Elisabeth Schumann, by Gerd Puritz (Grant and Cutler, £14.99 in UK)

There are surviving recordings of Elisabeth Schumann singing, but she is a remote figure for today's music lovers. A round faced, slightly buck toothed fraulein from Saxony, she belonged spiritually to the Belle Epoque and was a good friend of Richard Strauss. Her tempestuous affair with the great conductor, Klemperer, was a traumatic chapter in her life, since Klemperer was notoriously manic depressive. Schumann became almost an adoptive Viennese in the years between the wars, but in 1936 she emigrated to America and died there in 1952 as an American citizen. Her voice, it seems, survived virtually intact into her old age.