BIOGRAPHIES of acclaimed opera singers generally begin with a bit of harmless scene setting a poverty stricken childhoods perhaps, or a spot of prodigious showing off by the artist, aged three and a half.
In his study of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, however, Alan Jefferson skips the usual pastoral prelude and gets stuck straight into what might be called his exposition, with the news that at the age of 20 his subject not only joined the National Socialist, Party at the Berlin Hochschule where she was enrolled as a student, but that she became for one term a Fuhrerin of the National Socialist German Students' Association.
Schwarzkopf's duties as Fuhrerin included collecting funds for the Winterhilfe (Winter Aid), one of the National Socialists' favourite charities; she was also expected to keep an eye on her fellow students "to ensure that they pulled their weight and said nothing disparaging about the Fuhrer or the Party".
By 1940 she was a full member of the Nazi Party and signed off her letters with "Heil Hitler". Questioned about all this by the Allies after the war, she gave such unsatisfactory replies not to put too fine a point on it, she lied on four separate occasions - that she was blacklisted for many years and could appear at the Vienna State Opera only as a "last minute replacement" if no other soprano was available.
It is a chapter of her life that Schwarzkopf at 80 still as beautiful as ever and still a major figure on EMI's back catalogue would doubtless prefer to forget, and by spelling it out with clinical precision in the opening chapters of his biography Jefferson has perhaps put undue emphasis on what was, by the standards of the time, surely relatively innocuous realpolitik.
What will come as almost as great a shock to the soprano's many fans will be the discovery in later chapters that Schwarzkopf, the very picture of aristocratic calm in her best known stage roles and on her Lieder recordings, was absolutely ruthless in her pursuit of success and not at all averse to throwing a violent tantrum or two when it suited her.
But Jefferson is not slow to give credit where he feels credit is due: over and over again he is generous in his praise of his subject's vocal achievements, whether it be her "wonderfully vivacious delivery" on a particular recording or her "creamy voiced, utterly poised" account of Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni.
This is no hatchet job, but a sober, balanced account of the sort which is rare in the overheated, overstated world of the opera biography.
On the other hand it's impossible not to feel that in his effort to tell the National Socialist story Jefferson has passed up on a number of potentially interesting avenues of exploration.
It would have been fascinating, for example, to have seen him develop the theme of the contrast between Schwarzkopf and Maria Callas, unquestionably the leading divas of the 1950s and 1960s and possibly - in the light of Jefferson's other revelations here - not such fundamentally different animals as has hitherto been supposed.
And there is undoubtedly a good deal more to be said on the subject of Schwarzkopf's marriage to the record producer Walter Legge, who treated her - in public, at least - with relentless boorishness.
On balance, though, Jefferson's book provides a timely reminder of the complex political undercurrents which tugged at the world of European art music during and after the second World War.
Schwarzkopf's is by no means the only name to be associated, however obliquely, with the ideals of National Socialism: those of Richard Strauss, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Herbert von Karajan, Karl Bohm, Hans Knappertsbusch, Hans Hotter and Werner Kraus are also to be found on Goebbels's Gottbegnadete Liste ("Those blessed by God") from August 1944.
Whatever these superb musicians may have done to earn such a dubious honour, it pales into insignificance beside the activities of Goebbels and his cohorts - and which of us can honestly say that, in that time and in that place, we wouldn't have done the same? {CORRECTION} 96013100048
