There has been a muted response to the death this week of the eminent soprano Edith Mathis, Mozart star of the Karajan years at the Vienna Opera and, later on, one of the most exquisite Lieder singers of record. Never as famous as Schwarzkopf or Christa Ludwig, Mathis shunned flamboyance and focussed on the musical and emotional core of a song. She was deeply, if not loudly, loved.
The absence of instant obituaries for Mathis in English and French-language media is puzzling, though not astonishing. There is a tendency outside central Europe to marginalise Lieder, belittling an art that is, of its nature, appreciated by intellectual elites. Mathis, not Callas, was their darling.
Jürgen Kesting sums her up rather well in his obit in the Frankfurter Allgemeine: The voice of Edith Mathis, born in Lucerne, was a gift to lovers of what is lyrical and quiet in the world of music and, to put it paradoxically, to music lovers who think with their hearts. The seraphic beauty of her singing was the sensual manifestation of the spiritual.
image: Instagram
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