Eternal Flight

The Lotte Lehmann Foundation has recently purchased Lehmann's only novel Eternal Flight published in 1937.

Here are some excerpts in English translation by Elsa Krauch.

Of the lead character, a dancer, Lehmann writes:
"She was like a bird of passage, brilliant and restless. Her life taxed her energies to the fullest. She had painfuly little time for herself. Her ambition knew no bounds. Fame--always purchased dearly--demanded its price of complete self-surrender..."

Lehmann describes a famous opera singer:
"She was a strange creature. People thought her haughty, cruel, calculating. In reality she was none of these things. She was a miserably lonely woman, beset by a frantic fear of anyting that might disturb this loneliness....She had been happy today when she was singing Isolde. It was as though her real life did not begin until she stood there on the stage in another incarnation, released from herself and her loneliness, experiencing joys and sorrows that were not her own, yet of which she was so keely conscious. Her art was no profession to her, no mere means of making money."