So now I come to the end, the very last recording Schwarzkopf made, not, as it happens, for EMI, but for Decca. Walter Legge’s rift with EMI was now complete and Ray Minshull of Decca approached Legge, saying he would like at least one Schwarzkopf recording in their catalogue. It was recorded at sessions in London and Vienna in 1977 and 1979, by which time, Schwarzkopf would have been 63.

It was called simply, To my friends., and Schwarzkopf had this to say about it, “In that there is already the excuse that it’s only for you who like me. Others may find great fault in it and rightly so, but maybe you like me enough to have it.”

Well I do like Mme Schwarzkopf and, having listened almost exclusively to her for the last month, I can safely say the overused description of her singing as ‘mannered’ has never been so far off the mark. What I do hear is a superior intelligence and musicality, allied to an attention to detail, which brings music alive in a way that other more penny plain interpretations do not. Very occasionallly, the intellect gets in the way of the song. One misses, for instance, the natural simplcity of, say, Elisabeth Schumann, but in Lieder, and in Wolf in particular. her quest to find just the right inflections is what makes me keep coiming back. It’s also interesting to note how her interpretations can vary from one performance to another.

The voice on this last record is certainly not the voice of a young woman, but it remains within its slightly reduced range and dynamic, a voice mercifully free of wobble or excessive vibrato. It may not be the disc I would choose to demonstrate Schwarzkopf at her greatest, but I can safely say I am very pleased to have it in my collection as a fitting end to a great career on disc. In songs by Wolf, Loewe, Grieg and Brahms, she still demonstrates her ability to embrace and convey a wide range of emotions.

The record was completed in January 1979 and she gave her last performance at a recital in Zurich the following March. Three days later, Legge died and she abruptly cancelled all further engagements. The voice fell silent without Legge’s constant encouragement. ‘”You can do it, meine Schwatz, you can do it, you sing that – you’ll do it better.” He was wrong there, I wouldn’t have been better than people in full bloom of the voice. He thought there would be some moments which would be more memorable. But if you don’t have the voice you cannot put over what you would like to – you make ways round it technically, and by that time it has already vanished.’ Schwarzkopf was nothing if not pragmatic.

It was often said of her, disparagingly, that she was ‘her master’s voice.’ Maybe, in some ways she was. It was an extraordinary partnership and it is no wonder that the performance side of her life also ended with Legge’s death.