Let me start with what we can glean (never enough) about the formative influences on Lehmann’s voice. (You’ll find a list of the sources I’ve consulted at the end of Part 2 of this article, on my next post.) These will naturally include what her teachers and she herself believed about technique. But as I hinted in my blog Preamble, I’m also interested in pre-training influences. In Lehmann’s case, these include a childhood in the pre-mike, pre-horn world (no records, no radio, no sound movies or TV—all vocal usages bio-acoustical), in a middle-class North German household in which everyone (mother, father, older brother) sang, not professionally, but with voices of musical quality. (Lehmann’s mother, Marie, had a voice Lotte describes as a “velvety golden contralto;” her father sang in the local men’s choir; and brother Fritz was considered promising until ruined by early training.) Her upbringing also included an educational system that required everyone to recite poetry and other literature deemed suitable for declamation. So, before we get to the first lessons, let me ask: know anyone like that today?

Lehmann’s first formal vocal training was in Berlin, at the Hochschule für Musik. About this instruction we know that she did well enough to eventually earn a scholarship, and that she particularly loved the demanding elocution classes under a Fr. Elise Bartels. But we learn nothing about the technique being taught. After an unhelpful change of teachers, Lehmann entered the school of a famous 19th-Century soprano, Etelka Gerster, where she came under the tutelage of Eva Reinhold. Gerster had studied with Mme. Marchesi herself,  whose principles Gerster’s school seems to have followed more or less faithfully. (Indeed, Marchesi visited Gerster’s school during Lehmann’s time there.) These included the three-register distribution of the female voice described above, and Lehmann recalls her despair at the sight of “exercise sheets with the three vocal registers . . . printed in different colors. The voice fairly leaped from one register to another, a thing I couldn’t agree with, for to me a steady flow of tone was the highest possible aim.”  The Marchesiennes also believed that what accounted for their three female registers was resonance, and that the pupil learned to develop and blend them by learning to direct “the column of air escaping from the Vibrator (the glottis) towards the three resonant walls alternately.”

Lehmann doesn’t mention resonance or the “walls,” or ideas of placement, or of blending. Perhaps she just didn’t get that far, for after a frustrating period of  work with Fr. Reinhold, straining after high notes and attempting to master a single aria from Nozze di Figaro, she was expelled from Gerster’s studio as a lazy no-talent. Fortunately, her next teacher was Mathilde Mallinger, the original Eva in Meistersinger, who clearly freed Lotte’s voice and allowed it to settle into its natural identity. But concerning the technical means by which she did so, we again haven’t a hint. In any case, after a year with Mallinger, Lehmann was able to enter the professional operatic world. That happened (1910) in Hamburg, where for two or three seasons she sang small roles, or occasionally larger ones of a light nature. She also began study with Alma Schadow, and of all Lehmann’s teachers, she is the one I’m most curious about. For Lehmann reports that “with renewed intensive studies [I] felt greater strength and brilliance flood my voice,” and it was while working with Schadow that, after woodshedding the role on short notice with the young Otto Klemperer, Lehmann gave her breakthrough performances as Elsa. Not long thereafter (1916), she was signed for principal roles with the Vienna Court Opera, where she had already guested.