By Kenneth Furie

It’s not the most important thing about her career. But the fact pops out at you, there’s no getting around it. Christa Ludwig has been singing professionally for well over 45 years. And so, when I was interviewing her by phone last winter, I began by expressing surprise at this longevity.

“Me, too!” she jumped in, laughing. Which strikes me as a genuine Christa Ludwig Moment, revealing in at least two ways.

First off, there’s the laughter, which is warm and infectious—and, in my admittedly limited experience, frequent. Ludwig seems seldom far removed from a laugh, even when she is discussing matters of painful seriousness, as she has done surprisingly freely in interviews, and certainly did on this occasion.

I wish you could hear that laugh, but in a sense you have, although perhaps not directly. Genuine good humor is an important part of her artistic personality. As she has noted, “You bring your entire experience of life to every song you sing,” and when she sings, say, Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn account of St. Anthony’s sermon to the fishes or the Witch in Hansel and Gretel, she can be hilarious because at the same time she’s being so truthfully earnest—there’s no trace of camp.

Which brings us to the second point: that with the laughter there’s never only laughter. I don’t doubt that Ludwig is genuinely surprised by her durability. After all, there are no guarantees of vocal longevity. But hers isn’t accidental, either, as she proceeds to explain. She credits the technique learned from her mother, who was her only voice teacher, and through the course of her career functioned as artistic counselor.

And again, working backwards from the performances, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to discover how self-knowing an artist this is. Or to discover the extent to which her own considerable intelligence and healthy instincts have been enhanced throughout her career by a remarkable ability to seek out and incorporate useful counsel.

It is startling, for example, to learn that she first sang Das Lied von der Erde, Mahler’s great song-symphony of resignation and parting, music that would become so closely associated with her, as early as 1954, when she was only 26. It’s not so startling when she quickly adds that of course she didn’t understand the music back then. And, at least initially, it’s confounding when she further adds that she still didn’t understand it when she made her first recording more than a decade later, with Otto Klemperer.

Confounding, because that recording ranks among the most memorable achievements of the phonograph. Along with the matchlessly vibrant contributions of the late Fritz Wunderlich (in the three tenor songs) and of Klemperer and the orchestra, we have Ludwig, in magisterially free voice, singing the three alto songs—including the climactic half-hour “Farewell”—with extraordinary eloquence and authority.

On consideration, however, maybe it isn’t so hard to imagine that Ludwig didn’t yet “understand” the music. This may simply be a tribute to the soundness of her interpretive instincts, and to the utility of her working methods and of her collaborative approach. In fact, she rerecorded Das Lied twice, with Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan, for each of whom she gave a different performance, moving from an almost eager acceptance of earthly reality with Klemperer to a more autumnal resignation with Bernstein and a wintry bleakness with Karajan.

Clearly, longevity by itself isn’t what has most distinguished Ludwig’s career. More to the point is that she has sung so effectively over such a long period. In the recordings from her late twenties we can hear an already strikingly mature artist, and up to the very end she has continued to make an impact as a singer rather than a post-vocal geriatric specimen. But if we want to get closer to what has made this career special, has made it so, well, admirable, perhaps the best place to start is at—or at any rate near—the end.

The time appointed for my first conversation with Ludwig turned out to be a significant one. The day before, February 19, 1993, after a week of fighting a cold that jeopardized the event, she had sung a farewell recital in Paris, where she has lived for some 20 years. This was the start of a carefully planned farewell circuit, stretching out more than a year that would enable her to sing goodbye in the cities that had been most important to her. The obvious emotional climax was scheduled for April 1994: the Berlin-born singer’s farewells, in opera and recital, to her adoptive spiritual home, Vienna.

On March 20, 1993, four days after her 65th birthday, with the city still digging out from the heaviest snowfall in some years, Ludwig sang her New York farewell recital, in Carnegie Hall. (This was followed shortly by her final Metropolitan Opera performances, as Fricka in Die Walküre.)

And it was a special night. The voice flowed with remarkable freedom. The communicative intent of each song—groups by Brahms, Mahler, Schumann, Wolf, and Richard Strauss—could hardly have been fuller or more solid. I don’t recall the last time I saw an audience so single-mindedly stirred and content.

It had struck me as brash, for example, to include “Ich ging mit Lust” in the Mahler group. This youthful Des Knaben Wunderhorn setting, with its bold upward intervallic leaps, had been featured in the Mahler program Ludwig recorded with Gerald Moore in 1959, and it’s still one of her most treasurable recordings. (All the Mahler songs have been reissued in EMI’s valuable four-CD set “Les Introuvables de Christa Ludwig. “) Her technical security and tonal freshness back then enabled her to make those vocal leaps with such confidence and even-scaled bloom that the song, an expression of joy in nature and love, simply sailed. It did again that night. She remains the only singer I’ve heard make this “minor” song sound like a great one.

And the encores! The regular program had ended with the hushed tones of Strauss’s “Morgen”; the encores began with the same composer’s perennially roof-raising “Zueignung,” with enough vocal power unleashed to give the ceiling a good jolt. Next, hilarious for its rich but unexaggerated zest, was Wolf’s “Wie lange schon,” with Ludwig first telling the story of the woman who had wished for a musician as a lover and wound up with—a violinist. And finally, simple, pure, and haunting, came the Brahms Lullaby. You can’t top that.

Afterward, in her dressing room, the singer seemed tired but exhilarated as she received the throng of well-wishers. When I introduced myself—all of our communications having taken place via phone and fax—she laughed as she noted that the Sunday paper in which my piece had just appeared had shown pretty much zero interest in her in the several decades since she was a fresh face on the scene. “You have to be either retired or dead,” she said, (yes!) laughing.

Given those alternatives, it’s apparent why she was able to laugh. And she left no doubt that she was looking forward to retirement. The morning of the Paris farewell recital, she said, she woke up smiling, “because it was the beginning of my end,” after all those decades of living only for her voice, of not being able to go to a movie without worrying about catching a cold, of not being able just to extend her idea of real friendship—“not having a life.” (This sense of disengagement, she has said, produces a strong identification with Mahler’s Rückert setting “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.”) The emotional separation from the career has been made easier by the degree of control she has been able to exercise over the form of her leave-taking.

And yet, in that “retired or dead” business, isn’t there a sign of something not quite right? Why is it necessary to meet one of those conditions to qualify for media attention? There are other ways of qualifying, of course. You can become a “personality,” which not only isn’t the same thing as being an artist but pretty much excludes being an artist. You can throw tantrums, and become celebrated as a prima donna.

This Ludwig has chosen not to do. Oh, she had a mini-fling with the publicity machines earlier in her career. For a time, she and her first husband, the bass-baritone Walter Berry, were promoted as a hot team, and in the years when she flirted most energetically with the soprano repertory, she got more prima-donna-style attention.

Indeed, when I asked her about this suspiciously collegial history of hers, this habit of simply showing up for work prepared and then doing the job, she first offered a practical explanation and then returned to her status as a mezzo-soprano. The practical explanation is that she couldn’t afford to waste energy on nonproductive displays of ego. She needed that energy for singing. But it also occurred to her that “We mezzo-sopranos are seconda donnas,” adding that she had hardly known a mezzo “with a really ugly character.”

It may be too that some of her artistic self-discipline comes from having been born into the profession. Her father, Anton Ludwig, began his career as a tenor (he sang at the Met) and later taught and served as an operatic administrator. Her mother, Eugenie Besalla, was a mezzo-soprano who had “the same voice”—the daughter has recalled that, if she or her mother was singing in the next room, her father couldn’t tell which it was.

She also comes honestly by the temptation to the big soprano roles, to which her mother succumbed, singing the likes of Elektra and Isolde in Aachen with the young Herbert von Karajan, with unfortunate vocal consequences that became an object lesson. Years later, when Christa first undertook such roles as Fidelio and Strauss’s Dyer’s Wife with none other than Karajan, her mother underscored the lesson, pointing out how long a conductor’s career is compared with a singer’s. And for all the success she had in selected soprano roles—until she gave them up in the wake of her little-known vocal crisis in the mid-70s—she never dropped her guard.

Isolde, for example, so clearly tempted her that she learned the role, and sang it for her mother and Zinka Milanov, who had become a trusted advisor during her New York visits. One suspects that she could have decided well enough on her own that Isolde, although manageable for her, was too dangerous, but that the temptation was great enough to warrant marshalling external persuasion from such heavy hitters. At Karajan’s urging she also learned the Walküre Brünnhilde, and withdrew within weeks of the premiere. Karajan, to his credit, was understanding, and promptly recast her as Fricka—a role she has continued singing up to the very end.

My favorite Ludwig story—“there’s a good story,” she said by way of introduction, and as usual she was right—involves Isolde and Karajan, the second of the three conductors who most influenced her, along with the first of them, Karl Böhm. She mentioned to Böhm that Karajan had asked her to sing Isolde, and Böhm reacted with shock, indignation, and outrage. Karajan was a “criminal,” he said, to ask such a thing. Then, after a pause, the crafty Böhm added, “You know, with me you could do it.”

It was Böhm who was responsible for Ludwig’s momentous move from Frankfurt to Vienna in 1955. She had auditioned for him singing Verdi’s mezzo heavyweights Azucena and Ulrica, and he told her, “With me you will sing Cherubino.” And sure enough, the call to Vienna came, and she sang such roles as Octavian and Cherubino and Dorabella. The Così fan tutte they recorded in 1955 for Decca/London, despite the heavy cuts, captures both at their best, and is perhaps the best souvenir of Ludwig’s voice in the brighter coloration that within a few years darkened into essentially the same instrument we’ve heard since.

Ludwig credits Böhm with developing her habits of musical precision, and her singing has always been underpinned by rock-solid musicianship. She is also grateful for his knowledge of voices, his sense of what music was right and wrong for her at particular stages in her career. Eventually, she would sing a remarkable Brangäne with him at Bayreuth, opposite the Isolde of Birgit Nilsson (fortunately recorded live by DG). He would persuade her to take on Verdi’s Lady Macbeth, which she herself didn’t know how she would sing. For help with it she turned to Milanov, who advised her to sing it as a bel canto role, which obviously clicked for her. That 1973 Vienna performance is electrifying.

And of course with Böhm she scored her great triumph as the Dyer’s Wife, when the Met undertook its first Frau ohne Schatten during the first season in the new house in 1966. She had sung the role before, with Karajan in Vienna in 1964. And Karajan’s care in pacing and balancing may well have helped enable her to sing it. Still, on the evidence of the well-mannered but not exactly inspirational Vienna broadcast, it wasn’t until the New York production that the role really came together. And what seems clearer in hindsight is that over the seasons in which the Met Frau ensemble was kept together, Ludwig may have been the key to the opera’s success. Not because she upstaged her colleagues but because the character can so easily be so unsympathetic, and because it’s so important that the audience see her situation through her eyes. She may be constantly complaining, but look how much she has to complain about.

Strauss has always been an important composer for her. There aren’t many other singers who have approached his operas with this combination of beauty of sound and a deep understanding of their human sympathy and complexity. When she finally made the transition from Octavian to the Marschallin in Rosenkavalier, in Vienna with Leonard Bernstein, the last of her “three conductors,” instead of indulging in the customary sighing and posturing, she tapped into the character’s real underlying sadness as no other Marschallin I’ve heard has.

Fortunately, Columbia (now Sony Classical) recorded the Rosenkavalier. Ludwig and Berry and Bernstein had already made a stunning recording of Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn songs, and the association with the conductor remained strong after the breakup of her marriage to Berry. Ludwig credits Bernstein with helping her understand the depths of Mahler, whose music had first been urged on her by—who else?—her mother, at a time when the composer’s music was banned in Germany because of his Jewish roots. (And at a time when, even apart from the ban, the music had hardly gotten much circulation.)

It’s interesting that Ludwig has never really been thought of as a Strauss or Mahler “specialist”—perhaps because she has always approached them for the human content rather than as “specialties.” And, un-obvious choices as they are to figure so prominently in a singer’s career retrospective, they underscore the un-obviousness of the career.

Ludwig has of course sung lots of other music, from Bach and Gluck through Berg and beyond. (Bach has occasioned some of her most beautiful singing; listen to Karl Forster’s EMI St. John Passion, Klemperer’s EMI St. Matthew, and Karl Richter’s DG Christmas Oratorio.) For a voice of this size—really a lyric rather than dramatic-weight mezzo—she has had surprising success with Wagner; on records, in addition to the Brangäne, think of her Venus, Kundry, Orrrud, Fricka, and Waltraute. A measure of her success in opera, concert, and recital is that nobody thinks to type her as an “opera” or “lieder” singer.

And for all that she is clearly most at home in the repertory of her own language, she has sung numerous French and Italian roles, with results as distinctive as the Vienna Lady Macbeth. She and Berry even ventured memorably into Hungarian, singing Judith and Bluebeard in Istvan Kertesz’s Decca/London Bluebeard’s Castle. The common thread is the remarkable consistency with which she has used her distinctive vocal capability and her formidable musicianship and intelligence to bring music truthfully to life.

There is, however, one occasion on which Ludwig freely admits having shown up for work unprepared. In the difficult period following the breakup of her first marriage, she arrived in New York in 197 1 to sing Charlotte in Werther, and was unsure enough of the French text to need remedial work with the director of the production, Paul-Emile Deiber. As she tells it, “He arrived at my hotel, and we were married, and it’s been wonderful.”

These last 20 years, Deiber, a man of enormous courtliness and charm, has been her most trusted listener and advisor, counseling her in the time of her vocal crisis to continue singing only that which she could still sing well. They both seem extraordinarily nice people, which might not count for much in the absence of such considerable accomplishment. It’s comforting to be reminded, though, that every now and then nice guys finish first.

Kenneth Furie writes about the arts .for publications including the New York Times Arts & Leisure section.