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I was a serious piano student of 16 or so when I decided the time had come to discover what German lieder were all about. The first recording I bought was Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert’s “Schöne Müllerin” with the pianist Gerald Moore. This was not Mr. Fischer-Dieskau’s first recording of the cycle, from 1951, but the one he made 10 years later, though I knew nothing of this at the time.




I was immediately hooked. It is a tribute to Mr. Fischer-Dieskau’s artistic greatness and incomparable legacy that I am just one of countless music lovers who had him as their first guide to the art of the song.

Mr. Fischer-Dieskau died on Friday, just shy of his 87th birthday. The music world knew this day would come. But his death reminds me of the way I felt in 1971, when, then a student at Yale, I went to the music building for a piano lesson and saw a note posted on the door with a message of just four words: “Igor Stravinsky died today.” The death of Mr. Fischer-Dieskau feels comparably monumental.

What captivated me in that first experience of his Schubert was the seemingly effortless mix of vocal beauty and verbal directness. Even when not really following the English translation of the German poems, I hung on every word. His technique was superb. In the manner of the great musical theater performers, Mr. Fischer-Dieskau sang as if he were speaking. And there was nothing quite like his voice: a rich, warm, textured baritone. He could dip into his low range and project phrases with chesty emphasis, and soar high, sounding mellifluous and lyrical with almost tenorish colorings.

My collection of Fischer-Dieskau recordings grew steadily, not just songs of Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, Beethoven, Mahler and more, but also his operatic roles. Alas, my experience of his artistry comes mostly from recordings, and in this I am also not alone, at least among Americans. I heard him only in recital. But he sang opera mainly in Berlin, Munich and elsewhere in Europe, and never performed at the Metropolitan Opera.

His voice was probably light for some of the operatic roles he took on, though I remember from his recitals how penetrating and vibrant his sound was. In the theater, as critics and opera buffs consistently reported, he drew listeners in, never forcing his sound, making a virtue of subtlety.

My favorite Fischer-Dieskau opera recording — even more than his distinguished portrayal of Hans Sachs for the conductor Eugen Jochum’s classic account of Wagner’s “Meistersinger” (unrivaled for me) — is Berg’s “Wozzeck,” with Karl Böhm conducting the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin, recorded in 1965. Mr. Fischer-Dieskau utterly inhabits the title role, an oppressed, delusional soldier who is forced to do menial tasks for his captain and subjected to medical experiments by a quack doctor in order to earn some money to support his common-law wife (the great Evelyn Lear) and little boy.

Yet touches of refinement and elegance in his singing lend humanity, even tragic stature, to this lowly character. While conveying the sharp contours and modernism of Berg’s atonal musical language, Mr. Fischer-Dieskau reveals the plaintive lyricism of the vocal writing.

How fitting, and a little eerie, that his death comes 12 days before the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Britten’s “War Requiem,” an enormous work for three vocal soloists, chorus, boys’ choir, organ and two orchestras. It was commissioned for the reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral in England, which had been bombed during World War II.

Britten, a pacifist, incorporated antiwar poems by Wilfred Owen into a setting of the Latin Requiem Mass text. For the premiere performance, as a gesture of reconciliation, Britten wanted as soloists the tenor Peter Pears (an Englishman), the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya (a Russian) and Mr. Fischer-Dieskau (a German), but the Soviets kept Ms. Vishnevskaya from taking part. Britten conducted this shattering work with those soloists for a 1963 recording with the London Symphony Orchestra. Talk about a classic.

Though the statistics are hard to pin down, Mr. Fischer-Dieskau may be the most recorded artist in classical music history. But the stunning range of his recordings of older repertory, which include a survey of the entire catalog of Schubert songs appropriate for the male voice with his faithful collaborator Gerald Moore at the piano, tended to obscure his considerable involvement with contemporary music. He performed operas, concert works and songs by, among others, Hans Werner Henze, Aribert Reimann, Gottfried von Einem and Witold Lutoslawski.

There may have been a slight downside to Mr. Fischer-Dieskau’s reputation as a paragon among lieder singers, a tendency for listeners to take him for granted and search out fresher approaches. But on recording after recording he emerges as a searching and adventurous artist. When he returned to songs he had recorded years and decades earlier, to work with pianists like Sviatoslav Richter, Alfred Brendel and Christoph Eschenbach, he did not simply give his old performances with new partners but threw himself into rethought interpretations.

I get such a kick from a New Yorker cartoon by William Hamilton that appeared in 1975. A Manhattan couple, obviously divorcing, are packing up things and sorting through recordings. In the caption the glowering wife says: “Just a minute! You don’t get three years of my life and the Dietrich Fischer-Dieskaus!”

How poignant that seems today. What could be more central to a person’s well-being than Fischer-Dieskau recordings?


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Fischer-Dieskau è stato il cantante più registrato della storia, almeno finché la proliferazione delle nuove tecnologie non ha reso impossibile tenere il conto, ed ha lavorato con direttori d’orchestra e pianisti tra i massimi della nostra civiltà musicale. Generalmente identificato soprattutto come cantante di Lieder, ha spaziato tra tutti i generi: «il repertorio è così immenso – disse al Guardian qualche anno fa – per molti anni ho letteralmente imparato un pezzo nuovo ogni giorno».

Il Lied, certo, resta fondamentale: perché ha accompagnato tutta la sua vita d’interprete, da quando diciassettenne cantò Winterreise a Berlino sotto le bombe alleate agli ultimi recital nel ’92, e perché non è più stato lo stesso dopo di lui. Il livello di analisi, introspezione, cura del fraseggio raggiunto da Fischer-Dieskau ha contribuito in misura determinante alla comprensione e diffusione di un corpus sterminato di opere di Schubert, Schumann, Wolf. E Mahler: nel 1966 Leonard Bernstein gli chiese di registrare il Lied von der Erde sostenendo le parti originariamente scritte per mezzosoprano, ottenendo una registrazione leggendaria. Infine il Lied è stato la sua scuola nel resto del repertorio: analisi del testo, perfetta dizione in qualsiasi lingua, sensibilità cameristica nel dialogo con gli strumenti non sarebbero stati gli stessi senza questa fequentazione quotidiana.

Poi c’è l’opera, in cui Fischer-Dieskau poteva mettere in campo anche una notevole statura fisica e qualche buona dote d’attore: il debutto avviene nel ’48 come Rodrigo di Posa nel Don Carlo di Verdi, ovviamente in tedesco. Dirige Ferenc Fricsay, la sede è la Städtische – poi Komische Oper di Berlino Est – che resterà il teatro di riferimento di Fischer-Dieskau anche quando si moltiplicheranno gli impegni a Monaco, Vienna, Bayreuth e Salisburgo. Anche sulla scena il repertorio è di una vastità che oggi si scosiglierebbe a un giovane artista: al ritratto straziato di Kurwenal nel Tristan, documentato nel disco diretto da Furtwängler nel 1952, si aggiungono con esiti altissimi tutti i principali ruoli wagneriani. Storici i passaggi mozartiani, da Don Giovanni al Conte nelle Nozze di Figaro, e indimenticabili Barak nella Frau ohne Schatten e Mandrika in Arabella di Strauss. Più sfumato il discorso sulle interpretazioni verdiane, in cui l’intelligenza musicale e l’adesione al personaggio non sempre compensano i limiti di una voce chiara e poco incline all’ abbandono nei passaggi più baldanzosi. Restano Posa e il Rigoletto diretto da Kubelik, ma altri appuntamenti restano solo onorevoli tentativi.

Il Bach di Fischer-Dieskau è poco attuale, ma è meraviglioso lo stesso: le cantate dirette da Richter e le Passioni sgorgano da una temperie culturale in cui questo repertorio era familiare, quotidiano, identitario. Ma il radicamento nella tradizione non è mai stato un limite alla curiosità musicale: Fischer-Dieskau è stato protagonista di un buon numero di prime assolute, tra cui nel 1961 “Elegia per giovanni amanti” di Hans Werner Henze. Benjamin Britten scrisse per la sua voce la parte del baritono nel War Requiem e gli dedicò i “Songs and Proverbs of William Blake”.

Timido, colto, cortese, incerto di sè anche all’apice del successo, Fischer-Dieskau ha incarnato una figura nuova (e a dire il vero poco replicata) di cantante intellettuale perfezionista ed inquieto, capace di ispirare turbamento ed emozione senza mai incrinare un assoluto dominio formale. Nel suo straordinario Wozzeck, in Kurwenal, ma anche in Bach o Schubert la sua voce d’ambra perfettamente calibrata sembrava racchiudere un grido trattenuto, il dolore di un distacco irreparabile. Una voce nevrotica, elegante e disperata in cui confluisce e si specchia la cultura europea del Novecento.

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