Lotte Lehmann e il ciclo liederistico, dal palcoscenico alla masterclass

Lotte Lehmann (1888-1976) was one of the leading Wagner and Strauss interpreters of the early 20th century. In the United States, in particular, Lehmann became the patron saint of German opera and, above all, the lieder repertoire, with recitals that lasted until 1951 and twenty years of teaching 'vocal interpretation' as part of the summer master classes of the Music Academy of the West, which the soprano co-founded in 1947 on the model of the Salzburg Mozarteum. The long course of Lehmanni's activities, their temporal articulation around and beyond the Second World War, and their diffraction between multiple performance contexts and media (from recital to television programme, from autobiographical performance to the publication of novels and ‘didactic’ writings) make the German soprano a case of great interest for understanding how the 20th century reconceptualised 19th-century Art Music and made it into a cultural heritage. In this article, I analyse these processes using Robert Schumann’s “Dichterliebe” and “Frauenliebe und Leben” as paradigmatic examples. First, I will reconstruct Lehmann's performance models through her discographic legacy. I then turn to her teaching activities, which reveal further forms of adaptation of Lehmann’s interpretation. I show how the soprano imposed a dramaturgical structure on the Schumann cycle (and, more generally, on the song cycles she had in her repertoire) that was not necessarily intrinsic to the compositional project or the poetic text, but often in line with public forms of ‘self-construction’ of her own ‘musical persona’. Finally, I attempt to show how all of this stemmed from the teaching of Bruno Walter, resulting in a late articulation of the (implicit) patrimonialisation projects that affected the German Lied in the United States between the two World Wars.