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (1996), the first and, after three decades, still the only biography of that impeccable vocal artist who for me and so many remains the definitive Mozart Countess and Strauss Marschallin, I have been deeply troubled by his tendentious and cynical portrait of her as an ambitious and scheming young Nazi eager to further her rise on the opera stages of the Third Reich. Today, though out of print, it continues to bear poisonous fruit on the internet, where numerous references to the great soprano repeat Jefferson’s fictions as facts. The following represents a long-overdue response, a correction to Jefferson’s warped account of the life of my favorite voice on record.
In early 2006, two months after her ninetieth birthday and six months before she died, I made a pilgrimage to Schruns, a picturesque skiing village in western Austria, to visit Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf at her home for a few days.
We had first met a quarter century earlier, at the Frankfurt Book Fair in the fall of 1981. My father was publishing her book, a collection of her late husband Walter Legge’s writings, On and Off the Record, and I was in charge of guiding her through the maze of foreign publishers interested in translation rights. A few months later she came to New York for her publication party, hosted by my parents, and then a series of press interviews. I attended her master classes at Mannes College of Music, a revelation to this former piano student of how much correction could be concentrated in such short sessions with the highly promising students she had selected for these intense lessons.
Decades later, after several years of corresponding via fax and phone calls, I longed to see Elisabeth again in person. In a most gracious response to my book Bernini, she wrote to me that it called to mind all those years in the emi recording studios with her husband, “sculpting in sound.” I wanted to discuss with her that vocal sculpting, as she was, to me, the Bernini of vocal artistry. The editor of Opera News commissioned me to write an article about her, to be titled “The Voice of Mozart,” for their upcoming issue on the composer’s two hundred fiftieth birthday, his sestercentennial.
The voyage to that skiing village in Vorarlberg required two planes and six trains from the Zurich airport. The fourth of those trains had “The Ernest Hemingway” emblazoned on its cars. I knew, with relief, I was on the right track: our most famous author at Scribner’s had lived in Schruns for six months with his wife Hadley and young son Jack to complete his novel The Sun Also Rises between ski runs. I brought along a leather-bound diary that had remained pristine ever since my wife gave it to me as a wedding gift in 1979, the year Elisabeth’s husband died and she retired from the concert stage.
I taped my sessions with her over the next two days, and then each evening at the Hemingway Inn—how could I resist?—I recorded my impressions in that diary. The resulting article was published in July; I mailed Elisabeth a copy and held my breath. A week later she called and said that of all the profiles written of her over the years, this one was her favorite. Then, despite her aversion to digital recordings, she gave me permission to issue a dvd of the 1963 television broadcast of her “Viennese Evening” with the conductor-violinist Willi Boskovsky. That was the last time I spoke with her; two weeks later she died in her sleep. I wrote an introduction to the video disc as my memorial tribute.
The obituaries that appeared in the press did justice to Elisabeth’s preeminent vocal artistry in opera and lieder, above all the extensive legacy of recordings undertaken at the emi studios on Abbey Road in London together with her husband, Legge, a towering impresario of classical music. His role in shaping her career and interpretations, “sculpting in sound” down to the last syllable, was wittily summed up by Elisabeth herself, in a variation on the famous gramophone label: “Her Master’s Voice.” But those memorials were tainted by pointed references to her “Nazi past,” a catalogue of unjust charges based on the biography written about her ten years earlier by Jefferson.
Jefferson, a biographer and music historian, had originally asked Elisabeth to cooperate with his biography under contract with the London publisher Victor Gollancz, but she declined—and for a good reason. A decade earlier, after we published her book on Legge (originally planned as his autobiography; he died before finishing it), our editor Marshall De Bruhl had signed up her autobiography for Scribner’s—to be written with the assistance of Gustl Breuer, who had also worked on the Legge book. Even though the project made little headway over the ensuing decade—Breuer died in 1985—it is clear that she had not given up the idea, for in 2000 I received a fax from her asking whether I would give permission for her to use material from our Legge book for a memoir she was planning to write with her favorite emi recording engineer, Johann-Nikolaus Matthes, in Berlin. I faxed back that of course she could use anything she wanted from Legge’s book, but added that she had given me an idea: I’d like to have that book republished in paperback. There was only one problem: we couldn’t locate the original photos needed for the illustrations. Did she still have them?
After several more faxes, including photos of us together at my most memorable Frankfurt Book Fair, she concluded that they were not to be found. So she mailed to me a file of new photos covering her life with her late husband, the subject—and chief author—of the book. I made my selection of photos, and then Elisabeth asked me to compose the captions in her voice, first-person singular (or singer). That was a heady assignment, my sole stint as a ghostwriter. It was also my final editorial project at Scribner’s; I could not have chosen a better one.
Elisabeth’s unrealized memoir did yield a key document supporting the exculpatory backstory of her notorious Nazi Party membership card (no. 7,548,960), which had been discovered in Allied Bureau archives by Professor Oliver Rathkolb while he was a doctoral student writing his dissertation in 1981—the basis for Jefferson’s biographical fantasy. A dozen years before Jefferson’s publication, she had addressed this “discovery”—as it seems to have been for her as well—in a letter to The New York Times. It is worth quoting in full after four decades:
To the Editor:
On my return to Zurich, I found the International Herald Tribune of March 18, with your Bonn correspondent’s article about musicians’ Nazi Party ties (the article appeared in The Times of March 17). The only reason I write at all is that your correspondent neglected to say that I not only answered the ninety-odd questions of the Four-Power Allied Denazification Commission but that I was duly cleared.
May I also point out that joining the nsdap was not the same as applying for a passport to the Nuremberg Trials. It was akin to joining a union, and exactly for the same reason: to have a job. Could it possibly be that some of us merely worked hard to become decent singers?
I applied for membership when I was twenty-four, in my second year at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. I was told by the intendanz that I must do so if I wanted to continue my career. The membership card never reached me.
My father—a victim of Nazi procedure himself, having refused to join and consequently having lost his position of oberstudiendirektor (principal) at the Cottbus Gymnasium (high school)—urged me to join: nothing was more important to him than my singing. After the war, he was reinstated, and he also became denazification officer in Fulda, working alongside the United States Military Government.
Although it was never in my repertoire, I cannot help quoting Tosca: ‘‘Vissi d’arte . . .’’(‘‘I lived for art’’).
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf
Zurich, March 22, 1983
After Matthes’s death in 2012, a letter was discovered among the papers he had kept in preparation of Elisabeth’s memoir. It was written by her father, Friedrich Schwarzkopf, and explained in detail his urging her to apply for a party membership card in order to sing principal roles at the Deutsches Opernhaus, which she had joined as a probationary beginner two years earlier. We shall return to this letter, today preserved in the Schwarzkopf archives at the Schubertiade Quarter in Vorarlberg, but suffice it to say that it confirms her longstanding claim that it was her anti-Nazi father who told her to “sign and sing.”
Absent Elisabeth’s official participation—or the ability to clarify crucial details of her early life in Nazi Germany—Jefferson proceeded with a free hand to pen a biography that replaced evidence with innuendo, facts with gossip, and fair-mindedness with a passion to depict the young and beautiful German singer as a “streetwise” striver eager to use Nazi connections to advance her career. The facts tell a very different story that deserves to be known by all who cherish her artistry.
Born on December 8, 1915, in Jarotchin (Jarocin), East Prussia (now Poland), Olga Maria Elisabeth Friederike Schwarzkopf (thereafter known as Elisabeth) grew up an only child and was educated in a succession of high schools where her father taught Greek and Latin. World War I was raging when she was born, and he had taken his guitar along with him to the front. His wife, née Elisabeth Frölich, was in charge of the infant and toddler until he returned home after the armistice and resumed his teaching of classics. After postings in Breslau and Wahlstatt, he and his family settled in the gymnasium (high school) at Magdeburg, where Elisabeth, young as she was, soon revealed her musical instincts and versatile talents inherited from her beloved ‘‘Poppi”: she played the organ for school chapel services when her legs were long enough to reach the pedals. She also played the piano, guitar, viola, and glockenspiel, and she made her operatic debut at the age of twelve as the title role in the otherwise all-boys school production of Haydn’s Der Apotheker.
The Schwarzkopf family’s happy four years at Magdeburg were followed in 1932 by Friedrich’s moving to Cottbus to be headmaster of its gymnasium. That summer, she joined a group of students for a goodwill bicycling tour of England to learn English—something that served her well for decades to come, on and off the stage. But things changed early in 1933 when Hitler came to power. Elisabeth’s father, a classical humanist and member of the Social Democratic Party, was anti-Nazi and had recently forbidden a Nazi rally at his school. Revenge was swift: Friedrich was summarily fired and banned thereafter from assuming any comparable employment as a teacher. He and his wife and daughter moved to nearby Berlin—but not for the purpose, proposed by Jefferson, of pursuing a musical career for his daughter and taking advantage of all the cultural opportunities in the bustling Nazi capital. In reality, they no longer had a place to live, and relatives in Berlin came to the rescue. Elisabeth finished her high-school diploma there at the Kaiserin Augusta Gymnasium and was planning to go to university to pursue a degree in medicine. But as the daughter of a dissident, she was barred from entering any university. Instead, she applied to the Berlin Hochschule für Musik and gained admission to pursue a career in music. The heavy price paid for her father’s idealism has yielded rich dividends for music lovers in every land.
At the Hochschule, where Elisabeth was initially trained—mistakenly—as a mezzo-soprano by the celebrated mezzo Lula Mysz-Gmeiner, she met a student three years her senior, Peter Gellhorn. He accompanied her on the piano that first year, and the two became close friends, a fellowship that was to last a lifetime, but with a sudden hiatus: Gellhorn was half-Jewish (his father, not mother—pace Jefferson), and when his name appeared in the Nazi-issued Musical ABC of Jews, he fled Germany for England in September of 1935. There he established a successful career as a composer and conductor. After the war, he and Elisabeth resumed their friendship in England. Among her early recordings Gellhorn conducted for her future husband at emi was Bach’s jubilant “Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen” (1950), which translates as “Praise God in every land.” Indeed.
One documentary citation that looms large in Jefferson’s agenda to label Elisabeth an early Nazi—or at the very least, an ambitious opportunist without scruples—is her being listed as a student Führerin (party leader) at the Hochschule for one term in 1935, the very year her close friend and accompanist Peter Gellhorn had to flee abroad. Not only is it hard to square that official role with their lifelong friendship and, closer to home, with her father’s influence, she also never in the recollection of her contemporaries showed any interest in politics. Perhaps she was ‘‘volunteered” for it and, not wanting to cause further problems for her parents still living under suspicion, she accepted the honor with benign neglect. Earlier that year, she had been enrolled in the National Socialist German Students League. Half the girls at the gymnasium belonged, and her parents would hardly have directed her to decline membership and risk a charge of ingratitude or, worse, further negative attention on them. Her father had urged his wife and daughter, by her own recollection decades later, to ‘‘hang the flag, make the salute, do anything to keep the ‘spooks’ from suspecting us.”
More telling is a letter written to Elisabeth by her fellow student Horst Welter (who became a conductor, composer, and lecturer at the Frankfurt Hochschule für Musik) after the publication of Jefferson’s insinuations. In it he categorically denies that Elisabeth ever served as a student party leader. He furthermore names the schoolmate who held that post. It is worth quoting below, as published in Alan Sanders’s 2010 book The Schwarzkopf Tapes: An artist replies to a hostile biography:
Now, I know as we were studying together in Berlin I can say that I cannot let the report go without contradicting it. With certainty I can say that you were never that leader of the National Socialist student association at the Berlin Hochschule. That office was held by Herbert Klomser. . . . We were more or less forced to join the student association.
I leave it to fair-minded readers to apply Occam’s Razor—and common sense—to this question.
After leaving the Hochschule in 1937, Elisabeth continued her studies in opera at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin. She made her first recording for emi that year, anonymously, as a member of the chorus in Die Zauberflöte under the English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham at the Beethovensaal. Accompanying Beecham was his thirty-one-year-old technical assistant Walter Legge.
The next year, in early 1938, Elisabeth won, summa cum laude, a probationary post as a “beginner” (Anfänger) at the Deutsches Opernhaus and made an early debut in the spring as a Flower Maiden in Wagner’s Parsifal. She learned the small but important role in a day and went on stage the following evening, Good Friday. Her phenomenal gift of sight-reading and an ability to memorize fa presto served her in the months and years to come: Elisabeth could be counted on to fill casting gaps, and she added a wide range of roles to her repertoire. By 1940, she was offered a full contract as a house soprano qualified for leading roles, a promotion which required her to join the party (nsdap). Her decision to do so came back to haunt her forty years later when her membership card was discovered in the government archives.
Yet the decision was not hers alone. Later in life, Elisabeth maintained that she made that application at the urging of her father, the anti-Nazi. In fact, six years after her death in 2006, documentary confirmation was found in her archives and published by Kirsten Liese, the author of the 2007 photo-biography Elisabeth Schwarzkopf: From Flower Maiden to Marschallin, which I translated for the English edition in the United States and United Kingdom. In this letter, Friedrich Schwarzkopf states that when asked what to do, he urged his daughter, “Give in to the constant urging and the threat of reprisals against us and sign up to join the party! Then we’ll see what happens next.” Their enthusiasm was clearly under control.
Around this time, the celebrated baritone Karl Schmitt-Walter advised Elisabeth to undertake new vocal training before she ruined her voice. He introduced her to the great soprano Maria Ivogün as her new teacher. “Maria told me I had no technique,” Elisabeth recalled to me sixty-five years later, ‘‘and we started with two notes; for four months we did nothing but those two notes, and then slowly we went up bit by bit, for two years.”
Maria’s husband, the pianist Michael Raucheisen, in turn coached Elisabeth in lieder singing, and in 1942 she made her recital debut in Berlin at the Beethovensaal. Six decades later, when I asked her about him, she replied, ‘‘He was the most wonderful accompanist in all the world, the greatest accompanist that ever was—punto finito!” As the head of the Reich’s lieder and chamber-music division at Berlin Radio (Rundfunk Berlin), he was charged with recording a complete archive of German lieder. Some of these were sung by the young Elisabeth with him at the keyboard. Recently reissued, they provide a rich preview of the superb vocal artist she later became.
After the fall of France, Elisabeth was among the cast of the Deutsches Opernhaus that visited Paris in September 1941 for a performance of Strauss’s Die Fledermaus at the Opéra Garnier. Her contract obliged her to sing bit parts whenever needed, and here she sang the minor role of Ida, the sister of Adele, a starring role she had already mastered. That she honored the contractual obligation raises the question: if indeed her career at the opera house had been accelerated as a result of a high-placed Nazi official serving as her patron/protector—as Jefferson maintains, with no evidence of who this mystery angel might have been—why was she bound by such demeaning fine print? Her ability to sing the great roles at a moment’s notice had been demonstrated, so it makes little sense that, if such a protector existed, he would have failed to relieve her of a requirement that proved so professionally embarrassing that her teacher, Maria Ivogün, insisted that she sing the bit parts under a pseudonym, “Maria Helfer.” As my late father was wont to say, “The obvious is these days often overlooked.”
The issue took on particular urgency when, disappointed that once again she was to be cast as Ida and not Adele, she lost her temper onstage and kicked off a shoe. It flew into the backdrop and tore the scenery. Because this was government property and it was wartime, the transgression rose to a charge of ‘‘sabotage.” A hearing was held, and Elisabeth faced being banished from the opera house to a munitions factory. Her father, who had been sent in middle age to the Eastern Front (usually a death sentence, but he survived) to identify bodies and notify the next of kin back home, had to appear together with her friend and colleague Michael Raucheisen to plead her case. Raucheisen persuaded the authorities that he needed her for his important lieder-recording project and to entertain the troops.
Again, where was her alleged high-ranking “protector” during this crisis? Either her Nazi guardian archangel never existed, or he had taken early retirement. But her accompanist was sufficient. She survived to sing.
Among the names of Elisabeth’s would-be protectors floated in gossip and by Jefferson in print is that of Joseph Goebbels himself. Indeed the most speculative—and salacious—pages of Jefferson’s biography are devoted to Elisabeth’s side “film career” as a young star in movies purportedly made under Goebbels’s personal supervision, insinuating that she ended up in the latter’s notorious bedroom adjoining his office. This colorful conjecture is belied by the facts, which conform to her own recollection to me about her cameo appearances in a handful of films shot between 1939 and 1943.
The first was the 1939 film Drei Unteroffiziere (Three noncoms), where she plays—for a grand total of two minutes—an opera singer onstage singing Carmen. She was still a beginner at the Deutsches Opernhaus, where, she explained to me, calls from ufa (Universum-Film AG) would come for singers to appear briefly in films. She happily volunteered in order to supplement her modest salary.
Elisabeth included this brief debut clip—as a dark-haired Gypsy on stage!—in her 1998 biographical documentary Elisabeth Schwarzkopf: A Self-Portrait, which she narrated. In hindsight, after six decades, this rediscovered clip clearly caused her no regrets—much less embarrassment. Several months later she volunteered again for her longest wartime role on film: as an opera singer in the 1940 film Das Mädchen von St Coeur (The maiden of St. Coeur), a twenty-one-minute short. Thereafter she made another cameo singing appearance in the 1941 film Nacht ohne Abschied (Night without goodbye), along with the tenor Peter Anders. The next year she lent her voice, but not her person, to the film Der ewige Klang (The eternal tone) by dubbing an aria for its star. Finally, in 1943 she made her last, brief (two minutes) cameo as a singer at a dinner party in the film Der Verteidiger hat das Wort (The defense may proceed), singing a Schumann lied, “Mondnacht,” while bombs drop outside.
What is clear from his account is that Jefferson never looked beyond the few surviving stills from these films. If he had, he would have discovered that she was a voice, not a star. He probably never saw the films, especially the last. Otherwise he might have avoided his error in claiming that Elisabeth was ‘‘accompanying herself” at the piano as a result of trick photography. There is clearly a second actress seated at that piano: Carla Rust, who stars as the defense attorney’s daughter; we see them walking out of dinner together just before the musicale. The superficial similarity between the two actresses led him, from a single still photo, to draw his mistaken conclusion—emblematic of so much erroneous interpretation throughout his book.
Elisabeth recalled this shoot vividly, for it took place under horrendous conditions. The recent bombing of Berlin had resulted in the loss of the roof over the ufa studio. The temperature on the set alternated between sweltering (with the floodlights on) and freezing (when turned off). Soon afterwards she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, a crisis she attributed both to that movie shoot and to the many nights spent in crowded bomb shelters studying musical scores. The silver lining was that she had to leave the capital for a sanatorium in the Tatra mountains of Slovakia. There she not only recovered from tuberculosis over the following months, almost a year, but also avoided the worst of the bombing in Berlin: the Deutsches Opernhaus was among the casualties, reduced to rubble. But she was safe, and her voice was saved.
In conclusion, Elisabeth was the “movie star” that wasn’t. Far from a Goebbels ‘‘favorite” as cast by Jefferson, her name was mentioned in the thousands of published pages of Goebbels’s mundane diaries—that recorded even his breakfasts—not once. Some starlet, some favorite.
Recuperating in the Tatra sanatorium far from the bombs raining down on Berlin, Elisabeth devoted herself to studying musical scores for her new post in Vienna: she had been hired by the conductor Karl Böhm to sing at the celebrated Wiener Staatsoper. Jefferson insisted, with all the force of rank speculation, that her fortunate transfer to the sanatorium was the doing of yet another unnamed, high-ranking Nazi lover; his prime candidate was the Gauleiter of Lower Austria, Dr. Hugo Jury, who happened to be a specialist in tuberculosis. But truth is not always more dramatic than fiction: she told me that the arrangements were made by her coach and accompanist Michael Raucheisen. No doubt someone higher up had to sign off on this timely rescue, but one need look no further than his superior, Hans Erich Schrade, the secretary of the Reichskulturkammer (the Reich Chamber of Culture) and manager of the Reichstheaterkammer (the Chamber of Theater). Among the personal photos in the Schwarzkopf archives in Vorarlberg is a snapshot of Elisabeth with Schrade taken during his visit to her at the sanatorium. From their smiles, it was clearly a happy one.
Schrade, whom the historian Michael Kater has described as “a virtual nonentity in the Reich culture administration,” later proved her champion in securing her freedom in Vienna to continue performing on radio, in recordings, and in outdoor concerts after the theaters were permanently closed and all performers ordered to report to munitions factories as the war neared its end. In fairness, it must be conceded that Elisabeth benefited from her associations with individuals who were active party members—above all, Ivogün, Raucheisen, and later Schrade—but there is no indication that she valued them as anything more insiduous than professional colleagues.
Elisabeth had arrived in Vienna in April 1944, and she got to sing at the Staatsoper under Böhm—starring in Mozart’s Entführung, Puccini’s Bohème, and Weber’s Freischütz—for just a few months before Goebbels closed all the theaters as part of his “total war” decree in late July. Her final appearance was a lieder recital in December at the Musikvereinsaal. Four months later, the capital fell to Soviet troops who indulged themselves in several weeks of rape and plunder. But Elisabeth and her mother were spared: they had fled westward to the countryside in Attersee near Salzburg, where a former Staatsoper colleague gave them shelter away from the horrors. They wound up, along with Böhm and his wife, living on a farm owned by the famous actress Käthe Dorsch—in a room over a chicken coop! When I first shared with Elisabeth my favorite saying of Albert Einstein, Der Zufall ist Gottes Art anonym zu bleiben—“Coincidences are God’s way of remaining anonymous”—she replied that her life had been the product of Zufall, serendipity. It was never more so than here.
Between the closing of the opera houses and the fall of Vienna to the Soviet army, Raucheisen recruited her to sing as part of his German counterpart to America’s uso (or Britain’s ensa) to entertain factory workers and troops on the Eastern Front. He had earlier saved her from banishment to a munitions factory with the argument that he needed her for this service. She performed as promised, but it was hardly a voluntary assignment. As she later explained with understatement, ‘‘When you were asked to sing for the troops you were not given a choice.” The fact that among these troops were SS units provided grist for the mill of Jefferson and company, determined as they were to demonstrate darker political sympathies, but that was nonsense. She sang where she was sent.
When the Americans arrived from the west later in the summer of 1945, Elisabeth joined a group of singers organized by her Staatsoper colleague Max Lorenz, a tenor, to entertain the American troops; she even included ‘‘Summertime” from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, which had been blacklisted by the Nazis as triply verboten: American, black, and Jewish. By November, Elisabeth and her mother were finally able to return to Vienna, thanks to an American officer who drove them in his Jeep. There she faced still more trials en route to her permanent return to the opera stage.
As a German national in post-war Austria, Elisabeth was barred from starring roles at the Staatsoper until she had been officially cleared of political taints. The opera house had been destroyed by Allied bombing, and the company was now playing at the Theater an der Wien under dire conditions—without heat and electricity. The one loophole was that she could sing roles as an unannounced replacement for unavailable sopranos.
Visiting Austria in March of 1946 to sign up singers for emi records in London, Walter Legge heard her as Rosina in Barbiere and found her vocal agility ‘‘hair-raising.” Legge had earlier heard her on wartime broadcasts from Berlin, and already considered her one of the finest voices in Central Europe. He wanted to sign her up at once for an exclusive recording contract. But she, not wanting him to buy ‘‘cat in a sack,” insisted on an audition. It went on so long, with Legge demanding so many refinements of a single phrase in a song by Hugo Wolf, that finally her colleague and conductor Herbert von Karajan (whom Legge also signed up on this visit) said he could not take any more of the “sadism.” Yet it offered a preview of the intense working relationship between Legge and his future wife, one that eventually transformed her into the star that her colleague the baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau hailed as the ‘‘vocal artist of the century.” But before she could resume her career unfettered, she had to clear the long process of denazification by the Allies occupying Vienna.
Elisabeth admittedly prolonged that process by her insistence that she had nothing to do with the Nazi Party. Between July 1945 and May 1946, she filled out a total of four questionnaires. In the first three she denied being a party member; in the fourth and final one, she admitted to joining the nsdap in “1940 or 1941” (true enough) but claimed that she never received a membership number. Jefferson and others have interpreted her reluctance to ‘‘come clean” as evidence of greater guilts. But there is a simpler explanation. During my last visit with her in February 2006, she told me that she was never able to free herself of fear during those war years at the Deutsches Opernhaus since she never had the security of knowing that her party application had been accepted and that she was ‘‘safe” to sing. Whether the Opernhaus itself maintained possession of her card and had misplaced it, or it disappeared in some other way, we cannot be certain, but an official 1944 questionnaire signed by her for the Reichstheaterkammer reveals, in the space provided for the required ‘‘party number,” the scribbled words Karte verloren, “card lost.” At the time, this was a less-than-ideal substitution for her missing number—credit-card applications are declined for less—but it is consistent with what she later maintained in the final questionnaire. Add to this her family background, and it is hard to dispute her claim that she never considered herself a member in safe standing, before or after submitting her nsdap application. Her father, by this time an official working in the American denazification office back in Germany, would have concurred.
Elisabeth was finally cleared by the process in February of 1947 and was reinstated at the Staatsoper. That same year the company was invited to perform at Covent Garden in London. But as a former German citizen, Elisabeth had no passport. When urged to apply for expedited Austrian citizenship by the opera management, she—now thirty-one years old, no child—sought her father’s permission. He replied that he didn’t care whether she got a Chinese passport so long as she was able to sing. ‘‘Your voice is your passport,” he insisted. And so it proved to be.
In our Scribner’s book On and Off the Record, Walter Legge explains his wife’s vocal magic with a quotation attributed to the British playwright Sir Terence Rattigan: “What makes magic is genius, and what makes genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.” That capacity was aptly rewarded in 1992 when Elisabeth was named a Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of British Empire. We should have no doubt that Her Majesty’s government performed due diligence.
