Permanent series: Women of German History - Germany / Federal Republic of Germany 1989 - 180 Pfennig

With »Women of German History« the Deutsche Bundespost replaces the series »Industry and Technology« begun in 1975/76. The new series is intended to help raise awareness of women's achievements in society. The new stamps will be published simultaneously and with the same motifs in the issues »Deutsche Bundespost« and »Deutsche Bundespost Berlin«. Lotte Lehmann was born on February 27, 1888: in Perleberg, a medium-sized city in Brandenburg. She died on August 26, 1976, aged 88, in Santa Barbara, California. In 1910, at the age of 22, Lotte Lehmann debuted at the Stadttheater Hamburg as the second boy in the Magic Flute. Vienna was to become Lotte Lehmann's artistic home. Her official Viennese inaugural performance was given on August 28, 1916 as Agathe in the "Freischütz" - and the audience of the Danube metropolis belonged to her. On 4 October she sang the role of the composer in the world premiere of Strauss and Hofmannsthal's revised "Ariadne auf Naxos" and won Richard Strauss's unqualified approval. She confided her further world premieres: in 1919 in Vienna the dyer in "Frau ohne Schatten", in Dresden in 1924 Christine in the autobiographical comedy "Intermezzo", and in 1933 Lotte Lehmann was the Arabella in the Viennese premiere of the opera of the same name. The phrase attributed to Richard Strauss, "She sang that it touched stars," was to be immortalized more than four decades later on her tombstone. In 1938, when Austria was annexed to the German Reich, Lotte Lehmann immediately broke off her relations with the Vienna Opera. In 1940, she acquired an estate in Santa Barbara, California, and made it the center of her last 36 years. Joseph Wechsberg, the American cultural critic and voice connoisseur, brought the biography of Lotte Lehmann to the following formula: "It started in Hamburg, and it made it to Olympus." (Text: Dr. Karl Dietrich Gräwe, Berlin)