Lehmann Appraisals

…The exquisite art of Lotte Lehmann was manifestly enjoyed by her large audience….Listening to her opening group—all over-familiar, if vocally beautiful solos—one fervently wished that all the budding soprani who meditate including [in their recitals] either (or all) “Caro mio ben,” “Lasciatemi morire,” or “O del mio dolce ardor” might be present to hear how really expressive they can be when beautifully sung, instead of (as generally happens) being converted into particularly dreary, punctilious examples of “the classics”….The spirituelle beauty of “Du bist wie eine Blume” still lingers in the memory, like the mystic ecstasy, the crystallization of all that has ever been held to symbolize springtime’s magic which this great singer infused (or rather re-created, for the composer has captured it within his inspiration) into “Frühlingsnacht”….

…The thing one would like to do, if it were possible, would be to coax, cajole, harry, coerce all the bad singers of London—without having to tell them how bad, exactly, they were—into one of Madame Lehmann’s recitals: those, namely, who “know all about” legato singing, messa di voce, the right kind of vibrato, colour, diction, enunciation, pronunciation, temperament, except how to do them; and to let them hear how these things sound when there has been time to forget all about how they are done. Of all these virtues we would take Madame Lehmann’s legato for special commendation….It prevents such an old warhorse as “Caro mio ben” seeming jaded; it binds together the successive floods of ecstasy of such a song as “Frühlingsnacht.”

After March 1930 recitals in Paris, they wrote: …Ovations on top of ovations for Lotte Lehmann who triumphed at the Salle Pleyel….What tranquil mastery! And how sweet it is to listen to a perfect voice that gives the impression of being a force of nature, which seems born out of the good will of the elements, like the melody of the breeze or of the waves….

…It is always a pure joy, an intoxication, to listen to her! At first one is amazed at the instrumental beauty of her singing. There is not a mediocre note from top to bottom. And what nobility of phrasing! …What caresses in the poems of Wagner! We have, alas! all too few singers in France to place opposite this lady from Vienna. Where has technique disappeared to, here?…Can’t someone send a mission to Austria to recover the principles?…

For her Marschallin in Graz:  …Among the guests, Frau Lotte Lehmann, who was appearing for the first time in Graz, was resplendent as the Marschallin. She portrayed with moving poetry the last glow of a noble woman’s heart. Rococo magic blossomed around her figure. Every gesture, every tone testified to a wonderful mellowness and wisdom. The way in which Frau Lotte Lehmann spins her tones is incomparable. Her Feldmarschallin is one single song of beauty, free of “effects,” and free of any attempt to “shine” in the conventional sense. It is not too much to say that through Lotte Lehmann art becomes ennobled.

For Lehmann performances in the Salzburg Festivals, they wrote:…Glorious, unforgettable, transfigured in every respect is Frau Lotte Lehmann as the Marschallin. Highest effectiveness, noblest art.

…With Lehmann the ending of the first act becomes one of the purest, most precious impressions which any opera stage can offer today….Lotte Lehmann…a princess in appearance, a queen of song, and as a woman—a human being….

...The nature of this God-gifted woman is humble fulfillment and boundless devotion. In holy exaltation she gives herself to the character she is to portray, serves the idea of the work to be interpreted. Leonore’s tremendous destiny: to have to love, to be able to suffer—idea and impulse, affliction and freedom—can not be embodied more gloriously; her simple nobility: womanly dignity and active faithfulness can not be interpreted more tenderly; the melody of her soul: hope, hope…can not be voiced in purer sound than as it is realized by this great artist. And the triumphant radiance of her voice—truly “it penetrates into the depths of one’s heart” [a quotation from the dialogue of the dungeon scene].

…The Fidelio of Lotte Lehmann, a perfection, a probably unsurpassable accomplishment, uplifting and deeply stirring…filled with truly Beethovenesque transfiguration.

For Lehmann’s work at the Vienna Opera: …Her singing was a living miracle, more beautiful than in the legend, “The Rose-Miracle of Saint Elisabeth.” The extraordinary, the unique thing about this vision of an artist, her incomparable voice and her genius for acting, can scarcely be put into words. The experience of hearing her and seeing her, as on this Tannhäuser -Sunday, reveals mysterious secrets of eternal beauty, which will remain in memory, inextinguishable, indescribable…. (D.)

…In every respect a perfect accomplishment. The gentle radiance of the wondrously moving voice glows like a halo around her appearance. Lovelier than ever, more heartfelt in power and sweetness, is this blessed voice. The Elisabeth of Lotte Lehmann is a saint with a strong feminine nature, earthly and heavenly at the same time. In her being and in her appearance Lotte Lehmann embodies an ideal form of Wagner’s Elisabeth. She gives poetry to the expression of the words, there is poetry in every gesture, down to the graceful play of her hands. The soul-drama of the loving Elisabeth, full of faith and capable of total self-surrender, is fully revealed in the impersonation of Lotte Lehmann…..

…The Elisabeth of Lotte Lehmann cast a radiance over the whole Tannhäuser performance. Already after her entrance aria there was colossal applause. Of course. But that was just a preamble to what was still to come, which, at the finale of the act, surpassed by far everything of beauty that Lehmann has given us up until now….The Elisabeth of Lotte Lehmann is now the best Elisabeth of all the opera stages on earth…. (R. K.)

Lehmann’s debut at the Chicago Opera in 1930:…Her Sieglinde is perfection itself—perfection of voice and action…. (Musical Courier.)

…She has one of the loveliest voices ever heard on the Civic Opera stage. It is of a freedom and purity seldom discovered in American singers and employed with an eloquence and artistry that moved the audience to a great demonstration…. (Musical America.)

…The texture and the luster of her tone are so distinctive, so quick to reflect each shade of feeling, so potent in moments of Wagnerian orchestral drama, so responsive in the softer expressive inflections, that she must take her place quite unchallenged in the operatic Valhalla….

…In musical perception, in vocal beauty, in histrionic intelligence, Mme. Lehmann was at once a lesson and a reproach to most of her colleagues who specialize in the Bayreuth master’s works.

…Mme. Lehmann was the ideal Elisabeth. Her singing is the acme of art, and she gives a more complete picture than any of her predecessors. She invests the character with an individuality that is absolutely new. Here is one of the great artists of the century.

From Paris: …A singer? More than that! A soul that sings! [Une âme qui chante] Song incarnate!…The infinite variety of her singing!… (Paris.)

January 7, 1932, was a major date in Lotte Lehmann’s career, her first New York recital, at Town Hall. Here is a condensation of the review by Olin Downes, then the leading music critic of The New York Times: …The audience that gathered in Town Hall last night to hear Lotte Lehmann’s first song recital in this city was not only impressed but thrilled. It has been a good many years—more years, at least, than the writer has spent in this city—since any local song recital has offered such excitements and distinctions. Singing songs by Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Mme. Lehmann swept her listeners from their feet. She has a voice of magnificent range and color. Above all, it is an intensely communicative voice, one that stirs with feeling and that immediately affects those who hear it. She herself is a woman of superb temperament and capacity for the expression of great and varied emotions. The moment that the first song, “Von ewiger Liebe,” had ended, the audience knew that a great artist was present. The outburst of applause was a spontaneous and most impressive tribute. This first impression was not lessened but intensified as the concert proceeded. To claim that every song was perfectly sung would be exaggeration. That is a thing which never happens. But in sum the vocal and interpretive gifts of the singer surpassed the highest expectations….There were moments last night when Mme. Lehmann was operatic, and when, as an interpreter of song, her temperament got the better of her and she stepped from the frame. But even when she did…as in the final measures of Schumann’s “Ich grolle nicht,” she was so puissant, noble, and impassioned in her style, supplementing interpretation with such vocal resource and such a wealth of nuance, tone-color, and all-conquering sincerity, that if she had sung the song backward it would have been hard to keep cool and refuse to be moved by what she did….She sang songs which have become household words in such a way as to resurrect every wonderful thing which familiarity had caused us to take for granted or to accept as a matter of course. At her height she displayed interpretive genius—nothing less….

…Mme. Lehmann possesses a voice that glows and glitters; when emitted with full power it resembles the diapason of a great pipe organ; when slightly muted its color and quality are like the dulcet tones of a ’cello. One of the greatest lieder singers of recent years was Elena Gerhardt. Mme. Lehmann has the art and method of her famous predecessor plus a more gorgeous voice…. (Grena Bennett of the Journal-American)

From her US tour of 1932: Chicago:…Mme. Lehmann challenges all other sopranos, German, Italian, American or what you will, by the utter purity of her tone, the superb distinction of her style, the genuine musical and spiritual beauty of her interpretation.

…She is slimmer [than last season], but her crystal and silver voice has gained in beauty—if that were possible.

And from Boston:…Her Elsa was at once the most moving and most convincing one ever has heard.

 In Town Hall, NYC, 7  February 1932, and she offered Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben, among other lieder:…The early part was sung with indescribable tenderness, innocence, and happiness, and in this she had the expression of a girl of seventeen; but as the mood changed she seemed actually to grow older before one’s eyes, and the last three songs of the cycle had a depth of passion and grief that was overwhelming…. (Doris Madden, February 12, 1932.)

In Marseilles, March 1932:…For the sake of all those who have not yet had the good luck to hear her, let me say that the recital of the celebrated singer Lotte Lehmann was a prodigious revelation. And those who were absent…missed an artistic satisfaction of the first order….She truly touches the highest summits of her art, and her program was one long, continual rapture [“ravissement“]….

But the same reviewer expressed regret that Lehmann sang only three French songs—especially since he found her French “very correct”—and that the rest of her program was in German, a language neither liked nor understood in Marseilles:…If we found a very real joy in listening to the eight songs of L’amour et la vie d’une femme in their original language, it was because our comprehension was aided by that veritable mirror of the soul which is Lotte Lehmann’s face…. (Jacques Dordet.)

…It seems as if for her, uniquely for her, the art of bel canto, deserting the balmy skies of Italy, has consented to cross the Rhine. Certainly the German language, above all to French ears, does not naturally lend itself to that sweetness of accent which seems to be a privilege confined to the Latin tongues. Nevertheless, Lotte Lehmann has achieved the miracle of usurping that privilege; and, perhaps for the first time, we have enjoyed the charm of a German song in its original text, so well has this admirable singer been able to soften its harshness with the caress of her heavenly voice…. (Ch. Varigny.)

1 April 1932, Rome: …Eighteen German lieder, all sung in the original German. Monotonous recital? Not on your life! Signora Lotte Lehmann is such a brilliant, versatile interpreter that she easily holds the attention of the audience….Although expressing herself in a language that, in Italy, is familiar to very few people, she was able to make herself understood—at least in a general sort of way. Even those who knew nothing of German were listening with lively interest and obvious joy….It was an authentic success, one hundred per cent…. (Alberto Gaseo, April 26, 1932.)

1932 Vienna:…A peak of incomparable artistic enjoyment….The ideal type of Elisabeth….She draws out of this noble role all its magnificent depths, which she fills with the breath of the spirit and the drama of the soul. Lotte Lehmann stands at the zenith of world fame, the Vienna State Opera can be proud….The entrance aria was a powerfully thrilling experience; the prayer floated, a deeply inner, blessed revelation, into the most blissful regions of infinite art…. (A. M. P.)

[Desdemona] …Poetry itself is on the stage when Lehmann sings….

…Her every appearance upon the stage is like a sunrise….

…Her acting and her singing have been refined to a point of simple, classical greatness and most ideal perfection. Her Desdemona, like her Elisabeth, can be designated as a most faithful re-creation, the highest achievement that the art of the stage can offer…. (A. M. Pirchan.)

1932 London:..It was whispered that Sir Thomas Beecham does not like the opera [Meistersinger], and certainly the way he conducted it suggested an impatient desire not to dwell on its intricacies….The adorable Lotte Lehmann, distinctly slimmer, actually elevated the part of Eva into something dramatic as well as lovely….

…The Eva of Mme. Lehmann is familiar, but not her appearance. Last year she was handicapped by the conventional embonpoint of the grand operatic heroine. This year she is as slim as a film star and her lovely voice is, if anything, better than ever….

June 1932 Vienna:…Lotte Lehmann lent to Sieglinde all loveliness, all poetic magic….An ideal creation, a poem, the essence of romantic grace, captured from the world of German fairy-tales and legends. The image of the musical idea becomes visible to the eye, held fast in the lovely appearance, in the expressive movements of the body….

Salzburg Summer Festival 1932:…There is really only one Marschallin, and her name is Lotte Lehmann….

…The Fidelio of Lotte Lehmann stands on dizzy heights, a last perfection, an unsurpassable achievement, filled with truly Beethovenesque transcendence….

…Lotte Lehmann as Fidelio—something more perfect, more beautiful, something that goes straighter to the heart, can scarcely be imagined….What Frau Lehmann offers is great, pure, unparalleled art…. (F. K.)

29 September 1932, at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin: …The sensation of the evening [was] the world-famous Sieglinde of Lotte Lehmann….Her Sieglinde is a full-blooded woman filled with an uninhibited passion that breaks through all the limitations of conventional operatic acting. Her voice is as radiant, as brilliant, as ever. After the first act a hurricane of applause broke loose.

7 October 1932, Berlin, a report of that performance, sent to Edward Ziegler of the Met by the Met’s representative in Europe, the agent Erich Simon: Yesterday a remarkable new production of Die Meistersinger took place here, under the musical leadership of Wilhelm Furtwängler, the staging by Heinz Tietjen. The performance was sublime beyond all praise, and seldom in my life have I been witness to such a tumultuous jubilation as on this occasion. The preparations for this premiere took three weeks of intensive rehearsals, and something unprecedentedly beautiful is the result…. The performance ended at 11:30. Although it was so late, the entire audience rose as one man and remained standing for over ten minutes…. It was an unforgettable evening!

Munich, 1932:…The way she sings lieder has a fascinating effect. And one can certainly say that each of the songs presented—and many of them belong among the most familiar in the whole literature—was an artistic experience such as a concert hall can only offer on very rare and festive days….

…The voice of this woman alone is like a miracle: one is fascinated by the fullness and clarity of her sound, by the astonishing range both high and low, and by the ineffably noble charm of her timbre. No less enthralling is her phenomenal mastery of that voice, a mastery which seems too natural to have been learned, which seems more likely to have been a gift from heaven….But in the final analysis the determining factor is neither voice nor technique: Lotte Lehmann’s greatest, loveliest gift is rather the art of interpretation. More inspired singing is not even to be dreamed of. The power of passionate feeling and the power of genuine artistic understanding are combined in her in perfect unity. There was not one piece that she did not bring fully to life, down to the last nuance of expression, preserving at the same time the overall line….How amazing it is that she could sing with equal intensity two such totally different pieces, one right after the other, as “Death and the Maiden” and “To be Sung on the Water” [“Auf dem Wasser zu singen”], the one full of deathly fear and darkness, the other all spring and light. And what she makes of a somewhat over-familiar piece like Schumann’s “Ich grolle nicht“—how we experience that song anew, how we become conscious, perhaps for the first time, of its inner dramatic vehemence and shattering climax when Lotte Lehmann sings it! So the evening became one great triumph…. (Dr. A. W.)

…We heard the best-known songs of German romanticism and heard them new and fresh, beautiful as on the very first day…. (Dr. W. Sch., October 10, 1932)

1932 Berlin recital, her first in that city: …Lotte Lehmann is conquering Berlin; the success of her lieder recital has perhaps even surpassed her operatic triumphs of the last few weeks. Yet, fundamentally, Frau Lehmann is no lieder-singer. Dramatic song is her natural domain. She is accustomed [on the stage] to make everything that she sings the expression of definite dramatic characters. With this intention, she characterizes, she dramatizes. And in that way she also dramatizes lieder; if she sings Schubert’s “Serenade,” then a whole stage setting is there, the garden at night, the little house, in front of the house the lover—and that is she herself—who sings his song of longing. It is very beautiful, but it is not quite right; for it is just the difference between lieder and opera that the Lied is not intended to be the expression of a particular person…. (V. Z.)

Here are excerpts from the “perfect notice,” which was written by Redfern Mason for the San Francisco Examiner, 20 December 1932:

MME. LEHMANN RECOGNIZED AS GREAT ARTIST….

It is said that every woman often thinks she is in love. But when it really happens, she doesn’t think; she knows. It is the same with the dear public and artists. They often credit greatness to inferior talent; but, when the real thing comes along, they know beyond the possibility of doubt.

By the time Lotte Lehmann had sung “Von ewiger Liebe” last night [the first number on the program] the audience gathered in the Opera House recognized not merely a singer of unusual merit, but one of the succession of great artists…..Nobody, in my experience, has ever sung the “Erlkönig” with such mastery of characterization….This was magnificent singing and the audience, guided by the infallible instinct of the crowd, was fully aware of it….That heavenly “Ständchen” [Schubert’s]…had a beauty that left folks not far from tears.

And it is not an aloof, distant talent, that of this young German lieder singer: she is not a goddess condescending to humanity; she is a priestess who raises men and women to heaven’s gate….

Lehmann plays on all the stops of human emotion with a victorious sincerity. She can make her voice swell out in ecstatic triumph; yet the tone is never harsh; and always, between her and the audience, there is the feeling of a subtle sympathy, as if the artist were singing not merely her own emotions, but the emotions crying out for expression in your heart and mine.

Which means that Lotte Lehmann is a great artist, one of the uncrowned queens of humanity, uncrowned because her art is nobler than any merely physical crown could be….

Vienna, May 1933, a joint recital with Alfred Piccaver: …How Vienna celebrates her favorites and how the Viennese hold art above everything else! That could be experienced anew in this unique concert. Two of the most beautiful voices of our time were united in a joint recital and were frenetically applauded by the enthusiastic crowd that filled the auditorium of the Concert House up to the ceiling. The greatest of all miracles is the singing soul, and that is what our Lehmann possesses; whether she sings lieder or opera arias, the listener always forgets the world around him, for this enchantress ensnares him completely with her great art….

Regarding their collaboration in the Salzburg Festivals, when Bruno Walter played piano for Lotte Lehmann, he wrote: It was admirable how Lotte Lehmann’s dramatic feeling, to which she had formerly been inclined to yield almost to the point where she did violence to her voice, had gradually become restrained to fit the rendition of songs. Amazing, too, that her impetuous elemental personality should have found the way to the stylistic purity of the song by means of her own almost infallible instinct. The advice I gave her occasionally referred merely to details. She owed to herself the mastery of the essentials of lieder-singing. Her deeply penetrating understanding made her conscious of the beauty of her melodic line as well as of the spiritual and emotional contents of the words. She managed to combine these two elements of lieder-singing in a frequently ideal synthesis, and thus to fulfill the composer’s intentions. And even in those weaker moments from which no instant-bound reproductive artist can escape, the purely vocal demands of a song or an operatic part may have suffered occasionally, but never their poetic essence.

Innate simplicity and tender sensitiveness are the poles of Lehmann’s being. These qualities manifest themselves in her life as well as in her art, charmingly changeful at times, and often harmoniously blended. It is natural that so variously gifted a person—she has a genuine gift for writing poetry and for painting—should reveal certain erratic traits and be frequently guided by impulses. But our friendship, in which she has cordially included my family, has remained uninfluenced by atmospheric fluctuations in her unchangeably young soul, for that friendship had had its source in our essential artistic affinity.

When Lehmann finally made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1934, the critics were ecstatic.…Never before in the history of the Metropolitan Opera House has there been such a scene as that at the close of the first act of Die Walküre last night….The instant the curtain fell the applause rang out spontaneously; then when Lotte Lehmann came before the footlights it rose in volume, and as her confreres left her alone—something rare on the first curtain call—the whole audience broke into cheering which lasted a full ten minutes.

It was a welcome that must have gladdened her heart, for it came from everywhere—parquette, boxes, and galleries. It was honest and sincere and every bit deserved. In the lobby, after things had quieted down a bit, everybody talked to everybody else and all were saying the same thing—”nothing like it in their lives,” while the oldsters, your scribe among them, are firm in the belief that nothing like it in singing or acting has come from a Sieglinde in the half-century’s life of the Metropolitan.

Lehmann is the very essence of grace and beauty. We knew she could sing, for she gave us a recital last season; but we didn’t know what the great love scene at the end of the first act was like until she showed us, and, rising fully to the occasion, Melchior played up to her and sang up to her as he never has before. She was an inspiration. What a glorious voice she has…. (Charles Pike Sawyer, The New York Evening Post, January 12, 1934)

…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….More expressive, emotional, lovely singing has not been heard from any soprano at the Metropolitan for many a season…. (Leonard Liebling, The New York American, January 12, 1934)

…To those familiar with her lieder singing her finished phrasing, precise in definition yet always plastic, and her crystalline diction were no surprise. Yet even her admirers in the recital field were not altogether prepared for the other qualities she brought to her superb impersonation: the dramatic fire, the capacity to endow the vocal line with a breadth befitting Wagner’s immense canvas yet to retain always the purely musical finish she might have bequeathed to a phrase of Hugo Wolf; her telling restraint and sureness as an actress. At the end of the first act a cheering audience recalled her seven times….But if the first act was of a sort to startle the critical faculty into sharp attention and admiration, her performance in the second had an electrifying quality that swept that faculty away for once and made even the guarded listener a breathless participant in the emotions of the anguished Sieglinde…. (H. H. [Hubbard Hutchinson], The New York Times)

 …There has not been such a vital and thrilling first act of Die Walküre at the Metropolitan in years…. (W. J. Henderson, The New York Sun.)

 …Rarely has any singer been so uproariously applauded and so often recalled as Mme. Lehmann was at the conclusion of Act I…. (Pitts Sanborn, The New York World-Telegram)

 Time had this to say in the January 22 issue:…If the singer had been an Italian tenor who had spent his last nickel on the claque, the ovation could not have been bigger….[Before the performance] Lehmann was nervous. Her husband knew it. The battered old doll which she kisses for luck each time she goes on stage trembled in her hands. But the audience saw no signs of uncertainty, no lack of confidence….

Also in 1934 Lehmann gave recitals to a lot of praise: The Milwaukee Leader ran the headline: WARMTH OF LEHMANN’S VOICE THAWS HER AUDIENCE.

…Lotte Lehmann, who sings lieder as a fine actor reads lines, came to the Pabst Theatre last night. She saw practically the entire membership of Miss Rice’s Music Lovers thaw under the warmth of her performance, and conquered every cold hand in the throng….A glow settled over the audience which mounted into an excited flame as the singer progressed…. (Harriet Pettibone Clinton, Milwaukee Leader, January 30, 1934)

The very next night she sang in Cleveland, to an even more ecstatic audience: …Somehow this recital revived one’s faith in man and his possibilities….If human beings can create songs such as were presented on the program last night, and if every so often there comes an artist such as Lehmann who can recreate their splendor in such matchless fashion—then this old world is, indeed, a good place to live in…. (Denoe Leedy, The Cleveland Press, February 1, 1934)

Then New York City: …What might be the secret of the spell she wove? Possibly, first of all, the healthiness of her art. Second, perhaps its revelation of a very fine type of womanhood….When she sings she does so with a conviction you cannot resist. You feel that you are receiving something precious from an exceptional person…. (The New York Sun, March 5, 1934)

At the 1934 Salzburg Festival, more praise for Lehmann’s recitals with Bruno Walter: …Working together with Bruno Walter seems to lead the artist even beyond herself and to draw her up to unimagined heights. How those two up there on the concert platform, music-possessed, make music together—that verges on the miraculous. No one thought any more about the singer or about her guide at the piano; rather, the two had become fused into one sounding unity; and what one heard was not lieder sung with genius and incomparably accompanied, but simply music itself….Inimitable, with what a sure instinct Lehmann grasps and interprets for us the emotional world of each individual composer….No wonder that the two artists were jubilantly cheered and that there was no end to the ovations…. (H. E. H.)

At that same Salzburg Festival Lehmann sang Fidelio: …Lotte Lehmann thrilled the audience in the title role. She was not only the loving and suffering wife, but she seemed to symbolize in her playing and singing the suffering and deliverance of all mankind…. (Musical Courier, Paul A. Pisk, September 15, 1934)

Everything at the Festival did not go well:  Mme. Lehmann, in bad voice and exceedingly nervous, contributed Elisabeth’s Greeting to the Hall of Song and later the three most familiar Wesendonck songs. She created momentary confusion by obliging Mr. Toscanini to break off in the middle of the introduction to one of these, because she had expected to sing another first.

But of the same concert Musical America had this to say:…It was uncanny how high a degree of intimacy and facility of expression the singer and the orchestra achieved…. (Dr. Paul Stefan, September 1934)

In November 1934 Lehmann sang Tosca and Butterfly at the San Francisco Opera: …Her Tosca had not the sculptured beauty of Muzio; she did not wallow as Jeritza did when she sang “Vissi d’arte.” What she did was to give us a Tosca evolved out of her inner consciousness, and in that scene with Scarpia, she touched a note of beautiful humility which neither Bernhardt nor Muzio ever gave us…. (Redfern Mason, The San Francisco Examiner, November 17)

…Singing the role of Sardou’s Roman prima donna for the first time in Italian, Mme. Lehmann at one blow struck home to San Franciscans the reason why her name is renowned in Vienna, London, and New York.

She is a personality. Her voice, opulent and beautiful, but not necessarily restricted to the charm of honeyed tone, bespeaks a penetrating expressive intelligence. She constructs a role as it should be constructed: with human conviction and with a controlled and flexible sense of its form…. (Alexander Fried, The San Francisco Chronicle)

 …Superb actress and glorious songstress is Lotte Lehmann….The German soprano sang the role of the glamorous Tosca…and negotiated the mellifluous Italian phrases as if to the manner born. However, had she sung in Sanskrit it would have mattered not. For the Lehmann voice and the Lehmann dramatic instinct are bigger than nationality or language…. (Marie Hicks Davidson, The San Francisco Call-Bulletin)

…This Butterfly delighted the emotions by approach through the intelligence….Cio-Cio-San, strictly speaking, is not a Lehmann role. By her mastery of the stage and by the penetration of her feeling she makes it her own…. (Fried, Examiner)

…We have been accustomed to the suicide behind a screen….After witnessing Lehmann’s superb acting, her interpretation seems the logical one. She hugged the child in a frenzy of love and despair, shoved him off stage, and then, wrapping a knife in her kimono, committed the dreadful hara-kiri in full view of the audience….It was a shuddery last act, and one we shall not soon forget. Aside from the sheer drama of Lehmann’s acting, there was a quality of voice that spelled agony and death, a kind of declamatory huskiness in minor key that was heartbreak and the will to die…. (Davidson, Call-Bulletin)

In December 1934 Lehmann sang in Der Rosenkavalier for Philadelphia: …I had heard Mme. Lehmann sing this enamoring role in Europe, but I had never known her to re-create it with so probing a comprehension, so sensitive and sure a touch, a truth of feeling and of utterance so steeped in the essence of the part…. (Lawrence Gilman, The New York Herald-Tribune, December 1, 1934)

…So subtly projected was this great lady that for once the conventions of the theatre ceased to exist, and one felt oneself swept irresistibly into absolute identification with an alien soul. It would take a book to enumerate the details of this extraordinary impersonation, its inspired gestures, its perfection of movement, its uncanny vocal revelations, its pathos, nobility, and tenderness. But Miss Lehmann is to do the Marschallin at the Metropolitan this winter, so I shall say no more…for fear of having no adjectives left for that happy occasion…. (Samuel Chotzinoff, The New York Evening Post, December 3, 1934)

In Toronto that same December: …It was a real Wagnerian voice….As she sang, she seemed like the first Frigga, the original Norse queen of the heavens, who was at once so majestic as to rule but so sensitive that she could spin the clouds on her loom….There was only greatness….Her singing of the “Love-Death” from Tristan und Isolde had an ecstasy that was truly sublime…. (Pearl McCarthy, The Mail and Empire, Toronto, December 12, 1934)

New Year’s Day at the Metropolitan:…It is difficult to speak in anything but rhapsodic terms of Mme. Lehmann’s first appearance of the season in the role of Elisabeth…. (Winthrop Sargeant)

…The Elisabeth of Lotte Lehmann is one of the most moving embodiments to be seen on the contemporary operatic stage…. (Jerome D. Bohm, The New York-Herald Tribune, January 2, 1935)

…The electrifying spark which set off everything at white heat was the superb performance of Mme. Lehmann as Elisabeth…. (Henriette Weber, The New York Journal)

Lehmann’s Metropolitan Opera Tosca didn’t go so well: …Possibly the performance would have been better coordinated if it had not been for the absence of the unfortunate Mr. Crooks. As it was, Mme. Lehmann sang brilliantly, at times in a pseudo-melodramatic way. She was a German Tosca, rather heavy, lacking the mobility and the quick and light play that Italian or French singers can give the part…. (Olin Downes, The New York Times, March 22, 1935)

…Miss Lehmann, laboring under the disadvantage of some ill-fitting costumes, gave a vivid portrayal of the chaste Roman opera singer, and sang with her usual fervor. Yet, somehow, her Tosca did not achieve the reality of her Eva, her Marschallin, and her Elisabeth. It was a stagy facsimile of a hectic lady, melodramatic and rather self-conscious…. (Samuel Chotzinoff, The New York Evening Post)

…Mme. Lehmann, looking very beautiful and dashing, reminded us from her first entrance that she is a versatile and imaginative singing actress and can turn from Eva to Floria Tosca as easily as most of us can turn from sherry to champagne…. (Lawrence Gilman, The New York Herald Tribune)

Looking back at the opera season past, Esquire had this to say:…Gatti-Casazza’s final season at the Metropolitan Opera House will probably be remembered chiefly for the rise of Kirsten Flagstad and the recognition of Lotte Lehmann. Through the magic of the first of these two singers, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde actually became the most popular opera of the year, breaking all box-office records for the old building; and Mme. Lehmann succeeded not only in establishing the Strauss Rosenkavalier as the masterpiece that it is, but in bringing new life to several other operas that had all but succumbed to the spell of perfunctory routine…. (The Listening Post, Esquire, June 1935)

The 1935 General Motors broadcast with Bruno Walter as conductor and accompanist: …Lotte Lehmann’s Isolde [she sang the “Liebestod“] contained everything that Wagner wrote into the music; and for the creation of such an Isolde there must be not only a great singer but a great woman….She did [lieder] in such a way that made us wonder whether all music might not be great music if it only had a Lotte Lehmann to sing it…. (Aaron Stein, The New York Evening Post, January 15, 1935)

Lehmann with Toscanini in Beeethoven’s Fidelio at Salzburg: Vincent Sheean remembered: Fame alone, or public recognition, never swayed Toscanini in his choice of a leading artist for any great work. On the contrary, he frequently delighted in excavating artists hitherto unknown and showing what they could do….In the case of Lehmann he was swayed not by her fame as Leonore but by his own ardent admiration, which on one occasion, I was told, led him to declare at the end of a difficult passage in rehearsal: “You are the greatest artist in the world.”

Well, she was. The sheer ecstasy which she and Toscanini between them got into certain passages of Fidelio could not otherwise have come into being….There was an element in this Fidelio at Salzburg which defies technical definition. It was not perfect—not as, for example, Falstaff was perfect or nearly so—because in this Fidelio there were singers who were not physically able to reach the exalted mood in which Lehmann and Toscanini performed. The incandescence of the conductor and the soprano produced the very curious effect of making one pass over these imperfections almost without noticing them….

The central soprano part has long been reserved, in Germany anyhow, for those mammoth voices which otherwise sing only Brünnhilde and Isolde. The general idea is that unless a woman has a voice suitable for a fire engine she cannot sing the part of the faithful wife. I am sure Beethoven had no such notion, and Lehmann supplied the proof—if it were needed—that a richly human voice, warm and full, has far more to offer in this music than any hochdramatische goddess….Lehmann was not a sylph in 1935, but her appearance in that ungrateful costume was more convincing than any other I remember, and every note of her voice conveyed the meaning of the part….Blaze is the word that comes to mind most often in thinking of this collaboration between Lehmann and Toscanini. They seemed to take fire from each other; the resulting conflagration warmed all of us for as long as memory can last….

London’s Queen’s Hall on April 28, 1936. The Daily Telegraph wrote: So exquisite and so poignant can her voice be that at times a single note sufficed to enhance the effect of a whole song. The whole of Brahms’s “Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht” was excellent, but the ravishing softness of its last phrase sealed the success of that performance and made one wonder where and by whom it could ever be equaled.

January 16, 1937 The New York Times had this to say about her Metropolitan Opera performance: Perhaps the most magical of Wagner’s women is Sieglinde. She is not the greatest, but she haunts us the longest. Like the Iphigenia of Euripides, she is passionate and tender, simple and complex, piteous and wise, strong and weak, heroic and shrinking; and her purity is as elemental as her passion…No singing-actress of our time, I think, has achieved a more telling and veracious Sieglinde than Lotte Lehmann…It gives us the essence of the character, this remarkable and deeply touching embodiment of Mme. Lehmann’s…In certain moments of exceptional exactness and felicity of suggestion, she colors her voice and shapes her gestures with something of the primitive magic and strangeness and wonder of those who were daughters of earth in old, far-off, forgotten times…It was one of the signals of Mme. Lehmann’s achievement yesterday that she was most piercing and most memorable when the music was. Wagner…speaks of the agonizing utterances of sorrow that this score contains—“I have had to pay for the expression of these sorrows,” he remarks parenthetically. Mme. Lehmann’s delivery of Sieglinde’s music in her frenzied scene with Siegmund in the Second Act made us realize with peculiar vividness what Wagner must have meant. In such measures as…“Wo bist du, Siegmund?” she charged the music with an almost insupportable intensity of tragic woe.

John Hastings wrote a letter to The New York Times, printed January 24, 1937, praising Lehmann at Flagstad’s expense: At long last the critics have paid adequate, long overdue homage to one of the few genuinely great artists of the age, Mme. Lotte Lehmann….

The epidemic of idolatry for Mme. Flagstad as the greatest of modern Wagnerians, if not, in fact, for a vast percentage of operagoers the only Wagnerian, is preposterous and entirely out of proportion to her artistic and histrionic, as exclusive of her vocal, endowment. It has been more than a little difficult to understand the general critical agreement on Flagstad’s supposedly limitless imaginative insight and the likewise universal conspiracy of silence toward Lehmann’s interpretive prowess. It seems, at least to this one finite music-lover, that Flagstad’s pre-eminence begins and ends with one bewilderingly simple thing, and that is a great voice perfectly produced and miraculously inexhaustible.

Her acting is straightforward and of refreshingly natural simplicity, which modern opera can well use, but it assuredly exhibits none of the many soaring, mystical qualities of sheer inspired creation which are so frequently attributed to her….One critic [Lawrence Gilman, in The New York Herald-Tribune], when speaking of Mme. Flagstad’s singing of the Liebestod, went to far as to say that “the whole intolerable pathos of the moment is in her singing of the little grace-note before the B on Freunde,” which bids fair to be a new high in preciosity.

With Lehmann one does not think of such terms as simplicity, naturalness, vocal perfection, or any of the other merits for which one might justly praise Mme. Flagstad, because somehow her vastly inspirational and deeply intuitive art does not lend itself easily to such facile clichés. One might, indeed, almost say of Lehmann that mere vocal perfection is beneath her. The absorption in a mood that is exclusively her province is so complete that faultlessness of production ceases to be a criterion. What is more, her acting is predominantly so inspirational and instinctive that naturalness and simplicity, being attributes of a method at all times conscious and preconceived, prove useless as a basis of appraisal.

Her voice is one of ineffable warmth, lustrous and filled with endless variety of shimmering nuances and colors, a voice which, even though not always flawlessly employed, succeeds in conveying undreamt-of revelations and beauties in the music that she sings. Her movements about the stage bear the authentic mark of spontaneity and actual experience of every implication of a role. Who, then, that has seen and heard what Mme. Lehmann can do…can doubt that here is the greatest singing actress of our time?

It is more than possible that the infrequency with which we are permitted to hear her at the Metropolitan has had much to do with the critical unappreciativeness of Mme. Lehmann, at least in ratio to the critical adoration of Mme. Flagstad….

Olin Downes, the critic of The New York Times, had this to say on January 17, 1937, about the “rediscovered” Sieglinde:…As for this writer, who has been privileged to hear some great Sieglindes at the Metropolitan, and that within no distant date, he would sacrifice them all, great and small, high and low, for the glory, the sweep and the transfiguring emotion of Mme. Lehmann’s interpretation…one of the warmest, most womanly and beautiful enactments of the Sieglinde part we have seen…one sustained sweep of line and surge of feeling….

…Mme. Lehmann graced the role of Eva, and she draws the portrait of Pogner’s daughter with a girlish impulsiveness and warmth of feeling which represent the most exceptional understanding. The voice itself becomes that of Pogner’s daughter…. (Olin Downes)

…And there was Lotte Lehmann’s unmatched Eva, which gives us the spiritual essence of a role that is often slighted…. (Lawrence Gilman The New York Herald-Tribune)

Carleton Smith, writing of her Salzburg Eva for The New York Herald-Tribune of August 30, 1936:…The advantage of having a Walther (Charles Kullman) who was young and exuberant was offset by the disadvantage of his being matched with an Eva (Lotte Lehmann) who looked old enough to be his mother….

In 1937 Der Rosenkavalier returned to the Met: Oscar Thompson for The Sun: …Lotte Lehmann’s Marschallin is a famous one, and not without reason. But when it was first disclosed at the Metropolitan three seasons ago it fell short of its full effectiveness, as experienced by those who had sat in the spell of her characterization in Vienna, Salzburg, or elsewhere abroad. As had been true earlier of the Baron Ochs of the lamented Richard Mayr, its detail did not entirely register in the extensive reaches of the house. Last night Mme. Lehmann’s first act Marschallin was altogether charming for those seated fairly close to the stage. How it was further back is for someone else than this reviewer to say. The soprano was continent in the use of her voice and the music benefited thereby. The monologue was fashioned with just the right note of wistfulness. Elsewhere were phrases of haunting loveliness, as in the snatch of Lied, “Du bist mein Bub, du bist mein Schatz,” [“you are my boy, you are my treasure”] soon after the parting of the curtain; and in the high-arched phrase, “Da drin ist die silberne Ros’n” [“the silver rose is inside”], at the end of the act. This Marschallin was an aristocrat, a philosopher, and above all, a woman, which is precisely what the role requires….

Here is an excerpt from Richard Capell’s review in London’s The Daily Telegraph of May 11, 1937:…A supremely beautiful and affecting performance [was] given by Lotte Lehmann as the Marschallin. As if to make up for last week’s disaster, it seemed, she gave a finer subtlety and deeper tenderness than ever to a part which London operagoers of the last fifteen years must feel to be peculiarly and even exclusively hers. Word after familiar word in Rosenkavalier will be associated, while memory lasts, with Lotte Lehmann’s characteristic enunciation, to say nothing of the charming woman and true princess she represents in her appearance.

In January 1986 Risë Stevens reminisced: I shall never forget her Evchen, her Fidelio with Toscanini. There was not anything with her that I missed. But Rosenkavalier was naturally the thing I was most excited about; that was, after all, my reason for being in Salzburg. As a student, I was allowed to watch rehearsals of the festival performances. It became a dream of mine one day to sing Octavian opposite Lehmann’s Marschallin!

After that summer, in Prague and elsewhere, I sang many performances of Der Rosenkavalier with many partners, with the Konetznis, with almost everyone who was singing the part in those days. But none of them fully existed for me; until I was able to sing with Lotte Lehmann I had not yet sung with the Marschallin herself.

When I finally had the chance to sing with Lotte, I was like a sponge! I wanted to soak up that interpretation, to feel her reactions, to watch her mold a scene. I learned from her, I learned so much! As a colleague she was wonderful to me. She was a mentor. She handled me almost as if I were her own child. I had that feeling when I was on the stage with her, and even in our curtain calls.

Some of her rivals in Vienna may have called her a difficult colleague; but I never ever witnessed anything like that with her. She was far from difficult. Conductors, too, adored her.

As a singer, as a person, as a performer, Lotte had a tremendous effect on my life. She had a kind of charisma that very few people possess. You don’t see that kind of magnetism any more, it doesn’t seem to exist today. I had such an awe of her that I almost felt—in a way—inhibited by that huge personality. But every time I stood on the stage with her I learned something new. There was such a total involvement in whatever she sang! I found myself so mesmerized that I almost tried to sound like her. I used to copy tones and inflections. Our voices blended so well that when she would finish a cue I would try to take the same tone and go on from there; and she would do the same. It was a wonderful give and take. With our acting it was the same. We would bounce reactions back and forth.

I loved the special sound of her voice, I really loved it. No one else had that heart-tugging quality, nor such intensity.

I shall never forget Lotte’s farewell performance, the last we did together at the Metropolitan. I wept so much that I could hardly control myself.

And her recitals! I tried never to miss a concert that she sang, particularly in Town Hall, because there was an intimacy there. I would sit close and really observe her very carefully. She lived, really lived those songs. I learned so much from her. Her whole being was involved in singing, not just her voice. I’m not talking about big gestures. But what she did with that body and those hands! To watch her hands alone was really to learn a lesson. Her hands had expression, they said something. Teachers today are teaching their students not to be so intense, to give a relaxed feeling in singing, so that from the throat on down nothing is saying anything. Hands just dangle at their sides. Isn’t that weird?!

When Lotte walked on or off a stage you were fascinated. She mesmerized her audience. There wasn’t a moment when I took my eyes off her, because it was always a fabulous learning process for me.

Communication with an audience is the ultimate  beauty of singing. You could have heard a pin drop at those recitals. How the audience drank in every single nuance! She felt it all; and you felt it with her because she expressed her inmost feelings. It was so real.

1941 Town Hall: …The New Friends of Music made one of their most valuable contributions…when they presented Lotte Lehmann in Schubert’s immortal “Die Winterreise” cycle in Town Hall. Although in the abstract ideal these songs are more suited to a man’s voice that to a woman’s, we can think of no man appearing before the public today who could have made them more his own than did Mme. Lehmann on this occasion. And it was a memorable occasion….Seldom has the soprano been so completely in control of her abilities, seldom has she struck so deep into the heart of interpretative values…. Each song came fresh and spontaneously to the audience. The shades of melancholy, nostalgia, anguish, bitterness, and resignation passed in review and the listeners were drawn with the singer through the gamut of a poet’s emotions. To extract one memory from another in the series of impressions is well nigh impossible. To point to any song as outstanding would immediately call back another, until the entire cycle was in review….It was very near perfection…. (K., Musical America, February 25, 1941)

Olin Downes, The New York Times called the recital: “an achievement which transmitted the very essence of the composer’s spirit.”

New York Times, January 25, 1943, Olin Downes wrote: LEHMANN IS HEARD IN SCHUMANN SONGS; Soprano is assisted by Paul Ulanowsky in Program at Town Hall

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. Mm. 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.

February 2, 1943 Metropolitan Opera: …Lotte Lehmann, who put herself on record in Town Hall recently as the season’s First Lady of Lieder, just about won the same title for opera with her performance of Elisabeth. Whether heard or seen, the role lived. Every note and line sounded human and needed. Mme. Lehmann seemed to forget she had ever sung any other part, even that she was Lotte Lehmann. For three acts she was Elisabeth, ailing and pleading for her hell-bent Minnesinger. Such acting is rare, whether in opera or theatre, and the more brilliant because bound by musical pace. In awkward waits between sequences Mme. Lehmann went on living Elisabeth in thought and gesture, not just priming for the next cue. It was a tender and womanly portrait… The notes weren’t just notes, but tokens of feeling growing out of a deep-felt conflict… The audience duly noted the great portrayal set before it…. (Louis Biancolli, The New York World-Telegram, February 2, 1943)

Four days later the same critic wrote an editorial on acting in opera:…Mme. Lehmann’s Elisabeth looked fit to rank with the [legitimate] theatre’s best efforts. The singer fully identified herself with the plight of Wagner’s heroine. From the moment she chanted a greeting to the Hall of Song, she seemed intent on sustaining a complete illusion of life. Down to the last gasp of prayer she remained the saintly Elisabeth. By then you forgot a prima donna was singing a part. Elisabeth was merely being Elisabeth, having miraculously borrowed the art of Lotte Lehmann to make herself understood.

 Serious criticisms also exist, such as the following from  Jerome D. Bohm’s column, “Singers and Singing,” from The New York Herald-Tribune (mid-October 1942): Mme. Lehmann did not reach the Metropolitan until she was well past her prime. It was not until January of 1934 that the illustrious German soprano’s operatic gifts were first revealed to New York audiences, although Vienna and Berlin had long before recognized her extraordinary abilities.

Mme. Lehmann may be said to be a singer who has triumphed despite the handicap of a faultily produced voice. Of course, it must at once be added that the timbre of the voice is highly individual and of exceptional beauty, so that even the obvious faults of production, the nasality, the pinching of the top notes and the spasmodic breathing have not prevented Mme. Lehmann from achieving a truly distinguished career.

But Mme. Lehmann’s hold on her devotees can be attributed only partially to the entrancing quality of her voice. For had she been unable to make one forget the technical hindrances which mar her vocalism she could not have attained her present distinction. She is one of the very few singers who are equally impressive in opera and recital. Her imaginative gamut is so comprehensive, her musical insight so perceptive, that she can one evening portray with the utmost conviction the sufferings of Wagner’s Elisabeth or Sieglinde and the next night leave the trappings of the operatic stage behind her and convey with equal impressiveness the intimate poetry of the lieder of a Schubert or a Wolf.

If Mme. Lehmann is wise, however, and wishes to preserve as many as possible of the still persuasive aspects of her art, she will in the future eschew the rigors of operatic singing and devote herself exclusively to the interpretation of lieder, a sphere in which she has few peers. Even when I first heard her abroad some twenty years ago she already experienced difficulty in emitting free, effective top tones. Nowadays Mme. Lehmann’s efforts to attain the altitudes of such roles as Elisabeth and the Marschallin are less and less being crowned by success. Mme. Lehmann would profit by taking a leaf from the book of Hofmannsthal’s philosophical princess and realize that in opera as well as in love the Marschallins must make way for the Sophies.

After an all-Brahms recital at Town Hall, Luis Biancolli wrote in The New York World-Telegram of January 22, 1945:…Lotte Lehmann’s heart went into each number. You could feel it beat in every phrase, almost as if she had either written the song herself or lived the poem. The personal note was that strong. At times you even felt slightly embarrassed, as if suddenly you were looking into a soul and caught a confidence. Sharing that kind of feeling is probably art’s loftiest reach. There was no sense of illusion here. It sounded too real and went too deep…. Of course, Mme. Lehmann has a knack of breathing life into song that few can equal and none surpass. Possibly she does it by the simple process of forgetting herself and becoming the song. Or else through having lived the moment herself at some time…. The real Brahms, the poet of passion and pathos, writer of noble, stirring songs, is a special treat. So special, only the finest seasoned style is equal to it. And every one of these songs was warmed over in the heart, mind, and vocal cords of a great personality….

Lawrence Gilman, the music critic for The New York Herald-Tribune, wrote about Lehmann’s Elisabeth (and some of her other roles) in his book, Wagner’s Operas: For many New Yorkers, the experience of a closer approach to the greatness of Tannhäuser will undoubtedly be associated for years with Lotte Lehmann’s incarnation of the character of Elisabeth…an embodiment of rare imaginative truth: the product, obviously, of a long and searching scrutiny of the character, and of a skillful synthesizing of its constituent factors, musical, dramatic, spiritual….

When first I witnessed this performance, I found the word “virginal” in my mind and on my tongue; when I turned afterward to Wagner’s own exposition of the character of his Elisabeth, I was not surprised to discover…that he not only used that word, but that he described this noblest of the women of his imaginative world in terms that might easily have been applied to Lotte Lehmann’s re-creation—had Wagner been so fortunate as to witness it.

“The difficulty in the role of Elisabeth,” he wrote, “is for an actress to give the impression of the most youthful and virginal unconstraint, without betraying how experienced, how delicate a womanly feeling it is that alone can fit her for the task.” And elsewhere he says: “That actress alone can satisfy my aim, who is able to comprehend Elisabeth’s piteous situation, from the first quick budding of her affection for Tannhäuser, through all the phases of its growth, to its final efflorescence as it unfolds itself in her Prayer—and to feel all this with a woman’s finest sensibility.”

…It is one thing to know what an author wants you to do with his creation, and it is quite another thing to be able to fulfill his wishes. Mme. Lehmann accomplishes this unusual feat. She is, for a few enchanted hours, Wagner’s Elisabeth….

After Lehmann’s Farewell performance in 1951:…Then began a wild stampede backstage to bid Miss Lehmann farewell. At least two-thirds of the audience joined in the rush that soon jammed the entire stage. For three-quarters of an hour, hundreds kissed her hand, cried like children, and swirled around waiting for a parting glimpse of the singer…. As she entered her car, the vast crowd surged after her, cramming sidewalk and street till all forms of traffic were blocked…. As the car moved slowly toward Broadway, [the crowd] watched silently and wept…. (Louis Biancolli’s The New York World-Telegram & Sun)

…In a span of nearly twenty years, and more than fifty recital appearances in New York, Lotte Lehmann taught us something about the singer’s art almost every time she sang. In the latest and unfortunately the last appearance she taught us how a great artist says goodbye to a career…. As she approached the climax of [Schubert’s] hymn to the power of music…neither words nor tone would come…. If anything, these last seconds drew an exquisite line to underscore the joy Lehmann conveyed with her singing by revealing the agony it was for her to renounce it. Artists come and go; the memory of such a human being will remain.  (Irving Kolodin The Saturday Review)

When Lehmann gave a master class in London the actor (and author), Robert Speaight, wrote the following impressions under “Critics’ Columns” in The Tablet of October 12, 1957: …And now she has made herself into another kind of artist in order to pass on her own experience to the young singers of today. There has been no happier or more heroic fulfillment on the contemporary stage.

The present series of public rehearsals let us into the secrets of her incomparable art and personality, and in doing so they take us into the heart of the music she has chosen to interpret. I was lucky enough to hear her in the first act of the Rosenkavalier—the two duets between the Marschallin and Octavian, and the great monologue. This last she went through for us in full, hardly singing but acting it all with such perfect expression that it was easy, from memory, to fill in the contour and the color of the voice. And it was wonderful to see how it was done, and why. At the end of the afternoon, there came one of the most electrifying moments I have ever experienced in theatre or concert-hall. She was demonstrating the ironic gaiety with which the Marschallin should bid Octavian goodbye [presumably just before the arrival of Baron Ochs]. Suddenly, from the rather dingy stage of the Wigmore Hall, a sound went up which did not come from either of the very promising pupils of the Opera School. In a second we realized what had happened: Mme. Lehmann had forgotten that she had no voice! The applause went on for about a minute while she brushed aside the moment of oblivion with a good-humored wave of the hand….

Other critics of the London master classes wrote: …It was fascinating and touching for those who had never seen her in the opera, for—leave the singing voice out as we must—she is an actress of the utmost brilliance and charm…. Merely to see the way—as the Marschallin—she chucks Sophie under the chin with her fan is worth going to see. She scattered her wit and instruction over a two-hour class, asked the young artists to regard her as a colleague and not “as someone who stands on a pedestal.”… (Percy Cater, The Daily Mail, September 24, 1957)

Two young singers pallidly embraced each other on the Wigmore Hall stage last night. And a kindly, grey-haired woman watching them shook her head sadly and said: “I have never yet seen young singers play a love scene right. I—an old woman—have to show them even how to kiss!” Lotte Lehmann did just that, with the emotion and fire of somebody fifty years her junior…. She showed them what color of voice to use…where to put their hands…how to sit and stand…how to glance…how the music guides every word and gesture. And as we watched, two youngsters came to life in front of our eyes. Best of all was the way Mme. Lehmann described the key character of the Marschallin—her own great role: “She is a woman who must live with dignity, wisdom, courage, and kindliness.” For that is the only description of Lotte Lehmann herself…. (Noel Goodwin, The Daily Express)

…The class was on “La Bohème,” and watching her sketch, lightly, subtly, magically, the beginning of springtime love in an attic and its decline into winter and mortal sickness was the most ravishing experience in the world. She made new and irresistible and human what one had foolishly thought hackneyed to the last cliché. (The Sunday Times  November 3)

She made the moon rise, I swear it, in the middle of Wigmore Hall, at the end of “La Bohème,” Act I, with a piano and two young singers without costume, lights, or scenery.

She turned, for a quicksilver moment, into an adorably guttersnipe Musetta, when a few seconds earlier she had been demonstrating the right, the only way to burst into tears because your lover is tired and jealous and your lungs are in a shocking condition.

Perhaps there will be no more Lotte Lehmanns, enchanting, witty, tender ladies, high-romantic yet spiced with irony, elegant yet never artificial, supremely graceful and intelligent, and leaving one in no doubt that they are above all things women…. (Siriol Hugh Jones.)