Recent research reveals the payments (per opera performance) that Lehmann received at the Metropolitan Opera. You’ll see other well-known singers of the time, and the amounts they were paid. Remember that this was shortly after the Depression. Also, the dollar in 1935 is worth about $22 as of 2022.
1935: Lehmann: $700
Rethberg: $900
Pons: $1000
Flagstad: $550
Melchior: $900
from 1936-on (the data is a little confusing), Lehmann was paid $750 ($16,500).
Met Debut Review
The parterre box writer Windycityoperaman celebrated the 11 January 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.
Flagstad on Lehmann
From the November/December 2021 Fanfare magazine: “Faulkner raises the not unlikely possibility that the Norwegian soprano [Kirsten Flagstad] was infuriated at an April 1937 article promoting Lotte Lehmann’s return to New York, calling her ‘prima donna at the Met.’…It was Lehmann’s publicist who had placed the article, [not verified] and she was also Melchior’s publicist, causing Flagstad to argue with him about it. She retaliated by pressuring the Met’s general manager, Edward Johnson, to hire two additional Heldentenors, Carl Hartmann and Eyvind Laholm, neither of whom was even close to Melchior’s equal. Flagstad also disapproved of the specificity of Lehmann’s acting; when the two met backstage, Flagstad apparently told Lehmann that she did things on stage which only a married woman should do with her husband in the privacy of their bedroom….” –Henry Fogel
A More Interesting Singer
In the March/April 2024 edition of Fanfare magazine you’ll find a review by Henry Fogel in which he recalls the reason that Flagstad chose a tenor instead of Melchior: “The reason for this was that Flagstad, whose power at the Met was extraordinary, was upset with Melchior after he implied to an interviewer that Lotte Lehmann was a more interesting singer.”