Dowager of Song

The applause went on for two minutes when she came on stage; the house was full, and 100 extra people crowded onto the stage, which was decked with enough floral tributes to do justice to a gangster's funeral. But tall, ample Lotte Lehmann, one of the greatest sopranos of her fading day, making her 18th annual appearance at Manhattan's Town Hall, still nervously clutched a handkerchief as she sang Schubert's Muellerin song cycle. Said she, afterwards: "The first concert in New York is always difficult. The heart goes like that! It is like having again a difficult examination."

She is now 57--and is annoyed when newspapers, as they often do, call her 60. She has a Perleberg birth certificate dated February 27, 1888, and after producing it last week, added: "It has cost me so many tears, you have no idea. I should wear my birth certificate on a chain around my neck!" She is bubbling with health, and looks somewhat like a motherly Hausfrau, which she isn't. ("There's not an atom of Hausfrau in me., It's really dreadful.")

In a hillside house overlooking the Pacific near Santa Barbara, Calif., Lotte Lehmann lives with a friend, Frances Holden (former New York University psychology assistant professor). Says she: "We swim every day in the Pacific, even at Christmas time. We are dreadfully busy. She translates my books. I paint. She makes carpenter work. We look like pigs running around." Lehmann's fourth book, More Than Singing, is in its second printing, and her paintings (landscapes, portraits, opera scenes) were displayed in a one-man show in November 1944. ("A man called up and wanted to buy one of the paintings. I was so overwhelmed I wanted to give it to him. My friend said, 'Lotte, don't be so unprofessional.' He paid $50 for it, poor man!")

Lotte Lehmann's voice is still powerful and still lyric, but she does not dread the day when she loses it: "I will not miss it a bit," says she, "of that I am quite sure. I like very much to show other sides. Oh, Gott, I have not only one!"

For the first time in twelve years she is not singing at the Metropolitan this winter--although in San Francisco she recently sang her greatest role, the Marschallin, in Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier. She regrets that Strauss did not oppose Naziism more actively, but says: "Shall one expect that a great artist is also a great person? I know artists with lousy characters. It is strange that the gift is given sometimes to a shell that is not worthy of it, nicht?"

Another grande dame of grand opera packed Town Hall six days later. Busty, strawblonde Frieda Hempel, 60, was history's first Marschallin (she sang it at Rosenkavalier's 1911 premiere in Dresden).

In her U.S. debut, with Caruso, in 1912, critics raved about the "enormous heights" her voice soared to. Last week her altitudes were a little cloudy, but when she settled on the lower musical plateaus, concertgoers could still recognize some of the golden tone that earned Frieda Hempel a million and a quarter dollars in opera, concerts and Red Seal records.

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