And in that respect, the opening phrases of Lehmann’s 1918 traversal of Agathe’s great scene already tell us quite a bit. “Wie nahte mir der Schlummer,” she sings, and with that “Wie nah-” she drops from C# (third space) to F# on a pronounced portamento—a stylistic effect (and as such, I love it), but a technical device as well, encouraging the knitting of the interval. And upon arrival at that F# (upper edge of the transition area, open vowel, moderate volume), just a touch of chest blend is tipped in, so the tone, though light, is clear and present. The singer goes on: “bevor ich ihm geseh’n,” with the slow three beats of “ihm” on the B-natural given a touch of the even swell-and-diminish—a sure sign that the voice is poised here in the midrange.  A couple of staves down (as Agathe opens her balcony curtain to the starlit night, according to the directions in my old Novello score), comes the magical phrase “Welch schöne Nacht!” As Lehmann’s  voice moves on the umlauted “o” of “schöne” from its perfectly positioned upper F# down through the passaggio, it blends imperceptibly into chest on the middle C#, lifts briefly back up a fourth (again crossing the transition smoothly), then settles into more deeply blended chest on the lower B (“Nacht”). It’s clear from this much that the lower three-quarters of Lehmann’s range is in exemplary balance, with the intonation always centered and the move in and out of chest so undisturbed as to sound utterly natural.

To follow Lehmann’s performance on through the scene is to repeatedly re-affirm the rules of registral behavior I entered above, and E-natural is the telltale pitch: whenever the vowel is open (“wipfel rauscht”) or firmly pointed (“hehre Stille”), a defined chest makes its appearance, and when there are open vowels but a gentler tone is required (“Engelschaar-en”) a light mix is heard. With respect to her acknowledged deficiencies, we also note that she frequently takes breath where most singers wouldn’t. Notable examples would be in the 11th and 12th bars of the adagio (“Leise, leise”), where after the beautifully filled-out move from the upper E-natural to F-sharp on “mein Gebet,” she breaks before singing down through to the lower E (“zur Himmelshalle!”); and again on the identical phrase at the very end of the adagio, where she makes the opposite choice, carrying through the top of the phrase (“sende deine Engel-“), then breaking for “schaaren“⏤a no-no according to the verbal phraseologists, but a quite-okay for musical determinists. What is remarkable, though, is how little difference these unmarked breath commas make to the feel of line and destination in the singing. Often they are hand-in glove with the simple rhymed-couplet feel of the setting.

“Technique”? We should first observe that everything that’s been discussed so far belongs to it, and in Lehmann’s singing is impossible to find fault with. The presence of the bonded chest, blended on the notes just above and below the passaggio, is what enables not only what we recognize as “chest effects,” but the firmness of the midrange as well. It provides the elastic resistance against which the energies of the upper family are thrown higher in the range. When Lehmann confesses a shortfall in her own technique, she is undoubtedly referring to a lack of ultimate freedom in the top segment of the voice⏤the flexibility for dashing passagework and the access to the messa di voce, and thus of blandishing soft dynamics, from A-flat or so up. In the vivace con fuoco of the Freischütz aria (“All’ meine Pulse schlagen“), the floridity is only of moderate difficulty (it’s the wordiness that makes it hard), but Lehmann goes eagerly through it at a quick tempo, with a nice high B at the end. She takes (and retains on her later versions) a huge slowdown at the higher repetition of “will sich morgen treu bewähren!“, but I think that’s a traditional stylistic choice of leading gradually into the subsequent mood change, rather than fear of remaining uptempo. Of course, in discussing technique, there is still the matter of the “third register” posited by Michael Aspinall, the Marchesiennes, and many others. That is more distinctly heard and dealt with in her later recordings of this and other music, and will be fully considered in Part 2 of this article, in two weeks’ time.

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