RADIANT was an adjective applied frequently to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf by critics and others. It was used with justification. The word well described the famed and inimitable Schwarzkopf interpretations of certain heroines in Strauss operas, such as the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier and the Countess in Capriccio. It was altogether appropriate to her performance in lieder, with Wolf and Strauss (again) to the fore, to which she turned when she gave up the stage.

And it was quite right for Elisabeth Schwarzkopf herself, with her mane of hair acting almost like a halo, which remained golden well into old age. She was totally professional in all that she did, right through to her personal appearance. She used to tell the story of her arrival, with her mother, in gloomy, bomb-torn Vienna. They had little or no money, but her mother insisted that their meagre luggage contained one impressive and expensive-looking dress for auditions.

It was in Vienna that Schwarzkopf came to the ears of Walter Legge, the recording manager of EMI. They met in the Cafe Mozart in a Harry Lime world, went directly to the Musikverein, where Legge gave her an audition of an inordinate length, which even Herbert von Karajan, who was present, described as cruel. But that started a partnership — with quite substantial involvement from Karajan — on stage and on record which was to last almost 30 years.

In 1953 Legge married Schwarzkopf and he guided every stage and step of her career. With him she made all her records, apart from song recitals recorded in Germany during the war, many of which remain unsurpassed in their field. When just before her 75th birthday Schwarzkopf was asked whether anyone else had acted in the recording studios as her producer she was faintly surprised by the question and replied that she had never considered anyone else, adding: “In any case Walter would never have allowed it.”

Legge was equally punctilious about her stage appearances. He recognised that the voice was supremely musical, intelligently coloured, capable of conveying extremes of meaning. But it was neither exceptionally large, nor did it have the high notes of the coloratura range. On the one hand Schwarzkopf steered away from heavy parts, such as Beethoven’s Leonore, which she sang only in concert performance, and on the other from parts such as Strauss’s Arabella for which she was physically ideal but which lay a little too high.

The Legge-Schwarzkopf combination was a redoubtable one, combining a huge breadth of musical knowledge with a total understanding of the practicalities of music-making in theatres, studios and concert halls. Together they gave some notable masterclasses until Legge’s premature death in 1979. Thereafter Elisabeth Schwarzkopf went on telling singers, young and some of them not so young, how to develop their potential. “Think about what you are going to sing before you sing it,” she used to warn, “not when you are halfway through. That’s not just my advice. It was Stanislavsky’s.”

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was born in 1915 in Jarotschin near Posen (now Poznan). Her father was a teacher and classical scholar and the family moved around Silesia before coming to Berlin when she was 17. She studied voice and piano at the Hochschule für Musik, and immediately set her sights on joining the Deutsche Oper. Her first appearance on record was as a member of the chorus of a Zauberflöte made in Berlin by Sir Thomas Beecham. His technical assistant was a young man called Walter Legge. Neither Schwarzkopf nor Legge could have guessed at the future influence they were to have on one another.

By the next year her first ambition was achieved. She was engaged by the Deutsche Oper and made her debut in 1938 as a Flowermaiden in Parsifal. During that first season she sang quantities of supporting roles in both opera and operetta, mixing Wagner with Lortzing, before she was cast as the soubrette Zerbinetta in a new production of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. In the early years of the war she joined the National Socialist Party, according to Alan Jefferson’s punctilious but at times contentious biography of her. It caused a considerable stir when it was published in 1996 and certainly did not please its subject. Schwarzkopf appeared in a handful of propaganda films under Goebbels’ banner and sang too in a single performance of Die Fledermaus in Paris in 1941 put on for the benefit of the German occupying forces.

These moves were purely pragmatic. Schwarzkopf was determined to get to the top and was not inclined to go looking for obstacles. At the Deutsche Oper one or two of the older sopranos were none too pleased with the presence of a young rival who was exceptionally good-looking as well as talented. But she was not content with being a star in wartime Berlin. Encouraged by Karl Böhm, who was considering her as Blonde in a production of Entführung he was planning, she went to Vienna, with that audition dress in her suitcase. There she made her debut in her regular role of Zerbinetta. The Deutsche Oper was abandoned and she threw in her lot with Vienna for such performances as were going in the last months of the war.

During 1946 Schwarzkopf, in common with other prominent musicians including Furtwängler and Karajan, came under the scrutiny of the Allied Denazification Bureau. But while the process was continuing they were allowed to appear from time to time. On Karajan’s suggestion Legge, who was working for ENSA but looking for future artists for EMI, heard Schwarzkopf in The Barber of Seville. He recognised the talent at once but believed that she should be a lyric soprano — but not before he recorded her singing Johann Strauss’s Frühlingsstimmen, one of the first of their many discs together.

Supported by Legge, Schwarzkopf rejoined the Vienna State Opera in their temporary home of the Theater an der Wien. She was part of an extraordinary company, which included Erich Kunz, Irmgard Seefried, Paul Schöffler and Anton Dermota. Superb Mozart was performed in a city short of food and that was still in ruins. In 1947 the Vienna State came to Covent Garden for a short but memorable season in which Schwarzkopf made her London debut as Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni.

Covent Garden at the time, like Vienna, was trying to rebuild its company. But it recognised in Schwarzkopf a natural talent. The problem was that Covent Garden was committed to opera in English, in which Schwarzkopf was then far from fluent. But she accepted the challenge and in the late 1940s and early 1950s London heard her as Pamina (Zauberflöte), Eva (Die Meistersinger), Violetta (La Traviata) and Susanna (The Marriage of Figaro) among other roles. There was an outstanding Mimi, with Welitsch as Musetta, in La Boheme.

But the honeymoon with London soured. William Walton composed the role of Cressida in his opera Troilus and Cressida for Schwarzkopf, but there were arguments and the first night found another soprano in the role. She was never to sing the part. And as far as non-British opera was concerned Schwarzkopf saw no reason to continue in a language where the words did not always fit the music. A growing band of critics started to complain that, even when she was singing in German, her performances were too artificial. Matters came to a head in the Rosenkavalier of 1959 where her Marschallin came in for some harsh words. She was the leading exponent of the role, as Paul Czinner’s film of the Salzburg production of the same period demonstrates, and she had every right to be cross. She was not to appear in opera at Covent Garden again and she selected any friendships with London critics very carefully.