Glass Biography

"Succeeds admirably in capturing the essential Lehmann"

Reviewed favorably in many newspapers and magazines this past year, Beaumont Glass' biography of Lotte Lehmann has taken its place beside her own 1938 story, Midway in My Song, on many a music lover's bookshelf. Of interest to both the Lehmann fan and the Lehmann researcher, the book traces her career from her first singing lessons as a young girl in Berlin to her Farewell Recital in New York in 1951, with extensive coverage of her richly acclaimed opera and lieder career in Hamburg, Vienna, London, Australia and America, plus the master class years that followed in Santa Barbara, Pasadena, Evanston and beyond. Her personal life is detailed more clearly than in her memoirs: her romance with and marriage to Otto Krause and his death in America, her intense friendship with Toscanini, her long and productive friendship with Frances Holden, her singing dogs, her talking mynahs, her whimsy and her humor.

The book is illustrated wich 80 photographs and includes a full discography by Gary Hickling that lists all the known non-commercial recordings (many master classes) as well as the 78rpms and LPs. The book was reviewed in the November 1988 Opera News and in Opera Quarterly in the Winter 1988/89 issue, as well as in the San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times in the spring of 1988.

Lotte Lehmann: A Life in Opera & Song, by Beaumont Glass. Capra Press, P.O. Box 2068, Santa Barbara, CA 93120

[Now (2000) available by writing the author: P.O. Box 986, Camden, ME 04843. $25 new; "returns" $18]