Lotte Lehmann: Advent Calendar Of Song: Day Ten

Lotte Lehmann (1888-1976) had a long and glorious career, singing opera from1910 to the 1940s, and recitals until 1951. Don’t confuse her with the earlier Lilli Lehmann (1848-1929), who had an even longer and yet more versatile career. Lilli was exceptional and widely admired on both sides of the Atlantic, and yet it’s Lotte (no relation) who’s greater yet. She created several roles for Richard Strauss, was admired by Puccini in some of his, was passionately loved by Toscanini (whose love letters are intensely erotic) and by Klemperer (who called his daughter Lotte after her). 

 Caruso told her she had “una voce italiana”: he didn’t mean she had a good Italian accent – she didn't - he meant that her voice had an Italian placement, with a good chest register, a radiant top, and unaffectedly direct diction, so that the voice makes you see face. She’s one of the few singers to have sung all three of the leading female roles in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier; her Marschallin in that opera was so definitive that several of its greatest postwar interpreters (Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Régine Crespin, Elisabeth Söderström) studied it with her. When she sang Sieglinde in Die Walküre to the Brünnhilde of that also great soprano Kirsten Flagstad, the latter is said to have remarked “She behaved onstage as a married woman should only behave in private with her husband.” Some of Lehmann's recordings - intense and spontaneous beyond all others - make you understand what Flagstad meant. 

 It’s been remarked that none of her many recordings is without its great rewards; since there are more than five hundred (all originally on 78s), I haven’t listened to all, but I can believe it. For me, she is one of those rare singers whose singing shakes you by the shoulders to say “This is the truth” – and she can do it in English (“Drink to me only with thine eyes”), French (Duparc’s “La Vie antérieure”), or Italian (Beethoven’s “In questa tomba oscura”) as well as in her native German. In recent decades, a few women have seemed bold in singing some of Schubert’s song cycles associated with male singers, but Lehmann had already done so in the 1940s. With Winterreise, which so many greater male singers have recorded, hers is my all-time favourite: the one whose quality of utterance takes me to the core of the music’s drama.

 Still, her voice’s full bloom faded during her fifties. This recording, of Der Doppelgänger(which translates as “the double” or “the wraith”) comes from when she was about fifty-three. It won’t completely explain to you why she was loved. Nonetheless I think it’s among her very greatest: the diction is the first reason, but only the most obvious. Here's the link! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHc0qMFJSSI  

 In some moods, I also think this is Schubert’s greatest song. The words are by Heinrich Heine (1827): Wikipedia tells us that he spelt the title word “doppeltgänger”. Lehmann not only makes every word natural and important, she shapes the whole thing as a single, slow arc – though "arc" is the wrong metaphor, since she also shapes at least three amazing climaxes along the way: “Schmerzens Gewalt”; “meine eigne Gesalt”, and “so manche Nacht”. 

I’ve been both that past person gazing in anguish at the window of the beloved and that present-day witness of that haunting/haunted scene  - but only Lehmann makes me feel every inexorable facet of that self-recognition. It’s been said that Freud was just one in a long line of German Romantic poets: here I see that Heine was one of his precursors. 

I love Lehmann’s vibrato: it suggests the complete naturalness both of regular breathing and of intense neurosis. You don’t expect that this slow song, with its steady, firm, beginning, will rise to such hysteria; of course it does. And the way she ends the song is particularly wonderful, with the words “in alter Zeit” (“in times long gone”) suggesting several kinds of ghost-town loss: she’s horrified by the anguish she once felt and by the apparition of her former self, but she’s bereft without this passion that once irradiated her being.

Still ist die Nacht, es ruhen die Gassen,

in diesem Hause wohnte mein Schatz;

sie hat schon längst die Stadt verlassen,

doch steht noch das Haus auf demselben Platz.

The night is still, the streets are at rest;

in this house lived my sweetheart.

She has long since left the town,

but the house still stands on the selfsame spot.

Da steht auch ein Mensch und starrt in die Höhe,

und ringt die Hände, vor Schmerzens Gewalt;

mir graust es, wenn ich sein Antlitz sehe –

der Mond zeigt mir meine eigne Gestalt.

A man stands there too, staring up,

and wringing his hands in anguish;

I shudder when I see his face –

the moon shows me my own form!

Du Doppelgänger! du bleicher Geselle!

Was äffst du nach mein Liebesleid,

das mich gequält auf dieser Stelle,

so manche Nacht, in alter Zeit?

You wraith, pallid companion,

why do you ape the pain of my love

which tormented me on this very spot,

so many a night, in days long past?

Translations by Richard Wigmore first published by Gollancz and reprinted in the Hyperion Schubert Song Edition

Lotte Lehmann

Lotte Lehmann

Lotte Lehmann