The main thing to observe about the 1932 version (again involving the acoustical-electrical transition) is how little difference the intervening dozen years have made. There’s been no loss of freshness or alacrity, no weakening of  top-to-bottom sonority, no loosening of the vibrato, and—one or two little tweaks aside—no interpretive change. From the technical standpoint, a single moment jumps out. It’s in the  mini-cadenza, marked “mit Karikatur,” at the end of her imagined capitulation to Sir John’s advances (“ich liebe Euch!”). This little passage, with its jumpy pattern of accented dotted quarters on upper notes launched by groups of sixteenths from below, works its way from the B-flat (third line) to the upper A-flat before dipping to its mock-passionate finish, middle C to D-flat to E-flat. It is vocalized on the “ie” of “Liebe.”  In the 1920 performance, Lehmann zips up to those upper holding points (E-flat, then G, then A-flat, then back down, on a pristine, unmodified “ie” that stays clear without any  edginess. In 1932, she repeats this progression on the E-flat and the G but then, upon arrival at A-flat, suddenly turns the vowel towards a schwa. Call it a rounding, a warming, a “covering”—it’s still a fine note, but it isn’t any longer the “ie” of “Liebe.” And regardless of what we call it, and whether we approve or not, it  does raise awareness of a possible upper-middle transition, a “secondo passaggio.”

Lehmann’s decision to change her treatment of this single note may have been purely aesthetic and unrelated to any  belief about registration. However, it is typical of  the sort of vowel modification often employed by singers who believe they are exiting their middle registers and entering “head.”  With her atypical use of it here, we are reminded of the color-coded charts of “the three registers” she viewed with dismay in Etelka Gerster’s school, and suspect that though she rebelled at the mechanics of this layout in favor of a unified stream of tone, she probably assumed  the three-register model as an underlying reality—it was very much the standard wisdom of the time, and remains influential today. Is it right, though? Regardless of what such formidable theorists as Mathilde Marchesi or Manuel Garcia (the originator of  three-register thinking) believed, and regardless of what Lehmann herself (and many other great singers more thoroughly trained than she in that system) believed, is it an accurate description of what goes on?

If we take this model as a schema of the entire pitch range available to the female voice with balanced, sonorous tone, we would allot approximately an octave to each register, with E/F below middle C to the E/F above for “chest,” the next octave for “middle,” and the highest, stretching to the E/F above high C, for “head.” Since any given well-developed voice will have access to about two octaves of this stretch, with the most capable extending a step or two beyond in either direction, we can posit the oldtime contralto for the bottom two octaves, with some extension at the high end; the coloratura soprano for the upper two octaves, with some extension at the low end; and everyone else, rather sloppily (for we’re trying to account for  sopranos of the lyric, dramatic, and mezzo varieties) in between, roughly the two octaves B-to-B, again with some allowance at either extreme. Sounds logical enough, and close listening will disclose much vocal behavior that can be heard that way—especially, unsurprisingly, among singers so trained.