I was to call upon Madame Lehmann at 9:30 A.M., and this after a great and long performance the evening before. I had visions of the prima donna still in bed, receiving her caller quite in negligee, and sipping her coffee, served by a French maid, while a parrot and pet dog and flowers and the morning mail and newspapers combined to form an effect of artistic confusion.
This makes a pleasing picture, but it is not Lilli Lehmann. There is no sense of "artistic confusion" about her from her gray-tinged hair to her grand, true voice.
In answer to the visitor's knock at her room in the Hotel Netherlands, she opened the door herself, and shook hands with true German cordiality.
The bed in the adjoining room was already made, and there was no sign of a late breakfast; all this at an hour when it is safe to say half her hearers of the evening before were not yet up.
And Lilli Lehmann, who in the eyes of the public is majestically arrayed in flowing robes and breastplates and silver shields, wore on this occasion, over her plain serge dress, the typical little fancy apron—so dear to the German Hausfrau.
The Berliners may well call her "Our Lilli Lehmann," for she is as unassuming to this day as the least of them.
But altho she impresses you as unpretentious, you also feel at once her great force and energy. It shows in her every word and movement, and also in her business-like method of being interviewed.
"Yes, I am quite tired," was her first remark as she seated herself at a little writing-desk and her visitor near by. "The opera lasted so late; I did not get to bed until two o'clock. But I was waiting for you this morning, and had just prepared to write down some items you might wish to know."
Then she took a pencil and paper,—and what do you suppose she wrote first? These are the exact words, and she read them aloud as she wrote:
"Born—Würzburg, November 24, 1848."