Singing for Hitler: A new biography of Frida Leider does not skate over the moral issues of the great singer’s wartime career, finds Barry Emslie

Review of Eva Rieger, Frida Leider: Sängerin im Zwiespalt ihrer Zeit, in collaboration with Peter Sommeregger (Georg Olms Verlag, 2016).

March 2017, Volume 11, Number 1, 89–92.

Perhaps there is no book genre as constricted as biography. True, a limited amount of playfulness with the order of events can be indulged, but basically the writer is imprisoned by facts and chronology. And surely this is particularly true when the subject was a famous performer. There one is faced with a pre-programmed trudge through youth, early promise and disappointment, great success and then – one hopes – tragic decline. The début dates, the repertoire changes, the gushing of the critics, the adoration of the fans, possible difficulties with rivals, signpost the CV of the star. So while it is the great virtue of the autobiography that the author is allowed to – and certainly should – lie through his teeth, the commensurate tragedy for the biographer is that she may not.