This page will attempt to bring together all the information that’s available on this website about Lehmann’s portrayal of the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss .
Since Lehmann is best known for that role it’s interesting to see where she sang the role and how often. The total number of performances is somewhere between 131 and 141, but that’s just the number that we can discover from the various sources at our disposal.
Here’s a breakdown: Though Lehmann had sung Octavian at the Vienna Opera, once she’d begun to perform the Marschallin at Covent Garden in 1924, she was in demand for that role in Vienna and ended up singing it 45 times there. The next most performances were 26 at the Met, then 23 with Covent Garden, 18 at the Salzburg Festival, 7 for the San Francisco Opera. Her final opera appearance was as the Marschallin in 1946 for the San Francisco Opera on tour in Los Angeles. There were four Marschallins in Chicago, two appearances in Paris, Berlin, and Hamburg. The other times that Lehmann sang the Marschallin were single performances in Cleveland, Philadelphia, Basel, and Graz.
Berlin offers the single greatest lapse in such numbers. There were three opera companies in that city during Lehmann’s time and there’s little authentic information about the various works performed or with which casts. That we only know of two is an obvious undercount, but there’s just no serious scholarship yet on this.
Lehmann on Der Rosenkavalier and the Marschallin in particular
From the Apple iBook, volume 2, but in website format, you’ll hear Lehmann sing excerpts from the role, speak about the whole opera, hear her in interviews about the role, and discover information on the 1933 recording.
You can experience my commentary for Lehmann’s recording of “Kann mich auch an ein Mädel erinnern” as well as her performance of this monolog.
Photos of Lehmann as the Marschallin
Reviews of Lehmann in the role of the Marschallin
Information on the 1933 recording of Der Rosenkavalier with Lehmann
(One can hear Lehmann’s portions of the 1933 HMV Rosenkavalier recording at: https://lottelehmannleague.org/the-lehmann-recordings/ Just scroll down to recording 212.)
Lehmann teaches the role of the Marschallin
“Live” 1939 radio broadcast of Der Rosenkavalier with Paul Jackson’s remarks
You can hear LL recite (not sing) the monolog from Act I ‘Die Zeit…’ https://lottelehmannleague.org/2022/volume-2-her-legendary-marschallin/
You may want to read magazine articles that may reference LL’s role in Der Rosenkavalier (use your search tool on the page). Or you can read about the famous recorded performances of the opera with Lehmann as the Marschallin. Finally, you can read Lehmann’s summary of the whole Der Rosenkavalier.
In her retirement, Lehmann painted tiles representing the whole Rosenkavalier story. You can view them here. They begin on number 35.
Was the Marschallin Lehmann’s favorite role? Here’s an early radio interview with her on that subject.
Conductor Maurice Abravanel on Lehmann’s Marschallin:
Here in her own words is an article by Judy Sutcliffe that shows her Lehmann connection through the role as the Marschallin.
P.S. The Marschallin in recital:
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.