As a frontispiece for the insert-notes, imperious Lilli stands, one hand held hieratically aloft, the other brandishing the portentous goblet (Isolde’s, I would have thought, though the notes suggest Norma). She herself looks the image of high disdain, and studiously disagreeable. That is the difficulty: she so insistently set and embodied the loftiest standards that it is hard to exercise affectionate indulgence when she falls short of them. The recordings were made in her later years, and we duly remind ourselves that in 1906 the age of 57 was generally reckoned to be more advanced than it is now, 90 years later. She had been singing in public since the mid 1860s and her career had culminated in the heaviest, most demanding of the Wagnerian roles for dramatic soprano, roles of which she was the supreme internationally acclaimed exponent in her time. Considering all this, one marvels that her voice survived as well as it did. Moreover, her technique enabled her to achieve wonderful feats of flexibility and to exhibit, even after so much wear and tear, the mastery for which she was equally renowned, in Mozart, Bellini and Verdi. Yet it is inescapably as a ruin – grand, noble and well preserved – that records present her.
As with many ruins, it is possible to find a whole and apparently undamaged front. The aria from Robert le diable is probably most nearly that; it also has a certain mellowness of mood, something more akin than the others to the softer, more affectionate emotions. Then there are some breathtaking glimpses of past glories: the assured, magically lightened runs and reprise of the melody in “Non mi dir” (Don Giovanni), for example, or the fine sustained note which announces her arrival in the duet from Norma. But really most impressive is the contemplation of the ruin head-on. In the recitative (“Don Ottavio! Son morta!”) before “Or sai chi l’onore” she stands with magnificent grandeur and authority, given distance in the recording studio with only piano accompaniment instead of being crowded in with a quasi-orchestra. The wreck of the lower middle part of the voice is manifest, as is its disparity with the chest-tones, yet this is still the voice of command. Hearing that, we can understand what it was to have heard Lilli Lehmann in her prime.
The transfers are clear, if a little more edgy, surfacey and less full-bodied than one might ideally like them to be. Though the absence of “Martern aller Arten” (Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail) is regrettable, the selection is a good one, and there are admirably informative notes by Robert Jones.'