100 Greatest Singers: LOTTE LEHMANN

THIS PROJECT IS RESERVED ONLY FOR THE GREATEST! German soprano Lotte Lehmann in this? Please comment!

Lotte Lehmann, Soprano (1888-1976)

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy - Auf Flügeln des Gesanges
Song for voice and piano after a poem by Heinrich Heine
From "Book of songs"
Composed 1822-23
(Recorded 1927)

My personal opinion: "She owned the secret, the only secret we have: A pure heart. A sound from within her heart that goes direct to a listeners heart. It makes him happy".
Words about Lotte Lehmann from an admirer. Words from Leo Slezak.
It´s significant, critics rather wrote about the effects of Lotte Lehmanns singing than about her artistry. There was something magic in it. It was this intensive soulful tone only a very few possessed.
The picture of her shows us a beautiful woman, an image according to her exceptional voice. But it would be deficient to reduce the soprano only to beautiful sounds.
Lotte Lehmann was a performer of characters, a tragedian. She´d sung Wagner and italian heroines with same intensity as she did with Mozart. Walter Legge said, she never sang like a virginal maiden, what means, her singing expressed superior wisdom. When she performed the first Suor Angelica in vienna, Puccini wrote: "She´s indeed a german, but a fine and subtile artist easy and without affectations of a primadonna, with a voice sweet as honey".
Lehmann first came to Metropolitan Opera at age 46 singing Sieglinde with Lauritz Melchior. In 1951 she interrupted a recital in New Yorks Town Hall, annunciated it was her last performance. The audience wept.
Tears are all what´s left. We´re not having voices like hers anymore...

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