CRUELTY TO FLOWERS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20722, 8 May 1937, Page 14 (Supplement)

CRUELTY TO FLOWERS

GREAT SINGER’S REGRET LOTTE LEHMANN IN SYDNEY “Your flowers! Ah, but why are you so cruel to your flowers?” They came as gifts to Lotte Lehmann after her concert, but the wires around them wounded her heart, says a Sydney paper. She stayed up till 1 o’clock unwinding them. “I have never seen flowers so badly treated,” she said next day. “Wires through the heads ... all broken. Beautiful for the moment, but after! Ah, so cruel. “Other countries use wire, but kindly. No, don’t be so cruel to your flowers. “My husband threw me out of his room at last, as I worked with the flowers.

White lilies are Madame Lehmann’s favourite flowers “because my mother liked them best,” she expalins. “All kinds of white flowers please me most; and pink camellias. In America they send me pink camellias instead of orchids; for my gown.” Comparing audiences in Sydney and abroad, Madame says: “You cannot always tell by the noise.

“When I have success in America —excuse me, please. I must touch wood because I am superstitious when I say that word” (a graceful hand gropes for the wood of the deck in her sitting-room)—“sometimes they are just lame, the audience. No cries. No applause. To-morrow —next day —the newspapers say I have success and I ask my Viennese maid: ‘How do they know? I did not notice excitement.’

But here I know! You make me know!

“I always give myself in my song. Each song. Always. At last one day I shall he singing among the stars in the heaven.”