Use this page to stay current on news about Lotte Lehmann. I try to post the news as it arrives. As you scroll down the page you’ll find items that came in as far back as 2011.
Edward Downes on LL
Edward Downes (1911 – 2001) was an American musicologist, professor, radio personality, and music critic. He was the host of the Texaco Opera Quiz on the Metropilitan Opera radio broadcasts for nearly for years.
Downes remembers:
Lehmann was the only singer I ever met who seemed to be exactly the same offstage as she was onstage. She always sounded spontaneous onstage, whether it was Abseulicher! [from Fidelio] or some casual remark. She was always totally echt… there. As if somehow it just happens in this way at this moment. That was very powerful. It was powerful enough so that it extended to her physical actions aside from singing. Particularly in Tannhäuser. One quite short moment was at the very end of Elisabeth’s role, after Allmachtige Jungfrau, when Wolfram comes on and says “May I escort you back to the castle” or whatever. She doesn’t answer with words but is supposed to gesture that the place she is going to is “up there” not “over there.” It’s a somewhat pretentious stage direction. But there are only a few bars left from that to her exit, and a relatively short distance back stage, where you saw her in profile, she made an exit in a diagonal, not singing, no gestures, just walking, and it was one of the most vivid moments I remember in opera.
She was like this in every performance. This moment was always magical. Very close to the end of her career, when I was briefly a music critic for The Boston Transcript, Lehmann came to Boston and gave a recital. It must have been one of the Morning Musicales. I hadn’t seen her in quite a long time. Since it was a morning concert, I didn’t need to rush away to write my review and I knew her somewhat. Not well, but I knew her well enough that I had been to her house for lunch. She was a warm and gracious woman, I decided to go and see her after the performance. I knew it was long enough so she probably wouldn’t remember me, but I had dined with her and her family a few times at the Salzburg Festival, and in New York I knew her well enough so that she asked me one time why I thought the Met didn’t give her more performances. My only answer was that they had this idea that for Italian opera it should be Italian singers, French for French and so forth. I didn’t really know the answer. In any case, I knew her well enough that she had asked my opinion. However, many years had gone by. Now in Boston after the recital, she was sitting at a table chatting with people and shaking hands and autographing things and she saw me come in. Somehow, I knew she recognized me, but not sure from where. But she gestured and half got out of her seat and said to me ‘Sie hat nicht ewig lange gesehen!’ Which was very tactful but it was even with the little social fib implied, still a spontaneous and honest reaction. I think this was very characteristic of everything she did.
Lehman herself mentioned in a talk she gave that when speaking to Richard Strauss he complimented her and she was doing the ‘oh, you’re so kind’ and she said ‘Aber meister, ich schwimme’ meaning I’m cheating [swimming] through your music and Strauss said ‘Ja, aber sie schwimme so schön!’ Apparently, she knew him quite well – she was after all the first Composer in the revised Ariadne and the first Farberin in Die Frau ohne Schatten, and she said “I sang that opera for ten years and I never figured out what was going on!”
Lehmann was a regular visitor to Boston during Edward Downes’ tenure on The Boston Transcript. In 1939, he reviewed her Jordan Hall recital:
30 October 1939—
It is only artists of the stature of Lehmann who are able to supply that something new we demand simply by giving a great performance of a familiar composition. And she does it, not by making poor defenseless Schubert stand on his head, nor by doing something startling and sensational with Brahms. She does it by penetrating to the very core of the composer’s thought. What stands revealed to us then is not a clever idea that Lehmann had, but Schubert or Brahms himself recalled in all the freshness of primal inspiration.
Lotte Lehmann returned to Boston to sing her famous Marschallin in Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier at the Boston Opera House. Edward Downes reviewed the performance in The Transcript:
In the ten years since this writer first heard the unforgettable Rosenkavalier of the Vienna State Opera; Lotte Lehmann’s Marschallin has changed. If it no longer has quite the same opulence of voice, her impersonation has grown in depth and subtlety. It has become even more intense and moving than it was. There are Marchallins who are more naturally aristocratic, but none more poignantly human. Last night Mme. Lehmann lived her part as did no one else on stage. The gentle dignity with which she covers her agony at the thought of growing old, of losing Octavian, her vision of herself as the old Princess, die alte Fuerstin Resi, the heartbreaking simplicity of the pantomime that closes the first act and the noble gesture of renunciation in the final trio – these are memories of Lehmann to be cherished, for we shall not see them again soon.
LL Interview 1967
Here is a WBUR (Boston) interview with Lehmann broadcast on 27 January 1967. The program was called: Hall of Song: The “Met,” 1883-1966. The Lehmann portion of the broadcast begins at around 5 minutes.
John Amis on Lotte Lehmann
In 2021 John Amis put together a program of Lehmann’s singing called Lotte Lehmann: Vintage Years which can be found on YouTube.
LL sings Brahms to Koalas
LL Remembers Bruno Walter
Pianist Remembers LL
Here is, Mitsuko Uchida, another pianist with fond Lehmann memories.
Teaching Methods
Here is an article from the Thai Rangsit Music Journal that aims to present short biographies, teaching methods, and conceptual ideas of the legendary classical vocal pedagogues Nicola Vaccai, Mathilde Marchesi, and Lotte Lehmann.
TIME Magazine Review
Music: More!
February 27, 1950
“One must take things lightly, holding and taking with a light heart and light hands—holding and letting go . . .”
These words of sage advice, sung to her mirror image by the aging Marschallin in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, are largely ignored by grand-opera stars. But to 61-year-old German-born Soprano Lotte Lehmann, who for 25 years sang them with unsurpassed eloquence, they have long had the weight of dogma.
Although her last singing of the Marschallin at the Metropolitan in 1945 brought her a 20-minute ovation, she decided soon afterward that it was time to “let go.” Two years ago she resolved to give up opera and operatic arias completely, sing only less strenuous lieder. She limited her concert tours to two months a year, spent the remaining ten months at her California home. When she wasn’t singing, she painted watercolors, fired ceramics of her own design in her home kiln, worked on her fifth book, Of Heaven, Hell and Hollywood.
Last week Lotte Lehmann, in the East for recitals and her first one-man show of paintings, went back on her resolution. To honor her good friend Richard Strauss, who died last summer (TIME, Sept. 19), and to mark her 50th Manhattan recital in a decade, she decided to sing once more the first-act monologues from her most famous role, the Marschallin.
To Lehmann fans the performance in Manhattan’s Town Hall had the air of a religious rite. They sat devout and mouse-quiet while the singer, dressed in sober black, her chestnut hair caught back in a plain bun, leaned gently against the curve of the piano. Without properties, costume or conspicuous gesture, Soprano Lehmann recreated the aging Viennese beauty with her oldtime fire and finesse.
For a minute after she sang her final words of wistful resignation, the audience was silent, then burst into seat-rattling applause. At intermission Lehmann had said, her eyes shining: “Fifty concerts! Aren’t you tired of me?” At recital’s end, the audience answered with cries of “More! More!” They brought her back for three encores.
By week’s end Lotte Lehmann had sung four sell-out recitals, closed her one-man painting show with most of her 63 paintings and ceramics sold. This week she was heading west for concert dates in Milwaukee and Chicago, then back home.
An Italian Appreciation of LL
Daniele Palma has written a rather extensive appreciation of Lehmann (in Italian). It is well-documented and expresses a wide range of opinions about Lehmann’s singing and interpretations.
Someone to Listen to
On this 17 June 2025 that we’ve learned of the passing of Alfred Brendel, the following paragraph from his student, Imogen Cooper, seems appropriate:
Soon after my return to London I heard Alfred Brendel playing Schubert and Chopin at the Austrian Institute. It was fascinating. I went up to him afterwards and said, “I must work with you or I’ll die”. He answered, “Why don’t you live and come to Vienna?” The experience changed my life. He gave me time without parameters, we would work for hours on end, then we would sit down and listen to Furtwängler, Fischer, Cortot, the Busch Quartet, Kempff, Lotte Lehmann . . . It was an education, and an enriching experience. He was absolutely uncompromising about how he felt things should be, but also completely convincing, articulate and eloquent. It was a privilege and I learned a huge amount from him: how to listen, how to be aware of what I was doing, the meaning and shape of the phrase and not just the notes. It was a seminally important time for me and formed the basis of my adult music-making.
LL at the New Met
We have a short (interrupted) interview with Mme Lehmann (preceded by the First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson).
Enthusiastic Review
Lehmann’s agents and promoters could hardly have written a more positive review than this one from Sydney, Australia’s Wireless Weekly where Curt Prerauer wrote the following for the section called “The Music Critic”.
SYDNEY: Friday, May 7, 1937. THE MUSIC CRITIC
LOTTE LEHMANN gave her first recital in the Town Hall, Thursday, April 22. Any expectations, however high they may have been, were surpassed by the singer’s art. We have been hearing many artists, some of them of the “world-famous” kind, in recent years, but, with the exception of a conductor, nobody came near the impression Mme. Lehmann made upon me. I knew her from Berlin, but the new impression (which I knew only from hearsay) was that Mme. Lehmann is as perfect as a singer of lieder as she is on the operatic stage. Again it struck me how much feeling pulses in every word she pronounces. It is not an expression she has “learnt,” but an expression that she must give, and were it even in spite of herself. But this is not the case either, because Mme. Lehmann emanates such a wonderful personality that nobody can help being impressed by it. Every word emerge in its most secret meaning, she has thought about every tiniest shade of color a vowel, a consonant must get in order to convey the spirit of the music and the words, and it is the highest fulfilment of art I have ever heard. I should not hesitate to make a most daring comparison: Lotte Lehmann is the Toscanini among singers. Her expression, with which I have dealt first, because expression is the main thing in music, while being as perfect as it can be, makes never the impression of coming from the brain. The whole, wonderful, sweet person Lotte Lehmann seems to consist of nothing but expression, whether she sings or talks, or whether you are simply contented with looking at her. Her technique (but this should go without saying) is as perfect as her expression. It shows complete mastership of top, lower, and middle register, as a matter of fact, there are no differences noticeable at all. Her manners with the audience, though she has sung a lot in America, are as natural as possible, and perhaps this forms a part of the terrific impression she makes upon us all: One feels always personally addressed by her, and not from the platform to the audience, but as from one human being to the other. Lotte Lehmann’s art of building a programme is wonderful and corresponds to the highest standards everywhere. That she had to put in two operatic items was not her fault, but that of the A.B.C. [Australian Broadcasting Corporation], which asked her to do so. Lotte Lehmann agreed, of course. Among her items were some of the “old war-horses.” She is right in including them. She leads them back to the time when they were still fresh and young war-horses. Should one sing them? Of course, one should, if one is able to sing them, to interpret them as Lotte Lehmann does. Only in the mouth of the average artist they are unbearable and hackneyed. Let me make it a strong point: Unless you are able to sing them as Lehmann does, keep away. (And you are not able to do it in the same way, you know?) Among her songs, however, were also some which were produced for the first time in Australia; an extra (“Heimkehr vom Feste.” by Leo Blech) proved to be a most charming children’s song (I have wished to hear it again, oh, how long), one item by Emoe Balogh, and one by Emmy Worth, the latter an extra. I should like to write still many things about this greatest singer the world seems to have at present, and yet I do not know where to start. No word of highest praise is adequate to depict the deep, deep emotion which is transferred upon the listener by Lotte Lehmann’s wonderful art. Perhaps we come nearest by saying that she is the impersonation of art itself. Lotte Lehmann’s accompanist is Mr. Ulanowsky. He played Schumann and Brahms. I have often talked, in these columns, about how to play composers of the romanticist period, with a certain amount of freedom (but not licence), and yet so that the original rhythm is not marred. You will know what I mean when listening to Mr. Ulanowsky. Also when listening to him I had the feeling to lean back in my chair (which is too uncomfortable, however) and simply to enjoy myself. As an extra we heard part of a Viennese waltz by Johann Strauss, which was played as only Viennese people can play it, the slight sentimentality, smiling at itself, unpretentious, charming, and incomparably beautiful. As an accompanist, Mr. Ulanowsky is equally perfect, the balance between him and Mme. Lehmann being ideal throughout the night.
Good and Mixed Reviews
The first recently discovered review of one of Lehmann’s recitals is glowing with positive thoughts on many aspects of her singing. The second review includes some serious complaints but ends upbeat. The first has no attribution, the second only the initials: HTP.
Review of Recital in St. Louis on 13 Jan 1933
“One of the greatest personalities in the field of music made her first appearance in St. Louis last night when Lotte Lehmann, dramatic soprano, gave a song recital in Howard Hall, the Principia. The size and scope of her artistic gifts become apparent as soon as she starts singing but the impression deepens as song succeeds song until finally it has become a transfiguring experience. The voice by itself, with its depth, resonance and power, is galvanic in its effect, but the voice as an agent of her intellect and temperament brings an exhilaration that immediately makes all of the life about one more intense and more significant.”
Review of Recital in Boston on 8 or 9 March 1934
“…Mme. Lehmann’s singing of Brahms’ ‘Meine Liebe ist grün’, and his ‘Der Schmied’ …were examples of overpossession and over-projection to the detriment of voice and song. So also with Schumann’s ‘Ich grolle nicht’ which is one of her battle horses, to be ridden a little harder each time she mounts it. In a song that moves quick-paced, full-toned and in high emotion, Mme. Lehmann may hardly resist the temptation to force the note. There were as many songs in which she sang with an equal fineness of perception and tone, of matter and manner – – – say her simplicity with Schubert’s ‘An eine Quelle’; her musing grace with Franz’s ‘Für Musik,’ her light and tender humor with Wolf’s ‘In dem Schatten meiner Locken,’ her nostalgic melancholy with Strauss’s autumnal ‘Aller Seelen.’ In other pieces there were phrases and periods that she turned with apt and instant felicity; in which she gained both depth and sweep of tone – – – as in Wolf’s ‘Gesang Weylas’; once more in which she evoked passing images graphically; wrought them as well into an ever-expanding whole. The excesses and the shortcomings may stand as written, but the concert, by and large, was restoration of the art of lieder singing to a public that here or elsewhere in America may now seldom enjoy it.” H.T. P.
Review with a Cold
• Lehmann sang many recitals at Town Hall shortly before the “Farewell” one on February 16, 1951. Here’s a review of one of them that appeared on January 29, 1951.
Met Debut Review
• The “Parterre Box” celebrated the January 11, 1934 night that Lehmann made her Metropolitan Opera debut in what was called “the ideal Sieglinde” in Wagner’s Die Walküre with the review written by Leonard Liebling for the New York American:
Previously known here as a finished exponent of German Lieder in recital, Lotte Lehmann made her local operatic debut last evening at the Metropolitan as Sieglinde in “Die Walkuere.” Mme. Lehmann is no newcomer to the lyric stage, for at the Vienna Opera she has long been one of the adornments in Wagnerian and lesser soprano roles. Other European theatres and the late Chicago Civic Opera Company also are acquainted with Mme. Lehmann’s striking gifts in the realm of costumed song.
To tell the story of her achievement last night is to report a complete triumph of a kind rarely won from an audience at a Wagnerian occasion. The delighted auditors vented their feelings in a whirlwind of applause and a massed chorus of cheers. At the end of the first act Mme. Lehmann had half a dozen individual recalls and on every side one heard excited and rapturous comment. The stir made by the artist was in every way justified. Of statuesque figure and attractive features, Mme. Lehmann appealed to the eye as irresistibly as she wooed the ear. She has a full, rich voice, brilliant in the upper range and sensuously tinted in the middle register. It is a lyric-dramatic organ, ideal for the role of Sieglinde, and gives forth power as easily as it sounds the gentler accents.
More expressive, emotional, lovely singing has not been heard from any soprano at the Metropolitan for many a season, and, better still, Mme. Lehmann is musical and stylistic in the highest degree. A true Wagnerian artist whom the most diligent fault-finder would be estopped from faulting. In her acting, Mme. Lehmann interprets the impulsive, romanticist rather than the scheming woman who coldly plots the sleeping potion for her husband. Lissome, clinging, impassioned, here was the ideal Sieglinde to inflame Siegmund and sweep him to heroic deeds.
Reviews from the 1930s
La Scala?
• You can’t believe everything you read. This appeared in the Neue Freie Presse of 20 January 1924. In English: Tomorrow (Monday) Lotte Lehmann‘s single concert [we’d call it a recital] at 7pm. At the piano: Professor Ferdinand Foll. Miss Lehmann appears as Lieder singer before the Vienna public for the first time in several years. Her program contains songs of Brahms, Schumann, Cornelius, Marx, and Strauss. In this concert, Miss Lehmann takes leave of the Vienna public for a longer period of time, because only a few days later she travels to Italy for several months, where she first appears as a guest singer for two months at La Scala, Milan. Remaining tickets…..The recital information is correct, but Lehmann didn’t sing on those dates at Italy’s La Scala. Rather, in this case, she traveled to Berlin, first to record on 13 February and then to sing opera there with Georg Szell, among other conductors at the Berlin Staatsoper, where she remained, making records and singing opera until 21 May 1924 the date she sang her first Marschallin in London under Bruno Walter’s direction. She continued singing opera (Ariadne auf Naxos, Der Rosenkavalier and Die Walküre), not returning to Vienna until the next season when on 9 September 1924 she sang in Faust. As usual, many thanks to Peter Clausen for the clipping. P.S. Lehmann did eventually sing a recital at La Scala, but in 1935.
Review of Schumann Songs 1943
• The following review that speaks for itself has come to my attention. Take the time to read it through to understand the level of artistry that Lehmann had reached by 1943.
New York Times 25 January 1943
LEHMANN IS HEARD IN SCHUMANN SONGS
Soprano is assisted by Paul Ulanowsky in Program at Town Hall
By Olin Downes
A very distinguished recital of songs and song cycles by Robert Schumann was given by Lotte Lehmann yesterday afternoon in Town Hall. The capacity of the hall was brought out by an exceptionally attentive and appreciative audience days in advance of the event. There was no fuss about that either. The audience was practically all seated when the singer came in. The program began by Mme. Lehmann’s inviting the audience to sing the national anthem with her. Then she and her excellent accompanist, Paul Ulanowsky, began their task of communicants with the songs.
These were sung with a matchless simplicity, with an art that concealed an art now fully developed and shorn of every excrescence or superfluity of style, and the interpretation proceeded directly from the heart.
Mme. Lehmann sang these reveries and avowals with a fineness of style and a sense of proportion that had no slightest savor of exaggeration or less than utter sincerity, and her performance said plainly that if this was sentimental the audience could make the most of it. She believed what she sang. She herself was moved by it.
The “Dichterliebe” cycle permitted a wider range of expression and a greater variety of color. But the same simplicity, the same warm poetry and perfect proportion remained. Nor are the postludes of the piano to be forgotten. That is to say that there was complete unity of intention between the two performers, and that Mr. Ulanowsky with rare taste and sensibility completed the poetic thought of interpreter and composer.
One remembers those earlier years when Mme. Lehmann’s own nature swept her away and this resulted in prodigal and at time explosive outburst of tone, or disproportionate emphasis of phrase. All that is of the past. The thoughtful expenditure and shaping of tone, the maximum of communication with the minimum of effort, an intensity of emotion that requires no noisy heralding spoke more eloquently than any description could do.
Mood was established so completely that there was comparatively little demonstration till the end of the recital. For that matter the two cycles were sung without opportunity for applause between the songs that make them. But it is doubtful if in any case there would have been such a sign. There was the rapport between the artist and her listeners made possible by her achievement and also by the proportions of the hall. At the end the audience was loath to leave. Mme. Lehmann wisely refrained from an encore. To the best of her ability she had done a complete thing, and what she had done will long be cherished by those who heard her.
• From the Pariser Tagezeitung of 8 April 1938, Peter Petersen has sent the following article, which I translate: LOTTE LEHMANN SINGS NO MORE IN THE THIRD REICH; Lotte Lehmann, the great singer famous even at the Casino Theater in Desuville, who yesterday returned to America, stated the following to a French journalist: “No, I haven’t been driven from Germany. I am Arien and so is my husband.”
“Why are you leaving your homeland, you who just last year, was celebrated as no other artist, in Fidelio under the direction of Bruno Walter and Toscanini; you who give the artistic fame to the Vienna Opera and who experiences such triumphs from your too seldom Paris appearances?”
“Why? Because I don’t feel free in my homeland, because I can’t live freely and have the right to choose songs by Mendelssohn, Hugo Wolf or [Joseph] Marx. This is why I have left my homeland, but I have left freely…Certainly, nothing in the world is more important than freedom. Thus, I will seek American citizenship.”
Bad Reviews
• In the various Lehmann biographies one can read glowing reviews of Lehmann’s performances. I’ve finally found one full of negative comments and a second one with mixed thoughts. These are English critics. The first, acknowledges Lehmann’s success at Covent Garden and the enthusiasm of the Queen’s Hall audience (probably of 25 Feb 1930), as well as the “insinuating beauty of her voice–perhaps the loveliest one has ever known” and “her quick and warm response to poetic suggestion.” Then he begins with his problems: “There was a streak of the maudlin in her programme that proved rather too much for a modern English audience. We accept nothing more gladly than German songs from Mme. Lehmann, for we know the sort of thing she excels in, but her scheme to-night would have been better for a little more spice. One or two Schubert songs, Brahms in one of his irascible moods, or some of the acid of Hugo Wolf would have made all the difference, and none of these masters was represented at all. Beethoven sounded a little meagre, though the two “Egmont” songs were an interesting revival, and Schumann was shown in his wan and tearful manner, except in the enthusiastic “Frühlingsnacht,” which surged magnificently to the singer’s most jubilant tones. It was this song one wanted to hear a second time, not the once incredibly overrated “Ich grolle nicht,” which nowadays seems not so much a song as a smear. For the Liszt songs there were two excuses–that they really represented the composer adequately, if unflatteringly, and that much of their cloying perfumery was made tolerable by the persuasive beauty of the singing.” Of the same performance another critic wrote, “Last night she really convinced a large audience that she is a brilliant exception to the general rule that opera singers are not at their best away from the stage. She does not sing Lieder as if they were dramatic scenes, but with her perfect feeling for curve and phrase she sings those German sentimental love songs that are so dear to the heart of the Teutonic maiden with a rare lyric eloquence. Her generous programme last night composed songs by Giordani, Monteverdi, Gluck, Beethoven, Liszt, Marx, and R. Strauss. Naturally certain songs in her list were more closely suited to her ability than others, but to them all she brought a clarity and precision of technique, an earnest approach, and a sensitive understanding which were matched only by the charm and spirit of her delivery.” He goes on to list the songs he likes and then: “…she was not quite so successful with the Beethoven group and she certainly should not sing ‘Freudvoll und Leidvoll’, [which the above critic praised!] which she screams at the top notes.”