by Sue Corbett
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 Bohème.
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.
Indeed, she had little need of London, which henceforth was to hear her in lieder recitals, especially of works by Wolf, Schubert and Brahms, which always attracted full houses. During the 1950s, with Legge’s hand on the tiller, she had become EMI’s leading soprano. There was a series of Viennese “champagne” operettas devised by Legge and conducted, with the exception of Fledermaus, by Otto Ackermann using a team of singers highly skilled in this genre. With Karajan she recorded Mozart, Eva in Meistersinger, a witty Alice Ford in Falstaff and, perhaps best of all, Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel. For the young Wolfgang Sawallisch there was a Capriccio which has not been surpassed.
On stage she was always a figure of poise and extreme elegance, penetrating the meaning of each phrase she had to sing. In opera she was probably at her peak in the early 1950s, when she was an outstanding Eva in the Bayreuth Meistersinger and created the role of Anne Trulove when Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress was heard for the first time in Venice. She was a regular visitor to La Scala, where she first appeared in Figaro in 1949, and was to be heard in most of the following 14 seasons.
During her career Schwarzkopf sang 74 different operatic roles. But as she approached her fifties she concentrated on just five. Mozart provided Elvira, Fiordiligi (Così) and the Countess (Figaro). Strauss gave another Countess (Capriccio), and the Marschallin. Schwarzkopf’s last full performance in an opera house was in Der Rosenkavalier at the Monnaie in Brussels just after Christmas 1967. She chose the same theatre for her official farewell to opera on New Year’s Eve 1971, Rosenkavalier again, but just the first act.
Quantities of lieder recitals continued, usually with Geoffrey Parsons as accompanist and always carefully masterminded by Legge who was ever attentive to the hall and the potential audience. These eventually came to an end in 1978 with a farewell at the Wigmore Hall, followed by a final appearance in March 1979 in Zurich. Switzerland had become the Legges’ home, but he died from a heart attack three days after that last recital.
Schwarzkopf tried her hand at directing in 1981. Inevitably the opera was Der Rosenkavalier and she went back to her beloved Monnaie. But the venture was not the success she had hoped for, partly because of a chill that developed between her and the chosen Marschallin, Elisabeth Söderström. The two women were too similar in musical style and temperament for the combination to work. Thereafter Schwarzkopf devoted most of her energies to teaching, which she had already developed by the side of Legge. A number of singers who went on to international careers passed through her hands, usually getting individual coaching at her Zurich home. She rarely accepted payment, although those receiving advice were sworn to secrecy lest too many came knocking at her door.
A six-CD set, containing some previously unissued tracks, came out to celebrate her 75th birthday. When she had passed 80 she personally supervised a re-press of the Rosenkavalier recorded with Karajan. Her numerous awards included an honorary doctorate in music from Cambridge University (1977) and life membership of the Vienna State Opera (1993). She was appointed DBE in 1992.
Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, DBE, soprano, was born on December 9, 1915. She died on August 3, 2006, aged 90
JEANE KIRKPATRICK
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US AMBASSADOR TO THE UN WHO FOUGHT TO GET PRESIDENT REAGAN TO SIDE WITH ARGENTINA IN THE FALKLANDS CONFLICT
DECEMBER 9, 2006
By far Britain’s least favourite American during the Falklands War was the US Ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick. Only hours after the 1982 invasion of the Falklands she notoriously attended as guest of honour a reception at the Argentine Embassy in Washington. She then went on television to assert that if the islands rightly belonged to Argentina its action could not be considered as “armed aggression”.
Her efforts to tilt the Reagan Administration in favour of Argentina and against Britain provoked a most undiplomatic row with the US Secretary of State, Alexander Haig. Haig charged that Kirkpatrick was “mentally and emotionally incapable of thinking clearly on this issue because of her close links with the Latins”. Kirkpatrick dismissed Haig’s policy as “a boy’s club vision of gang loyalty”. She accused him of being blindly pro-British and said that he and his advisers were “Britons in American clothes”.
Kirkpatrick, who was close to the Argentine junta headed by General Galtieri, argued that America should not jeopardise its relations with Latin America by supporting Britain in a colonial war. Haig and the US Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger (obituary, March 29, 2006) took Britain’s side, and Weinberger was later awarded an honorary knighthood for his role in the victory.
Had Kirkpatrick prevailed, Britain would have been deprived of American fuel, Sidewinder missiles and other arms, and the vital US satellite intelligence that enabled it to win the war. And Galtieri and his junta would not have been replaced by a freely elected government.
President Reagan found himself in the midst of the tug-of-war between the West’s two most formidable conservative women — Jeane Kirkpatrick and Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher prevailed, but though the two shared a similar ideology, the British Prime Minister never forgave Kirkpatrick for her role in the Falklands.
Kirkpatrick first came to Reagan’s attention on the eve of his first Administration over an article she had written for Commentary, a publication backed by the American Jewish Committee. Entitled Dictatorships and Double Standards, it argued that right-wing “authoritarian” governments, such as those in Argentina, Chile and South Africa, suited American interests better and were “less repressive” than pro-Soviet “totalitarian” regimes. She castigated the emphasis placed on human rights by the previous, Carter Administration and blamed it for undermining right-wing governments in Nicaragua and Iran.
Overnight Kirkpatrick, a not particularly well-known academic and political scientist, and a paid-up Democrat, became one of the most powerful women in America as Ambassador to the UN with a seat in the Reagan Cabinet and a member of the National Security Council. As the US Representative to the UN for four years after the 1980 election, she came to be regarded as the ideological conscience of the Reagan Administration. Combative and confrontational, she symbolised the assertiveness that characterised American foreign policy after Reagan took office. She declared at t
he time: “I am not a professional diplomat. I’ve not signed over my conscience and intellect.”
Adored by the neo-conservatives and despised by the liberal foreign-policy establishment, she provided the intellectual foundations for a policy which aimed to confront Soviet expansionism and restore US pre-eminence in world affairs. She endeared herself to Reagan by lecturing Third World nations that the US would no longer put up with the sort of abuse it had suffered during the Carter Administration.
Many of her fellow ambassadors found her abrasive and uncompromising, but for others she was a refreshingly cold blast through the cynical corridors of the UN, attacking hypocrisy and the double standards of the Third World. She was a formidable figure with cropped hair, a jutting lower lip and a growl in her voice. She berated delegates for failing to condemn the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and said it was hard to understand “why we support some UN agencies, which are undermining the work of the US and some of its allies”. She frequently vetoed sanctions against Israel and South Africa. On one occasion, after an attack by the Non-Aligned Movement in the UN, she wrote personally to each delegate demanding an explanation for their support of “base lies and malicious attacks upon the good name of the United States”.
The only Democrat in the Reagan cabinet, and for a while the only woman, Kirkpatrick was a professor of political science at Georgetown University and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute before joining the Administration.
Jeane Duane Jordan was born in Oklahoma in 1926, the daughter of an oil-well engineer. She was educated in New York, receiving her PhD from Columbia University in 1968. She married Evron Kirkpatrick, another political scientist and 15 years her senior, and had three sons.
Although a registered Democrat, until becoming a Republican in 1985, the party to which she looked back was that of Presidents Truman and Kennedy. She subsequently became disillusioned with liberal Democrats during the counter-culture of the 1960s and the violence of the anti-Vietnam War movement. In the late 1970s she became highly critical of the policies of Jimmy Carter and observed that the Soviet Union had become “a major power in the Western hemisphere” during his Administration. When she first took office she felt completely at home with President Reagan’s hard-line approach to Moscow and his depiction of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire”. But she lost ground in Washington as Reagan began to move towards a deal with Moscow.
After battling for four years at the UN with the Soviet bloc and a hostile Third World, Kirkpatrick announced that she would resign her post at the end of the first Reagan Administration and made it clear that she would return to office only as Secretary of State or National Security Adviser.
At the Republican National Convention in 1984 she made the inaugural address to great acclaim and was the toast of the party’s right wing. But the new Reagan team were uneasy about bringing such a loose cannon to Washington (and the President may have sought a quieter life for his second term), and Kirkpatrick was offered neither of the posts of her choice. Kirkpatrick then returned to academic life in Washington, based at Georgetown University and the American Enterprise Institute.
In 1986, in an open break with her past, she expressed doubts about Reagan’s capacity for superpower diplomacy, indicating that she felt the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was too clever for the President and his advisers. Later she claimed that she had been eased out of the Reagan Administration because her hardline views had caused problems for Reagan’s “be nice to Gorby” aides.
Kirkpatrick was the author of numerous scholarly articles and a number of books. These ranged from Political Woman (1974), a study of the role of women in modern politics, to The Withering Away of the Totalitarian State — and Other Surprises, which appeared in 1992. In 2003 she became chairman of the US delegation to the UN Human rights Commission.
Her husband died in 1995.
Jeane Kirkpatrick, US diplomat, was born on November 19, 1926. She died on December 7, 2006, aged 80
DAME ANNE MCLAREN
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DISTINGUISHED GENETICIST WHO MADE NOTABLE CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SCIENCE, TECHNIQUES AND ETHICS OF FERTILITY TREATMENT
JULY 12, 2007
Anne McLaren was an exceptional scientist. She made fundamental advances in genetics which paved the way for the development of human in vitro fertilisation. She played an important role in discussions of ethical issues relating to embryos and stem cells, serving on the Warnock committee and later on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. As foreign secretary and vice president of the Royal Society — elected FRS in 1975, she was the first woman in the 331 years of its existence to become one of its officers — she travelled widely. In addition to promoting scientific exchanges and raising awareness of the medical and educational needs of developing countries, she was also a role model for women in science.
Anne Laura McLaren was born in 1927, the daughter of Henry McLaren, the 2nd Baron Aberconway, and Christabel MacNaghten. The family were industrialists with an interest in Liberal politics, women’s suffrage and the beautiful gardens created at Bodnant in North Wales. She was educated at Longstowe Hall and Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford where she took a first in zoology and, in 1952, a DPhil. She studied mite infestation in fruit flies with J. B. S. Haldane, the genetics of rabbits with Peter Medawar and mouse viruses under Kingsley Sanders.
She moved to London as a research fellow, first at University College and then at the Royal Veterinary College. She worked with Donald Michie, later her husband, on mice, which became her preferred animal. She studied the effects of the mother on the development of the spinal column in her offspring, and on the influence of “super-ovulation” on fertility. In 1958, working with John Biggers, she produced the first litter of mice grown from eggs that had developed in tissue culture and then been transferred to a surrogate mother. This advance led to the development of successful treatments for infertile women using in vitro fertilisation and embryo transfer.
She spent the next 15 years, 1959-74, at the Institute of Animal Genetics in Edinburgh, eventually becoming a principal scientific officer. Here she successfully nurtured a large group of graduate students. Her particular mixture of unstinting support, tolerance, sense of fun and a highly developed critical faculty made her an ideal supervisor. Her refusal, even when she had done a considerable amount of the work, to include her name on the scientific papers generated (an honourable practice rarely seen today) was deeply appreciated.
McLaren was actively involved in many research projects on infertility and embryonic development. This work involved developing the techniques needed for the successful transfer of embryos. She also studied reproductive immunology, contraception and the characteristics of chimeras produced by the fusion of different embryonic cells.
In 1974 she left Edinburgh to be the director of the Medical Research Council’s new Mammalian Development Unit at University College London. Here she carried on her research, and was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in 1986. In 1991 she became foreign secretary and vice president of the Royal Society.
In 1992 McLaren moved to the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge. She continued the research, developed in London, on primordial germ cells that mature into sperms or eggs. She described these as “the most fascinating cells of all — still deeply mysterious”. Interested in how they converted into stem cells, she studied their properties by putting them back into early embryos and monitoring their contributions to the developing adult. She compared them with the stem cells that can be obtained from early embryos. The reprogramming of germ cells into stem cells is crucial to understanding how a cell in an adult can be turned into one capable of generating many other kinds of cells. She maintained her interest in the formation of sperms and eggs, in the influence of sex chromosomes on the development of germ cells and in the activity of these chromosomes in modifying other chromosomes in the germ cells.
She was appointed a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, in
1992 and became a Fellow Commoner at Christ’s College. In 1994 she was made an honorary Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College. She was appointed DBE in 1993, and was president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1993-94.
Throughout her working life she endeavoured to promote the careers of women in the sciences, and in 1995 became president of the Association for Women in Science and Engineering. She was a trustee of the Natural History Museum London, 1994-2003, where she was much appreciated for her wisdom and vision.
Membership of the Government’s Warnock committee on human fertilisation and embryology was followed by ten years working on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority that served to regulate IVF and the research and use of human embryos.
McLaren — she always preferred to be addressed as Dr McLaren rather than Dame or Professor — received numerous honorary degrees and awards, including the Japan Prize for her work in developmental biology, the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London, the Royal Medal of the Royal Society and the Marshall Medal of the Society for the Study of Fertility. She was a foreign member of many academic institutions overseas, including the Polish Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1986 she was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists for her outstanding contribution to the field of fertility. In 1991 she became a Founder Fellow in the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution.
In addition to writing two academic books and more than 330 research papers, she served on many committees, councils and editorial boards, often as chairman or scientific adviser. They included the World Health Organisation’s Special Programme on Human Reproduction and the Panel on Sustainable Development. A lesser-known early achievement, at 9 years of age, was when, with charming confidence, she appeared with Raymond Massey and Ralph Richardson in the film Things to Come (1936) based on a story by H. G. Wells.
