LOTTIE LEHMANN.

Taranaki Central Press, 19 April 1937, Page 3

LOTTIE LEHMANN.

FAMOUS OPERA SINGER. i i 1 Brief New Zealand Visit. | A survival of the tradition which I the late Herman Klein called the [ Solden Age of Opera is Lotte LehI tnann, the famous operatic soprano who passed through Auckland on her / v.'ay to Australia to do a series o' broadcasts. Madame, Lehmann is one of the most loved of opera stars, and one has only to meet her to realise why thi, s is, says an Auckland exchange. She is charming, simple, warm, and human, as well as having one of the most perfect voices in the, world today. She explained something of her feeling for her work and her audiences.

“I am anxious to sing to Australian people, because I have heard that i they are so musical. I do not expect , tn a young country to find that people are-as highly trained as they are in Europe, but I find that this makes little or no difference to an audience's? enthusiasm and appreciation in some of the smaller places I have sung in I have found that the people ioved my singing just as much as they did in the great cities. In fact, I felt that they loved it more, and so I loved singing more to them than to the others.” If an artist has something to give to the world—a desire to share her gift with people—they feel it and respond, Madame Lehmann said. I did not start off being a singer,” she said. “When I was a child I Planted to be a writer, and I used to sit over pencil and paper writing poem 8 and stories. I would send fhem off to the newspapers, and they always came straight back. They must have been funny little stories. And then one day the impossible happened. Someone st-nit ten marks for

one, and it wa s accepted, and published. I knew" that my fortune was made. I think that v'ae the sweetest money I earned in my life.” Madame Lehmann has just had a hovel published in Vienna. “Writing is still my dearest hobby," she said. T am now writing a story of my life and I have finished it during this trip, and I with I had not, for so much that I have seen, in the last f w weeks should be in it.” No Time to “Play.’’ Next to writing, this famous singer, who has sung in all the famous opera hous.es ini the World, loves riding? Her husband, Mr Otto Krause, once an officer in the American army, taught her to ride, and when she has time she loves to take a horse out in the early mornings. “But I have very little time,” she said. “I have never had time to play, ar other people do. When I wa s very young my teachers always fold me that I would have a famous voice, and 1 was trained with that dim in view.” Asked whether she would have any other less arduous life in place of her own, Madame Lehmann said she would not. “It is. a hard life, but one meets lovely people, and travels and sees the world. It is a life full of movement and colour, and one f&els hat one has something to give the world that is a privilege a a well as one’s 'Work in life.”