New Books that speak of LL

In the Summer 1993 edition of this newsletter, we wrote of various books that devoted chapters to Lehmann. Happily, two new and important books have appeared with considerable attention to LL.

The first The Grand Tradition, Seventy Years of Singing on Record: 1900 to 1970, by J. B. Steane, second edition, 1993, Amadeus Press, Portland, Oregon. Though there are many detailed, opinion-filled pages which mention LL, the chapter called "Lieder, More than Singing" ( a play on Lehmann's book title) deals with Lehmann extensively. He can find fault: "Wolf's 'Auch kleine Dinge' is much too strongly voiced for the fragility of both sound and sense." But he generally praises: ". . . there surely never was an operatic artist with more of the natural feeling for the ways in which a phrase can be made meaningful and vivid, through the detailed, imaginative care for words." On Lehmann's recording of the "Liebestod" from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Steane rhetorically questions, "Has one ever heard an Isolde who so tenderly mirrors the smile she sees in the dead face, or who rises quite so humanly to the great climaxes?" Finally, he writes, "It requires a remarkable, complete artist to bring such unlike forces together [opera and Lieder]; and it is not surprising that Lotte Lehmann should have been the one. . . preeminently to do it."

It hardly needs saying that there are many analytical chapters that illumine the vocal careers and recordings of innumerable other artists in the 628 pages of this fascinating book.

The second book devotes a complete chapter to Lehmann. It is Legendary Voices by Nigel Douglas, published in 1992 by André Deutsch, London. It has the added cachet of an available CD which includes many of the recordings mentioned in the book. Nimbus, NI 7851, Legendary Voices includes Lehmann's "Die Lotosblume" by Schumann and "Du bist der Lenz" from the 1935 recording of Wagner's Die Walküre. But let's sample the book in which Douglas writes that Lehmann was "described again and again as 'a soul that sings', an artist whose every performance was a creation of the moment, fetched as a new and living experience from somewhere deep within herself. These are not qualities which are easily projected onto a gramophone record, and in her recordings something of the spell which Lehmann used to cast upon live audiences is inevitably lost. It was also not a help that her early recording contracts... were with German companies which did not at that time aspire to the same technical level as those in London or New York. Despite all these caveats, however, several of the Lehmann CDs do succeed in bringing out a far more immediate and accessible timbre than I ever managed to extract from the old Parlophone 78s." He then goes on to analyze in great detail many CDs including the RCA Victor's GDS7809. "She proves that as late as 1947 she was still quite capable of sustaining a line as taxing as Schubert's in 'Nacht und Träume' but it is not to prove that point that she sings the song, it is to wrap around her listeners the mood of external tranquility and internal longing, which the poem and the music engender." -GH