The future opera star's father, Karl-August Lehmann, was a singer (Heldentenor) while her mother, Maria Theresia Löw (1809–1885), was a soprano.

After singing small parts on the stage, for example in Mozart's Magic Flute at Prague in 1866, and studies under Heinrich Laube in Leipzig,[2] Lehmann made her proper debut in 1870 in Berlin as a light soprano in Meyerbeer's Das Feldlager in Schlesien.

Lehmann sang in the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876, singing in the first complete performances of The Ring Cycle as Woglinde and Helmwige.

Her mature voice, of splendid quality and large volume, gained for her the reputation of being not only one of the greatest Wagnerian singers of her day but also an ideal interpreter of Bellini's Norma and the operatic music of Mozart.

Among her pupils were the famous sopranos Geraldine Farrar, Viorica Ursuleac, Edytha Fleischer, Olive Fremstad; the mezzo-sopranos Lula Mysz-Gmeiner and Marion Telva; tenor Walter Kirchhoff; and the contralto and composer Florence Wickham.

Her diet consisted of fruit, rice, milk, eggs, cheese, vegetables and rye bread, although she admitted she ate fish twice a year.

[8] Rupert Christiansen has described Lehmann as a "fanatic vegetarian and anti-vivisectionist, and nothing pleased her more in New York than the fact that the whipping of horses was forbidden.