Editing Walter Legge (section)

===Last years===
Legge's employer, EMI, tolerated his independent ways for many years, but in the 1960s attempts were made to curtail his freedom of choice of repertoire, and finally in 1964 he resigned. His memoirs, edited by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and published in 1982, set out his disenchantment with EMI and its increasingly powerful internal committees: 
:I am convinced that in the arts, committees are useless. What is necessary are people like Karajan, [[John Culshaw|Culshaw]] and me; we know not only how to achieve the best artistic results but how to attract the public and carry out the whole operation with carefully chosen collaborators. Democracy is fatal for the arts; it leads only to chaos or the achievement of new and lower common denominators of quality.<ref>Schwarzkopf, p. 83</ref>

[[File:E. Schwarzkopf-Legge.jpg|thumb|Grave in Zumikon]]
In retirement Legge, together with Schwarzkopf, gave many joint masterclasses for young singers but he failed to find a permanent job. He was offered, and accepted, the directorship of the [[Wexford Festival Opera|Wexford Festival]], but he suffered a disabling heart attack in 1967 before he could take up the post, and he withdrew. He continued to supervise the EMI recordings made by his wife, but the breach with the company was complete when in 1977 and 1979 he produced her last recordings not for EMI but for [[Decca Records|Decca]], EMI's great rival.<ref>Schwarzkopf, p. 288</ref>

Legge attended Schwarzkopf's final appearance, a recital at [[Zürich]] Opera House on 19 March 1979, despite having suffered a heart attack two days earlier.<ref name=davis>Richard Davis, ''Geoffrey Parsons: Among Friends'', 2006, ch. 10</ref> Three days after the recital, he died in [[Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat]], France, at the age of 72. He was cremated, and his ashes were initially placed near those of Hugo Wolf in Vienna, as he had requested.<ref name=davis/> After Elisabeth Schwarzkopf's death in 2006, their ashes were buried next to her parents in [[Zumikon]] near Zürich, where she had lived from 1982 to 2003.