Beyond the making of art, what can we or should we expect from great artists? In particular, do their gifts excuse them from the ordinary ethical responsibilities of other human beings? Or should they be held to generally accepted standards of conduct—if not higher ones? No matter how self-evident the answers to these questions may seem, history proves them to be less obvious in practice.

In the case of music, no historical event has been more telling in this regard than World War II. While some well-known European musicians responded with integrity to the rise of the Hitler regime, far more collaborated more or less willingly with the Nazis. And now that historians have begun to apply stricter scrutiny to the wartime conduct of European artists, it is becoming evident that most—including some whose conduct was once thought impeccable—were opportunists who behaved no better than they had to.

Into which camp did Lotte Lehmann fall? Born in Prussia in 1888, Lehmann was one of a handful of non-Jewish German musicians to choose emigration over collaboration with the Nazis, moving to America and remaining there after the war. It has long been taken for granted that her decision to abandon her European career was both principled and courageous, since, from 1916 until the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, she was one of the Vienna State Opera’s most popular singers. But her story turns out to have been more complicated than it looks, and Michael H. Kater tells it with well-informed candor in Never Sang for Hitler: The Life and Times of Lotte Lehmann, 1888-1976.¹ 

Kater, a professor of history at York University in Toronto, is the author of two previous books, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (1997) and Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (2000). Both cast a cold eye on the wartime conduct of the classical musicians of Nazi Germany, and his new book, which is the first primary-source biography of Lehmann, is very much in the same vein. For while Lehmann was no Nazi, neither was she an anti-Nazi. Kater leaves the reader in no possible doubt that she emigrated for reasons that had nothing to do with idealism—and everything to do with money.

_____________

Lehmann is less well known today than she was at the time of her death in 1976, when her great career was still a living memory in America. Throughout the middle part of her life, however, she was as famous here as she had been in Europe. Because she was not filmed in her prime and left behind no full-length commercial recordings of any of her operatic roles, her legendary prowess as a stage actress must now be taken on faith. But she recorded extensively between 1914 and 1949, and these performances add ample flesh to the bare bones of her reputation.

A “heavy” lyric soprano whose voice was more warm than brilliant, Lehmann was never known for the security of her high notes. Instead she opted for sincerity over showiness, singing with a heartfelt quality that Kater nicely describes as “soulfulness enhanced by chastity.” Though her repertoire ranged widely in her youth, she came to be closely identified with three German roles: Leonore in Beethoven’s Fidelio, Sieglinde in Wagner’s Die Walküre, and the Marschallin in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. All were ideally suited to her emotional inclinations (if not her vocal limitations), and her interpretations of these roles helped make her one of the most noted classical singers of her day.²

Success came early to Lehmann. She signed her first opera-house contract in 1910, just six years after beginning her musical studies, and two years later Strauss invited her to perform in the premiere of the revised version of his Ariadne auf Naxos. >From then on she moved from triumph to triumph, aided by the patronage of Strauss and of Bruno Walter, who not only conducted many of her stage performances but also accompanied her in recitals.

But while she was naturally bright, Lehmann’s modest background—her father was a low-level Prussian civil servant—had not prepared her to move in such exalted circles. Nor was she quite attractive enough to make up for her lack of social and intellectual poise. In Vienna, such commodities were at a premium, and for all her fame, Lehmann’s petit-bourgeois habits of mind caused her to be ill at ease in the city where she had won her fame.

_____________

The crassness of Wilhelmine Germany suited Lehmann better. When the Third Reich eventually beckoned, she made it known that she could be had—at a price.

In April 1934, Hermann Goering summoned her to Berlin and offered her a lucrative contract with the Berlin State Opera. According to Lehmann herself, he also offered a villa, a large pension, and a riding horse if she would agree to sing exclusively in Nazi Germany. As she told the story, Goering then sent her a contract that made no mention of “all the extravagant promises.” Unwilling to give up singing in America or in her “beloved Vienna,” she declined the offer, after which Goering sent her a letter “full of insults and low abuse” and banned her from performing in Germany. Later on, she said, the Nazis renewed their suit, but by then “my eyes had been opened to their crimes.”

Such, at any rate, was the version told by Lehmann and her publicists, and no one privy to the details of what had actually happened came forward to contradict them. Later on she embroidered the tale still further, claiming that she was “a fanatical anti-Nazi” whom, when she refused to sign on the dotted line, Goering accused of having “a Jewish junk-dealer’s soul.”

Alas, not much of this pretty story is true, as Michael Kater discovered in the course of researching Never Sang for Hitler. In fact, by the time Goering approached her, the Depression-wracked Vienna State Opera had cut the high-living soprano’s salary significantly and reduced the frequency of her appearances. Far from being opposed to Hitler, she was already performing so frequently in Germany that her Jewish friends chided her for her insensitivity. And the real reason her deal with Goering fell through, it turns out, was that in addition to her promised salary she asked for too many fringe benefits, including a six-room apartment in Berlin. Nor had Goering insisted that Lehmann sing only in Germany: To the contrary, he expected her to perform in other countries as an artistic ambassador of the Third Reich.

As soon as Lehmann understood that she had gone too far, moreover, she backpedaled, attempting to reopen negotiations by assuring Goering in a telegram that “my purely idealistic, artistic conception of my life’s work is, and always has been, to carry German art into the whole world.” But he ignored her entreaties, and once it became clear to Lehmann that she would henceforth not be welcome in her native land, she started telling foreign journalists that she was no longer willing to sing in Germany “as it was today.” And yet even after the Anschluss she went out of her way to request that the Vienna State Opera pension her off (which it did) rather than resigning from the company in protest, and it is clear that she would not have hesitated to accept Goering’s offer had it been sufficiently generous.

_____________

By then Lehmann had moved her base of operations to America. There she engaged a shrewd publicist, Constance Hope, who succeeded in establishing her as a popular celebrity. Not only did Lehmann sing at the Metropolitan Opera House, but she also became a frequent guest on Kraft Music Hall, Bing Crosby’s radio show, and made the cover of Time in 1935. The Time story is a period piece that says much about the way in which Hope marketed her as a democratic diva:

Toscanini attends all her recitals. She is Bruno Walter’s favorite singer. . . . Lehmann’s ways are unpretentious. She keeps no maid, answers her own telephone, does her own mending. Five years ago she was definitely large. Now 20 lbs. thinner, she watches her diet, never orders dessert.

That Lehmann was believed to have defied the Nazis served her well during World War II. “Like Bruno Walter and other world-famous artists,” Kater writes, “she enjoyed the incalculable advantage of having been a brand name before Hitler’s coming to power.” The willingness of the American media to swallow her tale of standing up to Goering earned her much good will among American music lovers—and she put it to use. As advancing age forced her to give up one after another of her demanding operatic roles, she shifted her focus to the recital stage, winning critical plaudits as a specialist in German art song and publishing two valuable books about vocal interpretation, More Than Singing (1945) and My Many Lives (1948).³ An attempt to repackage herself as a Hollywood actress proved unsuccessful, however, and in 1951 Lehmann retired from public performance to spend the rest of her life teaching in California, where she worked with such singers as Grace Bumbry and Marilyn Horne.

Though Lehmann spoke English with a thick accent and remained aloof from most aspects of American culture, the uncomplicated directness of American manners appears to have suited her far better than Vienna’s elaborate urbanity, and her later years were for the most part happy ones. She visited Europe after the war to teach a few public master classes, but mainly she stuck close to her new home and to the Music Academy of the West, the conservatory in Santa Barbara she had helped to found in 1946 and at which she taught voice for the rest of her active life.

_____________

Michael Kater’s interests in Never Sang for Hitler are more socio-historical than musical. Still, it is surprising that he has so little to say about the records that are now Lehmann’s main claim to fame. Since most of these performances are now out of print in this country, it is difficult for younger listeners to get to know the singing of the woman whom the British vocal connoisseur J.B. Steane described as “immensely alive, strong and intelligent as well as warm, tender and charming—perhaps after all as complete a human being as we have come to know through records of great singers.”

It remains to be seen whether Lehmann’s records will be as esteemed by tomorrow’s music lovers as they were in her lifetime and for many years afterward. Tastes in singing are subject to changes in fashion, and the matronly warmth that was her trademark is no longer as popular as it once was. While one cannot  dismiss the near-universal testimony of the critics who described her as a singing actress beyond compare, the abridged Rosen-kavalier that she recorded in 1933 is not nearly so striking as reviews of her live performances might lead one to expect.⁴

But even if Lotte Lehmann herself should not continue to be so highly regarded in the 21st century as she was in the 20th, Never Sang for Hitler will remain valuable as a cautionary tale, not merely for artists who make the mistake of thinking themselves above the common run but also for anyone who idealistically believes that the ability to make great art endows the maker with superior moral perceptions. Even the greatest of artists are capable of behaving abominably and then lying about it afterward. Whatever the ultimate effect of the experience of beauty may be, no one who reads Never Sang for Hitler could ever again suppose that it infallibly ennobles the soul.

_____________

p>¹ Cambridge, 394 pp., $35.00.

² Lotte Lehmann: Opera and Lieder (Pearl GEMM CDS 9234, two CD’s) is a wide-ranging collection of recordings made by Lehmann between 1927 and 1942 that includes excerpts from Fidelio, Die Walküre, Der Rosenkavalier, and other operas. Though out of print in the U.S., it is still available in England and can be ordered directly from www.amazon.co.uk.

³ After 1935, Lehmann recorded only art songs, including the major cycles of Schubert and Schumann (the latter accompanied by Bruno Walter) and many individual songs by Brahms, Strauss, and Wolf. A six-CD series of reissues of her complete American recordings has been released in Europe by Naxos and can be ordered in the U.S. from www.norpete.com (Naxos 8.111093/97 and 8.111244).

⁴ The Marschallin’s first-act monologue from Rosenkavalier can be heard on Lotte Lehmann: Opera and Lieder, along with two lengthy excerpts from the abridged Walküre that Lehmann recorded for EMI in 1935 with Lauritz Melchior and the Vienna Philharmonic under Bruno Walter—to my mind her finest achievement on record.