Little need be said about Maria Gerhart’s life or career. She was born in Vienna and died there, made her debut there at the Volksoper in 1917 and her farewell at the Staatsoper in 1939. There were brief residencies in Berlin, Prague, and Frankfurt between 1919 and 1923, summers in Salzburg, and appreciated guest appearances elsewhere in Europe, but hers was a Viennese career, fondly remembered for its long and reliable provision to one demanding audience of the goods every opera house needs from the Koloratursopran. As a “house singer” rather than a superstar, she made far too few recordings; all the commercial ones are gathered here, for the first time on CD. Every one shows that the goods were hers to deliver.

That includes high notes, of course, and hers were among the best: clean, easily taken and sustained, vibrant, sounding like a delicious continuation of the voice rather than a trick register added to it. This was, even then, somewhat rarer than it might seem, and there are some great international names in the record collector’s pantheon who would have to yield pride of place to Gerhart when it comes to top D, E-flat, E, and F. Just below, in the more normal soprano realm of high B and C, her sheer ease and beauty are a constant pleasure.

But the singer’s merits did not wait to show themselves above the treble clef. Also expected in her repertory: musical liveliness and charm; beauty in ordinary midrange melody; the clear and intelligible diction of a soubrette, and mastery of the old bel canto skill-set. All of these are delightfully easy to find in her recordings, and in some of them she was superlative.

For one thing, her staccato singing comes about as close as anyone’s to flawless tuning, right up to the top of the range. For another, she almost never has the scoops of pitch or the squeezed-sounding attacks with which some of her compatriots were prone to ease into a note; and her trills were marvelous. Charles Burney had marveled at those of Handel’s star Faustina Cuzzoni: “so beautiful a shake, that she put it in motion upon short notice, just when she would.” He could have been describing what we hear from Gerhart in Mozart’s “L’amerò” (even in the difficult low register), the cadenza in “Saper vorreste” (including one on high A maintained for twelve seconds without a falter), or the Frühlingsstimmen waltz (either version), especially notable for being “put in motion upon short notice.” The most spectacular of all, earning a mention to itself in John Steane’s wonderful book The Grand Tradition, is the trill Strauss asked Zerbinetta to sing on a high D. Gerhart’s can very safely be called the best recorded realization of that feat; as far as I know, it remains the only one.

Zerbinetta also comes across as a person, and that is made possible not just by beauty of voice but by the clarity and zest of verbal utterance. Practically every word Gerhart sings is instantly intelligible, and that is true throughout her records, however unfamiliar the piece or the translation. Her peppery delivery sometimes reminds me of the great operetta diva of the previous generation, Annie Dirkens. The Ariadne scene is slightly abridged to fit on two sides (eighteen bars omitted at the side-break; twenty-one more to skip one episode in the rondo; ten at the end), and this is a pity, because one of the pages removed contains the ascent to high E that Gerhart might have sung better than anyone. But cuts notwithstanding, this is probably the most satisfying traversal yet recorded of Strauss’s parody/tribute to the multi-movement bel canto scenas that the great coloraturas kept alive even at the nadir of critical respect for traditional Italian opera.

And power? It’s not the quality that stands out to the ear, but it must have been there: like all coloraturas in the German-speaking world at that time, she was expected to sing the heroines of Il trovatore and Madama Butterfly, and did so regularly. We can hear how in the excerpts here: she sings them as she sang everything else, with an easy lyrical line and strong but youthful-sounding and unforced top notes. The low register is not as potently developed as it was in Italian and Spanish coloraturas of the era, but it can bear energy of declamation; the high Cs of the duet with the Count di Luna (including an extra one) are exciting, and the forte coda of “Un bel dì” has real thrust and energy.

In the duets with Hans Duhan, notwithstanding the rather plodding tempo of the two Mozart items, we enjoy another benefit of both singers’ clean definition of tone: the voices actually blend, something impossible when vibratos are slow or over-wide. That is also one of the satisfactions of “L’amerò,” where she joins the under-recorded violinist Gustav Liebisch, active in Vienna in the teens and twenties of the century: he matches his vibrato and trills precisely and deftly to hers, and even sometimes his portamento, in the elaborate Lauterbach cadenza that all German-speaking singers used in this aria.

The flip side of the Mozart is the most elusive item in the series, reissued here for the first time anywhere: an “Ave Maria” by the Munich-born violinist and composer Fritz Neupert (1893–1943). It is a surprisingly satisfying piece of music, with a prominent part for Liebisch, some Straussian harmonies that keep its lyricism from falling into routine, and gorgeous pianissimo endings for both singer and obbligato soloist.

Besides this “Ave,” the least familiar pieces are the two arias from Weber’s Abu Hassan. If vocal collectors know them at all, it is probably from the 1944 Berlin radio performance with young Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who is at her very best: radiant tone, elegant phrasing, complete technical command, never a hint of mannerism, not a note out of place. It’s a great compliment to both singers that neither surpasses the other in any of that. (Both sound as though they are right at the limit in descending to a contralto A-flat, but even there they acquit themselves with decent firmness.)

The differences? Well, in Gerhart’s acoustic orchestra the difficult cello solo is given to a bassoonist who really deserved label credit for his virtuoso performance. He might be Hugo Burghauser (1896–1982), who was the Vienna Philharmonic’s principal at the time, and who later played in Toscanini’s NBC Symphony and then at the Metropolitan Opera until 1965. But the main contrast is that Schwarzkopf confines herself to the score while Gerhart interpolates amazing cadenzas: in the first aria, one of the easiest and prettiest sustained high Fs ever recorded by a coloratura; in the second, yet another demonstration of those pinpoint staccati, and a flawless eleven-second trill on high C. Trivia for canary-fanciers? Maybe, if you insist. But as Gerhart reminds us, there is a reason the canary›s song is a proverbial metaphor for delight.

©2026 Will Crutchfield