Beginning in 1933 and extending into the war years, Johann von May made recordings from the flies of the Vienna State Opera, and in the 1990s Koch/Schwann released the salvageable material on 24 two-CD sets. Despite the devoted restoration work of Christian Zimmerli, much of this material (especially from the earlier years) takes determined listening. But for those of us who thrill to the resurrection of long-gone performance and cherish the documentation of cultural history, the series is invaluable. Like the far more primitive Mapleson cylinders from the Met (1900-1904), they give us glimpses of great artists in the heat of performance and in the opera-house acoustic, however peculiarly captured. Volume 12 presents a wealth of Lehmann material, including extended extracts from the second acts of Tannhäuser and Die Walküre, both from 1933 and both with formidable tenor partners (Josef Kalenberg and Franz Völker). If we listen analytically, we will hear the technical structuring I’ve been discussing holding up with remarkable consistency. But unless we’re concentrating on that, we’ll hear a voice soaring through the Tannhāuser excerpts with the utmost beauty and dramatic urgency, the style guided as if through a natural language, and with an occasional suggestion of the effect of which Hermann Klein took note, in reports on her Covent Garden performances, of her voice rising excitingly above the great ensemble finales of Tannhäuser, Act 11, and Otello, Act 111. (And what a pity that we have nothing of her on the recording of the1927 Covent Garden Otello, opposite Giovanni Zenatello). In the Walküre sequence (about seven and a half minutes starting at “Raste nun hier!”), no one I’ve heard has caught the desperation of Sieglinde’s predicament like Lehmann. She’s wonderful on the studio recording; this is a step beyond.
Like Claudia Muzio, or Lehmann’s idol from her Berlin student days, Geraldine Farrar, Lehmann was in her time a modern singer. She had little patience for the mathematics of music, getting herself recused from theory class, famously letting her note values “swim” a bit, and ignoring her register charts. She wanted to follow her impulses and to express emotions and intentions with the utmost directness. And so she did. But as Marchesi observed, had the “mechanical part” not been there, she would not have prevailed in that pursuit.
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The sources I have consulted or re-consulted in connection with these two posts are:
By Lotte Lehmann: “Midway in My Song,” Bobbs-Merrill, 1938; “My Many Lives,” Boosey & Hawkes, 1948; “Five Operas and Richard Strauss,” MacMillan, 1964.
About Lotte Lehmann: Michael N. Kater: “Never Sang for Hitler,” Columbia Univ. Press, 2008; Lanfranco Rasponi: :”The Last Prima Donnas,” Knopf, 1982; William R. Moran, ed.: “Hermann Klein and the Gramophone,” Amadeus, 1990.
I have also re-read the essays written to accompany several previous re-issues of Lehmann recordings: “Lotte Lehmann Remembered,” by John Coveney (Seraphim 1B-6105); “Some Recollections of Lotte Lehmann,” by Alec Robertson (Angel Colo 112); the untitled notes for “Lotte Lehmann Sings Lieder, Vol. 1,” by Philip L. Miller (Camden CAL 378); and “The Unforgettable Lotte Lehmann,” by Marcia Davenport (Columbia ML 5778), all of whom, like Rasponi and Klein, had extensive experience of Lehmann in live performance. And, of course, Michael Aspinall: “The Art of Lotte Lehmann—Unbridled Joy” (Marston 54006-2).