Nonetheless: when we hear Lehmann appeal to the Virgin, in Schubert’s setting from The Lady of the Lake or elsewhere, we immediately feel an unusually personal, woman-to-woman connection. When she brings us Elisabeth or Elsa, it’s not only with the free, broad musicality and stylistic authority of Rethberg, but with a nuanced, specific journey through the emotional life of the moment. She dramatizes, she story-tells, tries to capture us, almost as one does when reading to a child. To mark one instance: in Elsa’s Dream Narrative, try the falling line at the end of the first section “Ich sank in süssen Schlaf” (“I sank into deep sleep”), with that lovely caress on “süssen,” and then the pickup for “In lichten Waffen Scheine/ein Ritter nahte da” (“In bright shining armor/a knight now came near”)—with Rethberg, we certainly get the picture and feel the excitement, but with Lehmann it’s more vivid, more lit up. I’m not trying to elevate either of these great artists over the other—in part it’s a question of the listener’s individual temperament and taste, or even merely the mood of the moment—but simply to locate Lehmann’s special position in the firmament.

An aspect of the “particular feminine sensibility” that Lehmann inhabited was the emotional life of a domestic woman of 19th-Century—I guess there’s no avoiding the word—”bourgeois” provenance. Even when representing larger-than-life personae, she often sounds to me to be singing, passionately, from within this identity. This makes her the perfect interpreter of the Schumann/Chamisso cycle, Frauenliebe und Leben, which is the centerpiece of the Lieder repertoire she recorded during these years. Perhaps it also explains why this beautiful, relatively unchallenging group is not often programmed these days—at least, that is my impression. Contemporary women (and these songs are truly female-only) resist submitting to this identity, to the feelings (and the more heartfelt, the more repugnant they apparently are) of a woman whose life is, within the bounds of the cycle, entirely wrapped up with that of her husband, from first love to childbirth to the grave. In his characteristically knowledgeable and empathetic booklet essay, Michael Aspinall writes of Lehmann’s emotional and musically free treatment of these songs, and of her “operatic” mode of expression in them, which he characterizes as belonging to 19th-Century Lieder performance. If so (and my own listening to early Lieder recordings leads me to believe that it is), all that should overjoy performance-practice “authenticity” proponents. But does it, I wonder?

The close relationship between stylistic habit and vocal function cannot be undone. Take, for instance, Lehmann’s use of the downward portamento, which she employs far more often than we’re now accustomed to. As Aspinall points out, this is a typical Romantic stylistic gesture. But it is also a functional device of continuity, for the “carriage” of the voice through intervals is simply an extension of the concept of legato, which ensures the uninterrupted vibration of tone along the vocal line. And that, in turn, is biologically grounded, derived from the necessity for keeping the energization of muscle groups in an elastic balance for the creation of any form of movement or action. Since in my two-part discussion of Marston’s earlier Lehmann release (see 9/29/17 and 10/13/17) I devoted generous space to her exemplary bonding of registers, with special attention to her guidance from the upper-middle range down into the blended chest, I won’t repeat those observations here. But the great aesthetic and dramatic empowerments of this technical tool, including that of a firm midrange with strong vowel definition, are on constant display in Frauenliebe und Leben. Singing the cycle in the medium keys (and operatically developed voices are at a distinct margin-of-error advantage here), Lehmann constantly bends this registral interplay to her expressive intent, dipping in and out of an array of shadings and shapings that embrace the whole emotional span of the songs without once suggesting that she is manipulating or fussing with them (or with us). The writing’s frequent down-and-back-up gestures (what the old elocutionists called the circumflex, but over wider intervals), as well as the rapid upward turn so deftly deployed by Wagner as well as by Schumann to launch phrases of excitement or urgency, also grow out of this taut knitting of the voice. Late in the cycle (I think especially of No. 6, Süsser Freund, du blickest) she captures the sense of tears barely contained at a soft dynamic. That, too, is dependent on that same catchment of energies.