Tells the story of this beautiful soprano who has been deemed one of the greatest singers of the last century through a review of her career on the opera stage and the noted roles she played, enhanced with more than 170 photos of the singer, her costumes, and private estate.

"The portrait of an ambitious singer who put her career ahead of everything, including politics." -- Library Journal

Michael Kater's work probes the relationship of music to society and politics in the Nazi regime, 1933-1945. It addresses the question of whether or not the Nazi regime, which utilized music and musicians for the regime's own political purposes, controlled the musicians and the music, or whether these remained in some measure autonomous.

Is music removed from politics? To what ends, beneficent or malevolent, can music and musicians be put? In short, when human rights are grossly abused and politics turned to fascist demagoguery, can art and artists be innocent? These questions and their implications are explored in Michael Kater's broad survey of musicians and the music they composed and performed during the Third Reich. Great and small--from Valentin Grimm, a struggling clarinetist, to Richard Strauss, renowned composer--are examined by Kater, sometimes in intimate detail, and the lives and decisions of Nazi Germany's professional musicians are laid out before the reader. Kater tackles the issue of whether the Nazi regime, because it held music in crassly utilitarian regard, acted on musicians in such a way as to consolidate or atomize the profession. Kater's examination of the value of music for the regime and the degree to which the regime attained a positive propaganda and palliative effect through the manner in which it manipulated its musicians, and by extension, German music, is of importance for understanding culture in totalitarian systems. This work, with its emphasis on the social and political nature of music and the political attitude of musicians during the Nazi regime, will be the first of its kind. It will be of interest to scholars and general readers eager to understand Nazi Germany, to music lovers, and to anyone interested in the interchange of music and politics, culture and ideology.

A history of a golden age of recording and a lively memoir of the brilliant man who influenced it more than any other single person.

Wieder draws from over one hundred interviews of people who knew and worked with Studs to create a multidimensional portrait of a run-of-the-mill guy from Chicago who, in public life, became an acclaimed author and storyteller, while managing, in his private life, to remain a mensch. --From publisher description.