Lisa Della Casa - Later Career

Later Career

Lisa Della Casa admitted she did not like the "music business", with its intrigues and vanities. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau said of her that after hearing a performance he was astonished and wanted to congratulate her, but she was still so involved in her role that she never heard his compliments. She also smoked during her career, with defiance: "Why not?" ("Warum nicht?") In a 1963 BBC television interview conducted in English, when the soprano was in mid-career, she was asked if smoking were not bad for her health. Smilingly she replied: "You know, while in Vienna, I went to a special singers' doctor 'it is the singing which is more dangerous than the smoking', and I smoke longer than I sing."

She made several complete opera recordings mainly for the Decca label: her interpretations of Countess Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro (Erich Kleiber) and the title role in Arabella (by Sir Georg Solti) are regarded as among the finest recorded. She made the first commercial recording of Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs (Karl Böhm) in 1953 for Decca, and many classical music lovers claim this recording to be the greatest available. Her Elvira, sung to perhaps the greatest Don Giovanni of his time, Cesare Siepi, is available both on CD and DVD. She recorded a memorable Countess under the direction of Erich Leinsdorf at the Met, starring the American bass-baritone Giorgio Tozzi in the title role.

As an interpreter of lieder, she often performed with the German pianist Sebastian Peschko and Hungarian Arpad Sandor. She made several appearances in the acclaimed US television edition of the Bell Telephone Hour and appeared regularly on Swiss television, giving interviews and performances, as well as participating in game shows. In October 2007 and November 2008, Della Casa, members of her family and her colleagues agreed to be interviewed as part of a Liebe einer Diva, (Loves of a Diva), a German documentary film by Thomas Voigt and Wolfgang Wunderlich about the soprano's life and career. The film was last shown on 5 April 2010 on German television channel 3SAT and has ample footage of Della Casa's career, as well as rare television footage.

She died on 10 December 2012 in Münsterlingen, Switzerland. The city of Salzburg flew a black flag on news of her death.