Liza Lehmann

Elisabetha Nina Mary Frederica Lehmann was born in London on 11 July 1862, the daughter of the German painter Rudolf Lehmann and Amelia Chambers, a music teacher, composer, and arranger. Raised in an environment shaped by art and music, Lehmann spent portions of her early years in Germany, France, and Italy. Her vocal training was undertaken in London under both Alberto Randegger and Jenny Lind, while her composition studies spanned multiple countries and teachers, including Hamish MacCunn in London, Niels Raunkilde in Rome, and Wilhelm Freudenberg in Wiesbaden.

Lehmann's public singing career began on 23 November 1885 at a Monday Popular Concert held at St James's Hall in London. Over the following nine years she performed extensively throughout England, drawing encouragement from figures such as Joseph Joachim and Clara Schumann. Her final concert appearance took place at St James's Hall on 14 July 1894, after which she married the composer and illustrator Herbert Bedford and redirected her energies toward composition.

As a composer, Lehmann became particularly associated with vocal music. Among her most celebrated works is the 1896 song cycle In a Persian Garden, written for four voices and piano and drawing on Edward FitzGerald's translation of the Rubāiyāt of Omar Khayyām. Its tenor song "Ah, moon of my delight" was recorded by singers including John McCormack, Jan Peerce, Mario Lanza, Robert White, and Webster Booth. Her earlier vocal quartet The Daisy-Chain, dating from 1893, featured children's songs set to texts by multiple poets. Later cycles included In Memoriam (1899), a setting of Tennyson's poem, and Bird Songs (1907), with words attributed to "A.S.," believed to have been Alice Sayers, the family's nurse. Alongside Ethel Smyth and Maude Valérie White, Lehmann was regarded as one of England's foremost female composers of songs at the turn of the twentieth century.

Lehmann's work for the stage brought her to Broadway. In 1904, commissioned by producer Frank Curzon, she composed the score for the Edwardian musical comedy Sergeant Brue, which featured a libretto by Owen Hall and lyrics by James Hickory Wood. The production opened in London on 14 June 1904 and subsequently played in New York. Lehmann was dissatisfied with Curzon's decision to incorporate music by other composers into her score and declined to write further musicals. She did, however, compose the score for a comic opera adaptation of The Vicar of Wakefield in 1906, with a libretto by Laurence Housman, which premiered in Manchester on 12 November 1906. In 1915 she returned to stage composition with the one-act opera Everyman, produced by the Beecham Opera Company and performed in London on 28 December 1915.

Beyond composition, Lehmann contributed to musical life in other capacities. In 1910 she toured the United States, accompanying her own songs in recital performances. She served as the first president of the Society of Women Musicians in 1911 and 1912, and in 1913 joined the faculty of the Guildhall School of Music as a professor of singing. That same year she published Practical Hints for Students of Singing through Enoch and Sons.

Lehmann and Bedford had two sons. Their elder son, Rudolf, died during training in the First World War. Their younger son, Leslie Herbert Bedford (1900–1989), became an inventor who contributed significantly to the development of radar and was the father of conductor Steuart Bedford and composer David Bedford. Lehmann completed her memoirs shortly before her death on 19 September 1918 at Pinner, Middlesex, at the age of 56. She is buried alongside her husband and father in a family grave on the east side of Highgate Cemetery. Her autobiography, The Life of Liza Lehmann, by Herself, was published posthumously in 1919.