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).
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.”