Mrs Rudolf Lehmann
(1838-1903)
21 April 1861

Volume 3, paged 130, sitting number 3209. 

Born in Edinburgh on 3 February 1838, Amelia Chambers was the daughter of the Scottish author and naturalist Robert Chambers, who in 1844 created a sensation when he anonymously published his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. 

On 15 August 1861 at St Mark’s in St John’s Wood she married the portraitist Rudolf Lehmann, son of the artist Leo Lehmann. William Holman Hunt was one of their witness. Robert Chambers and Leo Lehmann were also witnesses. The marriage produced four daughters. 

A gifted singer, Amelia Lehmann composed and arranged many song cycles and popular ballads, which she published as ‘A.L.’ Her daughter, the soprano and composer Liza Lehmann, later wrote of Amelia in her memoirs:

‘My mother certainly had extraordinary gifts, but suffered all her life from quite abnormally developed diffidence. As a girl, she was so musical that her father declared she did not require lessons! It was, therefore, not until after her marriage that she began to study music seriously. I have met most of the artists of my day, and I have never met any one so naturally gifted as my beloved mother. She had a lovely voice, and studied singing with several vocal teachers of renown; but she was never confident about her own achievements, and could hardly ever be induced to sing before any one. The few people who heard her sing have never forgotten her quite peculiar charm. She had a wonderful ear, the gift known as "absolute pitch," and could transpose easily at sight. She wrote some beautiful music, notably an operatic setting of a Goethe libretto; but the same diffidence and exaggerated, almost morbid self-criticism, led her to destroy most of her compositions, including with them many of her best’ (Liza Lehmann, The Life of Liza Lehmann, 1919). 

Amelia’s sister Nina married Rudolf’s younger brother Frederick. The extended social circle of the two couples included Robert Browning, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Lord Leighton and John Everett Millais.

Amelia Lehmann died on 1 April 1903 at 28 Abercorn Place, St John’s Wood, London.