A young singer takes the stage in a suburb of Berlin, in 1943, for his first public performance. Just a few minutes into the first piece, Franz Schubert’s Winterreise, the recital is interrupted by an Allied bombing raid. The 17-year-old baritone and his audience rush underground for two and a half hours before returning to the hall to finish the concert.
That performer was none other than Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, whose 100th birth anniversary we celebrate this year, on May 28. While that experience alone would have a profound effect on anyone, it was not the end of his experience with war. He was drafted into the Wehrmacht a few months later, and taken prisoner by the Americans in Italy in 1945. Singing lieder to his homesick countrymen, he was so popular that the Americans sent him around to various camps to entertain prisoners. He was one of the last Germans to be repatriated, and in 1947 he returned to Berlin and the beginning of an extraordinary career.
Fischer-Dieskau was a towering figure in classical music for most of the mid 20th century, and an artist who built a bridge between the old and new worlds. In a singing career spanning 45 years, he almost single-handedly brought art song into people’s homes through hundreds of recordings, and had a profound and lasting impact on singers and collaborative pianists.
Like any artist who achieves such omnipresence, he has his detractors, who find his singing at times fussy, too cerebral or calculated. But Fischer-Dieskau’s clinical reputation was a byproduct of deep sympathy for artistic intention. “One has to listen to what the music says” he once declared, “and be penetrated with the same warmth as that of the composer when he wrote. Then and only then comes the true interpreter…[who] will transport you to another sphere.”
Fischer-Dieskau’s repertoire encompassed almost 3,000 songs, several hundred cantatas and oratorios, and more than 100 operatic roles. He was most celebrated for his interpretations of lieder by Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms. Let’s hear him speak for himself with a number of selected recordings highlighting the full breadth and depth of his intellect and artistry.
We have to begin with Franz Schubert. I could play any or all of his lieder sung by Fischer-Dieskau accompanied by his longtime collaborator Gerald Moore, but watch this performance of “Erlkönig.” Based on poetry by Goethe, the song is a conversation between the Erl-King, the boy and his father. Watch him embody each character and draw you into the story.
Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe is an astonishing work of art. The first song in the cycle is “In wunderschönen Monat Mai.” Listen to the intertwining of the voice and piano: as Fischer-Dieskau sings about the first pangs of longing, the piano outlines the hesitation and fragility of new love. Hear how he shapes the following two phrases: the vulnerability of “Die Liebe aufgegangen” (love blossomed) and quiet yearning of “Mein Sehnen und Verlangen” (my longing and desire).
Fischer-Dieskau is most renowned for his interpretation of Brahms lieder, but I think his singing in the third movement from Ein deutsches Requiem is absolutely stunning. It was also the piece that launched his career upon his return to Berlin in 1947. I’m including his second recording with Otto Klemperer (1961), below, but you should also seek out the earlier one from 1955 with Rudolfph Kempe and the Berlin Philharmonic as well.
Fischer-Dieskau was a champion of contemporary music, premiering at least one new work per year throughout his career. In 1961, Benjamin Britten wrote to him personally to ask him to consider singing in his searing War Requiem. "The first performance created an atmosphere of such intensity that by the end I was completely undone,” Fischer-Dieskau later recalled in his memoirs. “I did not know where to hide my face. Dead friends and past suffering arose in my mind."
Though he was a tireless advocate for contemporary work, most people today associate Fischer-Dieskau with music from the Romantic era. However, his repertoire extended to the Baroque as well: he sang and recorded the music of J.S. Bach many times. He recorded the St. Matthew Passion twice with Karl Richter, the founder of the Munich Bach Choir and Orchestra, and was involved in a recording project of Bach’s cantatas with Karl Ristenpart, a forerunner of the historically informed movement, renowned for creating the first recorded collection of Bach’s instrumental music. Here is the first movement of the cantata “Ich habe genug” (I have had enough), BWV 82:
He also recorded the music of Heinrich Schütz, whose music was “discovered” in the 20th century during the Weimar-era Hausmusik scene, but at that time was well outside standard literature.
Fischer-Dieskau’s innate understanding of the connection between the music and words made him a compelling ambassador for German lieder. By the 1960s, he and his frequent collaborator Gerald Moore had recorded the complete songs (except those explicitly written for the female voice) of Schubert, Brahms and Richard Strauss, as well as most of those by Mozart, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt and Wolf. Here he is singing “Der Lindenbaum” from Winterreise with Moore:
And you simply must hear how Fischer-Dieskau embodies the quiet joy of Richard Strauss’ exquisite “Morgen”:
Opera was an essential part of Fischer-Dieskau’s career. His first role was Posa in Verdi’s Don Carlos at Berlin’s City Opera at 22. His debut at Bayreuth came seven years later, and he would go on to perform most of the major Italian and German roles for baritone. I think his early Wagner recordings are a revelation. Here he is singing Wolfram’s Act 3 aria from Tannhäuser “Wie Todesahnung… O du, mein holder Abendstern.”
As Fischer-Dieskau looked to curtail his singing in the late 1980s, he turned to conducting and teaching. Here he conducts his wife Júlia Várady in Violetta’s sparkling and effervescent “Sempre libera” from Verdi’s La Traviata:
As singers age their voices change, and the things that they could count on in their technique aren’t as consistent as they used to be. Fischer-Dieskau once famously said: “We singers die two deaths: the death of the voice, then the death of the body.”
The other side of this (that is hardly mentioned and rarely appreciated) is that aging provides an opportunity to hear someone singing with more life experience, more humanity and empathy. I’ll leave you with a late recording from 1989, just a few years before he retired, of one of Mahler’s most beautiful and moving songs from the Rückert lieder “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (I am lost to the world). It describes the poet’s withdrawal from the world and his life in heaven, love and his song. “Ich leb’ allein in meinem Himmel, In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied!”
Listen to WRTI 90.1 FM on May 28 to hear some of these pieces and more.
