GREAT RECORDINGS phase 14

MOZART: OPERA ARIAS
from Il ré pastore, Idomeneo, Die Entführung aus dem Serail
Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf
John Pritchard, Josef Krips, Herbert von Karajan &
Warwick Braithwaite

4 76844 2
(Angel: 4 76845 2)
Recorded 1946–1948 & 1952
Mono/ADD
78 minutes

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‘Heartily recommended. Schwarzkopf was in excellent voice when these recordings were made: the singing is always stylish and beautifully controlled and the singer’s tone is consistently lovely.’ (Gramophone)

Awards: Diapason d’Or, France; Edison Stichting, Netherlands

During her career, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf brought to her roles in Mozart an aristocracy of voice, style and understanding that were peerless in her time. This CD brings together all her recordings of Mozart operatic arias made outside complete opera sets. They were recorded between 1946 and 1952, when Schwarzkopf was in her thirties and her voice was at its purest and silvery best. Central to the programme is a famous LP made in London in 1952 with John Pritchard and the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Mozart’s knowledge of the soprano voice was close and comprehensive and he wrote with consummate skill for the soubrette, the coloratura and the dramatic soprano. But at the heart of his writing was the lyric soprano, the voice of youthful maturity, warm with womanly gentleness, fortified by reserves of strength. As her career and voice developed, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was able to master the whole range of Mozart’s writing for the soprano voice, though it is true that she avoided the highest reaches of coloratura assigned to the Queen of Night (in Die Zauberflöte) and the music that makes the most strenuous demands on the voice (Donna Anna’s vengeance aria in Don Giovanni, for example).

In this newly-compiled CD collection, Schwarzkopf assumes a wide variety of Mozart’s soprano roles, each with its own vocal identity and each calling on different skills: the high coloratura in Konstanze’s arias, the lightness for Susanna, the resonance of the mezzo-soprano in Cherubino’s songs, the dramatic force for Donna Elvira and the ‘central’ lyricism of Pamina and the Countess.