Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was a renowned German baritone, celebrated for his contributions to classical music, particularly in the genres of lieder, opera, and oratorio. Born in Berlin, he developed a passion for music early in life, receiving formal voice training at the age of sixteen. His career took off after World War II, during which he performed informal concerts for fellow prisoners while held in a POW camp. Following his return to Berlin, he became a sought-after performer in Europe, the United States, and England, known for his remarkable interpretations of lieder, particularly those of Schubert and Schumann.
Fischer-Dieskau's extensive discography features over a thousand recordings, with a significant focus on both traditional and contemporary works. He was also a notable opera singer, taking on more than one hundred roles, primarily in smaller European venues. His legacy is marked by numerous accolades, including multiple Grammy Awards and honorary degrees from prestigious universities. After retiring from stage performances in 1992, he devoted his time to coaching and literary recitations until his passing in 2012. His profound impact on classical music continues to resonate with audiences and musicians alike.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
- Born: May 28, 1925
- Birthplace: Berlin, Germany
- Died: May 18, 2012
- Place of death: Berg, Germany
German classical and opera singer
Fischer-Dieskau was a consummate interpreter of classical song, opera, and oratorio, and his recordings spread his fame worldwide. He was noted for his virtuosic interpretations of lieder and of Franz Schubert’s vocal works.
The Life
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (DEE-trihk FEE-shur DEE-skow) was born into a middle-class family in Berlin. His parents, both educators, shared with their son a love of literature and music. Fischer-Dieskau’s paternal ancestors were mostly Protestant clergymen, and one of his maternal ancestors is memorialized in a Berlin monument depicting Frederick the Great and General Baron von Dieskau, an artillery expert and inventor of a light cannon depicted on the monument, known as Dieskaus.
Fischer-Dieskau began to sing at an early age, starting formal voice instruction at age sixteen. Upon completion of high school in 1943, he made his first solo appearances in Berlin. Later that year, he was drafted into the German army, and in 1945 he was captured by Allied forces and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Italy. While in prison, he presented informal lieder concerts to his fellow German prisoners.
After World War II ended, he returned to Berlin to resume his vocal studies and to begin his singing career. His artistic reputation grew, and he was in great demand in the United States and England. Fischer-Dieskau was one of the few singers who excelled at concert performance and at opera singing. He was also a prolific recording artist, who produced an enormous repertoire of works, ranging from obscure Renaissance pieces to operatic roles to contemporary songs. Throughout his career, he collaborated with an impressive list of accompanists, conductors, and orchestras. He retired from singing on stage in 1992. He then made a career of coaching select singers and of reciting literary texts for audio recording. His memoir, Nachklang (Echoes of a Lifetime), was published in 1989. Fischer-Dieskau died in 2012 at the age of eighty-six.
The Music
Fischer-Dieskau’s remarkable professional success may be attributed to his debut at an early age, the reconstruction and subsequent economic boom of West Germany following World War II, and the advent and worldwide distribution of the long-play recording.
Lieder. Fischer-Dieskau began to collaborate with the English pianist Gerald Moore in 1951. For the next two decades, the pair made numerous recital appearances in Europe, Japan, and North America. By 1970 Fischer-Dieskau had recorded with Moore every Franz Schubert song appropriate for male voice, along with most of the songs of Robert Schumann, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf, Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. These recordings in the new long-playing format were sold all over the world, and they introduced the genre of lieder (art songs) to generations of music lovers and musicians. So impressive were his renditions that Fischer-Dieskau became internationally known as a foremost interpreter of lieder.
His 1952 recording of Schubert’sDie Winterreise (1827), with Moore at the piano, continues to be the standard against which all other versions are judged. It rates highly with the recording of Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin (1824) as one of the finest recordings of the genre. “Der Neugierige” (The Curious Boy), song number six from Die Schöne Müllerin, provides a splendid example of the tremendous range in pitch, dynamics, and tone color Fischer-Dieskau gave this repertoire. His interpretive approach was to start with the poem and analyze Schubert’s setting, phrase by phrase, word by word, and note by note.
Oratorio. Fischer-Dieskau’s long career as an oratorio soloist began with Ein deutsches Requiem (1868) of Brahms. His first performance of this work, which was also his professional debut at the age of twenty-one, was as a last-minute substitute for an ailing colleague in 1947. He performed the work dozens of times throughout his career, and he recorded it several times, under such conductors as Rudolf Kempe and Herbert von Karajan. However, the most popular of those recordings continues to be the one from 1961, which includes Elisabeth Schwartzkopf, soprano, and the New Philharmonia Chorus and Orchestra, conducted by Otto Klemperer.
Ein deutsches Requiem is a masterful expression of the gift of life triumphing over death. In the two solo sections for baritone, Fischer-Dieskau is able to use a variety of vocal color and shading to express the contrite spirit of the third movement. Then, in the sixth-movement solo, his voluminous power creates a contrasting prophetic sense, giving the listener a tremendous emotional impact. A work that has occupied him for his entire career, Ein deutsches Requiem was the singer’s choice to end his career as an oratorio soloist, in a 1992 performance in Tokyo, Japan.
The British composer Benjamin Britten requested that Fischer-Dieskau sing the premiere performance of War Requiem (1962), given in Coventry, England, in 1962. This premiere was part of a series of consecration ceremonies for the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, which had been destroyed in a German air raid in 1940. Fischer-Dieskau continued to sing performances of the War Requiem throughout his career as an oratorio soloist. Soon after the premiere, he recorded it with soprano Galina Vishnievskay, tenor Peter Pears, the Melos Ensemble of London, and the London Symphony Orchestra, with the composer conducting. As is often the case with Fischer-Dieskau’s recordings, this effort remains unparalleled in intensity and expression.
The oratorio is an attempt at international reconciliation, with soloists coming from Germany (Fischer-Dieskau), the Soviet Union (Vishnievskay), and England (Pears), all memorializing the great loss of life in World War I and World War II. Although Fischer-Dieskau was not a pacifist (as was Britten), he was not attracted to the social and political goals of the Third Reich, and he resisted his conscription into the German army. Tall and lanky, ill-suited for a combat role, he finally joined as required, and he was quickly captured by Allied forces.
Fischer-Dieskau’s war experience certainly colored his singing of this piece, although a more personal experience is at the heart of his relationship with the War Requiem. One of the main baritone solos draws its text from Wilfred Owen’s sonnet On Seeing a Piece of Our Artillery Brought into Action. The segment is set in a highly dramatic musical style, including a fusillade of kettle drums announcing the deployment of the artillery. For Fischer-Dieskau, who grew up in Berlin, admiring the monument that included his ancestor, this combination of words and music must have been shattering. As reported by Michael Steinberg in his book Choral Masterworks, tenor Pears recalled that he “could hardly get his colleague (Fischer-Dieskau) to stand and leave the choir stalls at the end of the Coventry performance.” Fischer-Dieskau’s ability to take the universality of the war experience, to add his own personal experience, and to sing in English (for him a foreign language) is indicative of the singer’s singular power of artistic achievement.
Opera. Fischer-Dieskau’s legacy includes more than one hundred operatic roles, spanning the entire history of the genre. His voice, possibly best classified as a lyric bass-baritone, is not well suited for the majority of dramatic baritone or bass roles. However, his overall musicianship did ensure him great success in some roles, notably those created by Mozart, Giuseppe Verdi, and Richard Wagner.
Favoring the smaller opera houses of his native Germany, Fischer-Dieskau seldom performed operas outside of Europe, and he never appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He did frequently appear at the major opera houses of Europe, such as the Vienna State Opera, the Munich Opera, and London’s Covent Garden, as well as in the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and at many important festivals, such as the ones at Beyreuth and at Salzburg. These smaller houses allowed Fischer-Dieskau to use his voice in the way he was accustomed, with a wide palette of colors, dynamics, and inflections.
Among the roles that Fischer-Dieskau sang on stage and in the recording studio were a number of title roles: Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Verdi’s Falstaff, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, Handel’s Giulio Cesare, and Wagner’s Flying Dutchman. The breadth of his repertoire spans the history of opera.
About half of the opera roles in Fischer-Dieskau’s repertoire were never performed on stage but were recorded only. An examination of his discography makes it clear that Fischer-Dieskau made a consistent effort to support contemporary composers, premiering new works such as Heinz Werner Henze’s Elegie für junge Liebende (1961), Gottfried von Einem’s Danton’s Tod (1943), and Aribert Reimann’s Lear (1978), which was composed for him.
Musical Legacy
For his pursuit of artistic excellence, Fischer-Dieskau was awarded honorary degrees from the universities of Oxford, Yale, Heidelberg, and the Sorbonne. He won multiple Grammy Awards and the Deutsche Schallplatten Preis (the German Recording Prize). He won the Grand Prix du Disque almost every year between 1955 and the end of his career. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the Royal Academy of Music in London, of the Accademia Santa Cecilia in Rome, and of other international music organizations. In 2000 Deutsche Grammaphon issued a commemorative box set of twenty-one compact discs devoted to the entirety of Fischer-Dieskau’s singing career. With a discography of more than one thousand recordings, covering the works of more than two hundred composers, Fischer-Dieskau created an impressive permanent legacy of performances.
Principal Works
operatic roles: Marquis of Posa in Giuseppe Verdi’s Don Carlos, 1948; Wolfram in Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser, 1949; John the Baptist in Richard Strauss’s Salome, 1952; Don Giovanni in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni, 1953; Busoni in Charles Gounod’s Faust, 1955; Amfortas in Wagner’s Parsifal, 1955; Count Almaviva in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, 1956; Renato in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, 1957; Falstaff in Verdi’s Henry V, 1959; Mathis in Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, 1959; Wozzeck in Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, 1960; Yevgeny Onyegin in Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, 1961; Barak in Strauss’s DieFrau ohne Schatten, 1963; Macbeth in Verdi’s Macbeth, 1963; Don Alfonso in Mozart’s Così fan tutte, 1972; King Lear in Aribert Reimann’s Lear, 1978.
Principal Recordings
albums:Schubert: Die Winterreise, 1952; The Magic Flute—Die Zauberflöte, 1956; Arabella, 1957; Capriccio, 1958; Wagner: Die Fliegende Holländer, 1960; Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem, 1961; Schubert: Die Schöne Müllerin, 1961; Lohengrin: Romantic Opera in Three Acts, 1962; Britten: War Requiem, 1963; Don Carlos, 1965; Tosca Highlights, 1967; Elektra, 1961; Wozzeck, 1962; Doktor Faust, 1969; Handel: Giulio Cesare in Egitto, 1969; Salome, 1971; Palestrina, 1972; Il Matrimonio Segreto, 1975; Béatrice et Bénédict Opéra-comique en Due Actes, 1982; Hänsel und Gretel, 1985; Jessonda, 1991.
Bibliography
Blyth, Alan. "Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau Obituary." The Guardian, 18 May 2012, www.theguardian.com/music/2012/may/18/dietrich-fischer-dieskau. Accessed 2 Jan. 2018.
Fischer-Dieskau, Dietrich. Reverberations: The Memoirs of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Translated by Ruth Hein. Portland, Oreg.: Froom, 1990. This personal account of the events of Fischer-Dieskau’s life and distinguished career contains many anecdotes. Well written, it is for the general audience and cultivated musicians alike.
Fischer-Dieskau, Dietrich. Schubert’s Songs: A Biographical Study. Translated by Kenneth S. Whitton. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. As in-depth study of Schubert, using the composer’s songs as the primary source for assertions on Schubert’s personal life and outlook. Written more for cultivated musicians than for general readers, it is rich in detail and presents Fischer-Dieskau’s subjective experience of preparation and performance of Schubert’s music.
Ivry, Benjamin. “A Voice of the Century Past.” New England Review 27, no. 1 (2006). An excellent, if not enthusiastic, appraisal of Fischer-Dieskau’s singing career.
Moore, Gerald. “Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.” In Am I Too Loud? London: Hammish Hamilton, 1961. A testimonial to the relationship between singer and accompanist. Moore, with whom Fischer-Dieskau made the complete Schubert lieder for male voice recordings, presents a singular insight into the artist.
Neunzig, Hans A. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: A Biography. Translated and annotated by Kenneth S. Whitton. Portland, Oreg.: Amadeus Press, 1998. A thorough biography of Fischer-Dieskau, with rare photographs and examples of the singer’s painting and other artwork.
Steinberg, Michael. “Benjamin Britten: War Requiem.” In Choral Masterworks: A Listener’s Guide. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. This chapter on Britten’s oratorio contains accounts of Fischer-Dieskau’s contribution to the premiere.