Lilli Lehmann

Lilli Lehmann (born Elisabeth Maria Lehmann, later Elisabeth Maria Lehmann-Kalisch; 24 November 1848 – 17 May 1929) was a German soprano who had an active performance career spanning from 1865 into the 1920s. One of the great sopranos of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, music critics hailed her as a peer to other celebrated singers of that era such as Jenny Lind and Adelina Patti. In her early career she performed lighter soprano roles from mainly the lyric coloratura soprano repertoire; and it is in this rep that she was known while a prima donna at the Berlin Hofoper from 1869 through 1885. In 1884 she made her first foray into the dramatic soprano canon at the Royal Opera House in London when she performed the part of Isolde in Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. She thereafter performed roles from a wide range of fachs in the soprano literature; mastering more than 170 different opera characters during her extraordinarily long career. Unlike many singers, her voice maintained its flexibility as it grew in size allowing her to be successful in the dramatic coloratura soprano repertoire. Lehmann was a principal soprano at the Metropolitan Opera ("Met") from 1885 until 1892 and again in 1888–1889. While her repertoire at the Met was large and varied, she was part of a group of singers that popularized Wagner's operas in America. She had earlier performed multiple roles in the first staging of Wagner's Ring Cycle at the very first Bayreuth Festival in 1876. At the Met she portrayed Brünnhilde in the first complete staging of the Ring in America in March 1889. She performed in the first American performances of several of Wagner's operas; among them Siegfried (1887), Götterdämmerung (1888), Tristan und Isolde (1886) and Tannhäuser (1889). In 1888 Lehmann married tenor Paul Kalisch who was also a singer at the Met. Lehmann returned to the Berlin Hofoper from 1892 until 1897, and was thereafter active in opera houses internationally. She sang annually at the Salzburg Festival from 1901 to 1910 and was also artistic director of that festival for a period. She continued to perform into the 1920s as a singer of Lieder; still singing well into the last year of her life. She was also a voice teacher at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and an animal welfare advocate. She died in 1929 of heart disease at the age of 80 in Berlin.