Never Sang for Hitler: the Life and Times of Lotte Lehmann, 1888-1976'

H-German Wipplinger on Kater, 'Never Sang for Hitler: the Life and Times of Lotte Lehmann, 1888-1976' Review published on Tuesday, September 8, 2009 Michael H. Kater. Never Sang for Hitler: the Life and Times of Lotte Lehmann, 1888-1976. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xv + 394 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-87392-5. Reviewed by Jonathan O. Wipplinger (North Carolina State University)Published on H-German (September, 2009) Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher The World of Lotte Lehmann In this copiously documented and well-researched biography of world-renowned opera singer Lotte Lehmann, historian Michael H. Kater pursues the two-fold goal of setting the record straight regarding the many myths surrounding the prima donna and situating her life within specific cultural, historical, and social contexts. As in Kater's other works on German music and musical culture,[1] the picture that emerges of Lotte Lehmann, both politically and personally, is ambiguous and at times contradictory. Culturally, she was an avowed philistine, but consorted with members of the cultural elite like Thomas Mann; aesthetically, she despised jazz and Arnold Schoenberg and adored Richard Strauss; politically, she was banned by the National Socialists, yet had little problem with Austro- fascism; and though she counted many Jews among her friends and artistic collaborators, she consistently displayed antisemitic attitudes and prejudices. What ultimately emerges from this wide- ranging biography is the portrait of a master artist haunted by insecurities, about her art and person, and a deep need to be recognized for her art. Kater follows Lehmann's fascinating life through six chapters, relying almost exclusively on archival sources rather than on the singer's published autobiographical writings. Each chapter follows a more or less standard structure. After opening with a vignette from or about Lehmann, Kater provides contextual information about broader historical and cultural developments relevant to this period of her life. Next, major events and personalities of her professional life are recounted. These, finally, tend to be followed by a third section covering her private life. Lehmann was born in 1888 in Perleberg in the Mark Brandenburg into a lower middle-class family. Her father worked in a credit union that served the local nobility. The direct connection between her family's well-being and that of the aristocracy meant that she was raised in an extremely conservative environment. According to Kater, it left her with a "deeply conservative disposition ... and with a concomitant respect for law and order" (p. 168). Such conservatism extended to her aesthetic preferences, which tended towards the middlebrow when she consumed culture at all. Her family background also played an important role in shaping her relationship to money and wealth. Simultaneously generous and greedy, Lehmann was in constant fear of not having enough money to support herself and those who relied on her. The greatest beneficiary of her magnanimity throughout her life was her brother, Fritz, whom she supported until his death in 1964, out of gratitude that he had loaned her the tuition for her studies at Berlin's Musikhochschule. Financial woes both real and imagined form a leitmotif of Lehmann's personal correspondence and go a long way towards Citation: H-Net Reviews. Wipplinger on Kater, 'Never Sang for Hitler: the Life and Times of Lotte Lehmann, 1888-1976'. H-German. 09-30-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/45957/wipplinger-kater-never-sang-hitler-life-and-times-lotte-lehmann-1888 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-German explaining the singer's obsession with contracts and contract negotiations, which is thoroughly detailed over the course of the book. Lehmann took her first position in an opera company, Hamburg's Stadttheater, in 1910-11, and quickly ingratiated herself with the port city's denizens, who later lovingly referred to her as "unsere Lotte." She performed in Hamburg between 1910 and 1916, making her debut as the second boy in Mozart's Zauberflöte (1791). Her true coming out was as Elsa inLohengrin (1850), whom she portrayed in 1912 under the baton of Otto Klemperer. Yet, even if some musicians there were of the caliber of Klemperer and Gustav Brecher, the city was no Berlin or Vienna. During this formative moment in her career, the petty-bourgeois predilections of the young Lehmann were reinforced rather than undermined. "In Berlin," Kater writes, "her taste might have been shaped more appropriately in the direction of a serious-quality repertoire than could have been the case at the second-class Hamburg Stadttheater.... And so in Hamburg she found herself too often serving up lighter fare, without even finding very much wrong with that" (p. 27). If in Hamburg, Lehmann became a local star, then Vienna and Richard Strauss made her an international one. In 1916, in the midst of World War I, Lehmann moved to the city with which she is today most closely associated. At Vienna's Hofoper she made her debut as the Composer in Strauss's revised setting of Ariadne auf Naxos (1916). Her stellar performance in the role marked the beginning of a troubled relationship with the opera's progenitor, as she fell in and out of his favor. The conflict with Strauss climaxed when the lead female roles for the world premieres of his operas Die ägyptische Helena (1927) and Arabella (1932) went, for a variety of reasons, to rivals. Kater summarizes Lehmann's difficulties with Strauss: "She did not know, or did not want to know, that whenever Straus told her she was the only singer in his life, he had said this to other singers before and would do so again, during her own career with him and after.... Not to be able to comprehend this and put it in perspective was the gullible Lehmann's first mistake. Her second was her own unwillingness to make material and intellectual sacrifices, swallow a prima donna's pride, and give up more of her precious time" (pp. 103-104). If this judgment seems harsh, Kater supports it by detailing the singer's diva-esque contract demands, which included increasing amounts of vacation time and decreasing minimum numbers of performances. Indeed, just such a contract dispute, with none other than Hermann Göring, lay at the heart of the prohibition that the National Socialists laid on her performance career, the state of affairs referred to in Kater's title. During exile and after the war, Lehmann insisted that she had been banned from performing in Nazi Germany for her politically motivated refusal to sign a contract with Göring's Staatsoper that would have prevented her from performing outside of Germany. According to Lehmann, she was to have been compensated for her sacrifice of foreign markets with vast riches including a castle on the Rhine. Kater's critical eye allows no truck with this sort of retrospective myth-making. Though Lehmann did meet with Göring and Heinz Tietjen, then director of the Berlin State Opera, no castle on the Rhine was promised to her, nor, in fact, was there a restriction on performing outside Germany. The dispute actually centered on the way her honorarium of RM 1500 was to be funded and perquisites she sought, such as an apartment in Berlin and a guaranteed position for Fritz at Berlin's Musikhochschule. Lehmann voiced her concerns first to Tietjen, who rebuffed her, and then to Göring himself. After an exchange between Lehmann, Tietjen, and Göring, the singer was informed on June 5, 1934, that no official contract would be forthcoming. So ended her potential career in the Third Reich. Citation: H-Net Reviews. Wipplinger on Kater, 'Never Sang for Hitler: the Life and Times of Lotte Lehmann, 1888-1976'. H-German. 09-30-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/45957/wipplinger-kater-never-sang-hitler-life-and-times-lotte-lehmann-1888 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-German With Germany closed to her for the immediate future, Lehmann was forced to focus her attention elsewhere. During the early 1930s, she sought to capitalize on her fame by exploiting as many international markets as possible. The most important of these was the United States: in particular, New York and its Metropolitan Opera. She had toured America three times between 1930 and 1934, but engagement at the Met had eluded her. Lehmann now redoubled her efforts in this regard. The contract she eventually signed for the 1934-35 season contained neither the perquisites nor the guarantee of high payments she had sought from Göring. Yet, just as in Hamburg and Vienna, Lehmann's charismatic personality and warm voice won over audiences, even if she ultimately had to play second fiddle to newcomer Kirsten Flagstad. At the Met, she became known above all for her portrayal of the Marschallin from Strauss's Rosenkavalier (1911), a role she was uniquely suited to and which she performed thirty-three times for the Met alone. Earlier in her career, she had portrayed both of the opera's other lead female roles, Octavian and Sophie. Now, in her mid-forties, Lehmann excelled at breathing life into the middle-aged, world-weary princess. In America, she also devoted greater attention to the art of singing Lieder, of which she later became one of the foremost masters. She not only performed traditionally feminine songs, but also more prototypically masculine ones, like Franz Schubert's Winterreise song cycle (1827). It was during the 1930s, as she reached the apex of her career, that personal matters (and crises) came to the forefront.

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