In 1910, Enrico Caruso was so captivated by a twenty-two-year-old German soprano singing her first season at the Hamburg State Opera that he cried, “She has the voice of an Italian!” Lotte Lehmann also enchanted the likes of Puccini, Klemperer, and even the tempestuous Toscanini. But she hit her highest notes during her years with the Vienna State Opera and its co-director Richard Strauss. She created the roles of the Composer in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos (1916), the Dyer’s Wife in Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919), and Christine in Intermezzo (1924). And while Strauss wrote the title role in Arabella (1933) for her, Lehmann became best known for singing the Marschallin (pictured above) in the composer’s most popular work, Der Rosenkavalier. It was the last role she sang publicly, in San Francisco, [for the San Francisco Opera, but on tour in Los Angeles] in 1946. Before Lehmann left Austria, in the wake of Hitler’s Anschluss, [actually she had left months before the actual Anschluss] she had also been a favorite at the annual Alpine extravaganza cofounded by Strauss, the Salzburg Festival. This month, two Strauss works, Die Frau and Salome, will be performed at Salzburg, boasting, among other talents, the lightning conductors Sir Georg Solti and Christoph von Dohnanyi, and the soaring sopranos Cheryl Studer, Catherine Malfitano, and Eva Marton.
