1862–1918 · United Kingdom · 20th century
Liza Lehmann (1862–1918) was an English singer and composer who wrote a large number of songs for voice and piano. After nine years of concert performing she left the stage and turned to composing, chiefly song cycles and songs, many of them written for children. For pianists today, her music is of interest mainly through the piano part in these songs.
Rudolf Lehmann, a German painter, was her father; her mother, Amelia Lehmann, worked as a music teacher, composer and arranger, and Liza Lehmann was born to them on 11 July 1862, in London. Lehmann grew up in a household where art and intellectual pursuits were valued, and in her childhood and youth she lived in Germany, France and Italy. For singing she studied in London with Alberto Randegger and Jenny Lind; composition, meanwhile, she studied with three different teachers in three different cities — Hamish MacCunn taught her in London, in Rome her teacher was Niels Raunkilde, and in Wiesbaden it was Wilhelm Freudenberg.
Lehmann made her debut as a singer on 23 November 1885, appearing at one of the Monday Popular Concerts held at St James's Hall in London. Over the next nine years she performed widely at important concert venues in England, with backing from well-known musicians of the day, among them Joseph Joachim and Clara Schumann. She gave her last concert at the same hall on 14 July 1894; she then left the stage, married Herbert Bedford, himself a composer and illustrator, and turned her attention to composing.
After 1894 Lehmann spent the rest of her career writing music rather than performing it. She became known chiefly for her songs, many of them written for children, as well as for several works for the stage.
In 1904 Frank Curzon asked Lehmann to write the music for his production of Sergeant Brue, an Edwardian musical comedy; audiences in both London and New York took to it, yet Lehmann herself resented how Curzon folded music by other composers into her score. That experience put her off musicals for good, though in 1906 she agreed to score a comic-opera version of The Vicar of Wakefield, which found only modest success and no successor. Stage composing drew her back once more later on, when the Beecham Opera Company staged her opera Everyman.
In 1910 Lehmann toured the United States, accompanying her own songs in recitals. From 1911 to 1912 Lehmann was the first to preside over the Society of Women Musicians, and from 1913 she began teaching singing as a professor at the Guildhall School of Music — the same year brought her singing manual, Practical Hints for Students of Singing. She and Herbert Bedford had two sons. Rudolf, the elder, died while training during the First World War. The younger, Leslie Herbert Bedford, born in 1900 and living until 1989, worked as an inventor and contributed to the development of radar; his two sons were conductor Steuart Bedford and composer David Bedford.
Lehmann finished her memoirs, and in that same year, 1918, she died, aged 56. Her grave at Highgate Cemetery is shared with her husband and father. The memoirs appeared in print the following year, in 1919, under the title The Life of Liza Lehmann, by Herself.
Lehmann was known chiefly for her art songs and parlour songs, alongside other works in her catalogue. She often wrote cycles for four voices with a piano part linking the individual songs together — a manner of writing typical of her time. At the start of the 20th century, Lehmann, together with Ethel Smyth and Maude Valérie White, was considered one of England's leading female song composers; like White, Lehmann was especially successful with lighter material.
Her song cycles include In a Persian Garden (1896), for four voices and piano, based on an English translation of quatrains from Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat. Among her other cycles are The Daisy Chain (1893) — songs for a vocal quartet, written for children — In Memoriam (1899), a setting of words by Alfred Tennyson, and Bird Songs (1907). Many of her songs were written specially for children.
The site presents her music through 22 songs for voice and piano: thirteen of them are rated upper intermediate, and the remaining nine advanced. A good place to start with her music is, for example, the songs There's a bird beneath your window, Just a multitude of curls, or Along the sunny lane.