In the thirty-five years that followed (twenty-five still active in opera, ten more as a recitalist), Lehmann sang an impressive range of music. From its small, sweet beginnings her voice grew to formidable size, though it was never of heavy dramatic calibre. She confessed (I think with a touch of humblespin) to three shortcomings: a deficient sense of rhythm; shortness of breath; and a lack of “technique.”  Obviously, she dealt with these sufficiently well to become a great singer; nonetheless, I will  keep an ear open for them as I proceed. Mostly, though, I’ll be directing attention to the knit of the voice, the “bonding” of its elements over its full range. (Fortunately, register transitions are one thing even the earliest recordings can show, for all that they may conceal.) That means looking both at the voice’s display characteristics, then at how these draw together into the firmness of position, purity of tone, consistency of vibrato, and continuity of line that informed all of Lehmann’s singing. By “display” I mean quick-speaking, mobile excursions up, down, and across the two (me) or three (Aspinall) registers. Two scenes show this particularly well, and in recordings made at different stages of Lehmann’s career. They are Agathe’s Act 11 scene from Der Freischütz and Mistress Ford’s (Frau Fluth’s) big solo scene in Act 1 of Die Lustigen Weiber von Windsor.

Agathe was the first full role Lehmann studied, when she was working with Mallinger, and she sang it regularly throughout the early phases of her career.  She made recordings of the Act 11 scene (a double aria interspersed with recitative) in 1918, 1925, and 1929. The first two are acoustical, and are on the Marston set. The third is electrical; I have re-listened to it on the rather edgily transferred LP in Angel’s COLH series. As always, I hope you will find a way to listen along to these comparisons—otherwise, you will have no grounds to agree or disagree with me, Aspinall, Marchesi, or anyone else, or to understand why the arguments are of aesthetic and dramatic importance. Which they are. Three-register theorists and I have one crucial area of agreement, namely, that a developed chest register belongs in female voices, and that without it there isn’t going to be much in the way of a lower range, or for that matter (assuming some blending capability), a firm midrange. ^(I) In the two-register model, the transition point into and out of “chest” is the fulcrum of the entire voice. Thus, although in female instruments the upper family is long and the lower short, they are functionally equal, and the lower-middle area of the range, not the upper-middle or the top, is the likeliest place to look for the source of technical strengths and weaknesses.