The contralto from Oldenburg received her vocal training with Ulla Groenewold and Hanna Schwarz at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg. After guest engagements at the Kiel Opera House and the Hamburg and Hanover State Operas, Wiebke Lehmkuhl became member of the ensemble at the Zurich Opera House while still a student. In 2012 she made her debut at the Salzburg Festival under the baton of Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Further engagements took her to the Opéra de Bastille in Paris with the Ring des Nibelungen and to the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, where she sang in Götterdämmerung under Kent Nagano.

Her extraordinary versatility opens up a broad repertoire for Wiebke Lehmkuhl, ranging from Monteverdi, Handel and Bach to the Romantic oratorios, Mahler and Wagner, making her a sought-after soloist on the international concert podiums as well as on the opera stage. She is a regularly invited by the great orchestras, such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich, the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, the Bamberg Symphony, the Orchestre de Paris, the Swedish Symphony Orchestra as well as the concert halls in Bilbao, Tokyo and Shanghai. She is also a welcome guest at festivals such as the Schleswig-Holstein or Rheingau Music Festival or the Lucerne Festival.

In opera, Wiebke Lehmkuhl can be heard regularly at the Salzburg and Bayreuth Festivals. She made her debut with Handel's Jephta at the Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam. Her absolute key role on the opera stage, however, is without question Erda in Wagner's Rheingold and Siegfried: "And with Wiebke Lehmkuhl's Erda, an operatic miracle occurred in the third act: a performance that has long been very good with very good singers is here raised to a lonely world level by a very special singer. Weighing every word and yet weaving each word into the legato line, the registers of her dreamlike alto voice melding like ebony - this is how Wiebke Lehmkuhl's Urmutter deserves the singing crown of the evening." >(Peter Krause, "OPERN-KRITIK: GRAND THÉÂTRE DE GENÈVE - SIEGFRIED - Poesie statt Politik", www.concerti.de; 15.02.2019). This role has meanwhile taken her to the stages of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, the Grand Théâtre de Genève, the Opéra de Bastille in Paris and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London and together with conductors such as Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Marek Janowski and Philippe Jordan.

In the current season, a major focus is on the Romantic concert repertoire, be it with Mendelssohn's Elijah (Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Berlin Philharmonic, both conducted by Kirill Petrenko), the music of Max Reger (Requiem and An die Hoffnung) in two concerts with the Munich Philharmonic, Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder in Holland or the works of Gustav Mahler - the orchestral songs and the symphonies - in Palermo, Helsinki and Madrid, with the Orchestre de Paris in Paris, Vienna and Hamburg (under Klaus Mäkelä) and at La Scala in Milan (under Riccardo Chailly).

Wiebke Lehmkuhl's artistic output has been captured on numerous recordings, including J.S. Bach's Christmas Oratorio with the Gewandhausorchester zu Leipzig under Riccardo Chailly (Decca) or C.P.E. Bach's Magnificat with the RIAS Kammerchor and the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin under Hans-Christoph Rademann (Harmonia Mundi).