For Dieter—Hommage A Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Alpha Classics.

In a draft epitaph for his friend Franz Schubert, the Austrian dramatist Franz Grillparzer declared that “he allowed poetry to sing and music to speak.” Something similar could be said about Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the great German lyric baritone who died in 2012 and whose centenary is this year. Like the soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Fischer-Dieskau came of age with the golden era of the LP, recording numerous discs for EMI and Deutsche Grammophon to attain a listenership that their predecessors could only have dreamed of. And like Schwarzkopf, Fischer-Dieskau’s dedication to his craft and command of an audience was absolute. 

His repertoire included almost 3,000 songs and over a hundred opera roles. During his American debut in 1955, he sang Schubert’s demanding Winterreise song cycle without intermission. When I heard him late in his career in Munich’s Hercules Hall, his resonant and honeyed vocal powers were ebbing, but his superlative enunciation remained intact. The audience listened reverently as he explored the 19th century songbook with fervor and acuity. Nowhere are the demands higher on a musician than in performing Lieder, or art-songs, the acme of classical music.

Fischer-Dieskau’s remarkable talents were evident at an early age. The great British accompanist Gerald Moore remarked in his memoirs, Am I Too Loud?, that “he had only to sing one phrase before I knew I was in the presence of a master.” Similarly, Wilhelm Furtwängler, the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, was transfixed after he heard Fischer-Dieskau in a private performance of Brahms’s Four Serious Songs in 1949. “That such a young person already knows exactly,” he told his wife, “how this should be sung!” Two years later, he invited Fischer-Dieskau to make his debut at the Salzburg Festival, where he performed Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer.

In For Dieter—Hommage A Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, his final student, Benjamin Appl, offers a welcome celebration of this masterful singer on his 100th birthday. Appl has earned numerous accolades for his operatic and solo performances. Now he not only performs a number of Fischer-Dieskau’s favorite songs together with the pianist James Ballieu, but also chronicles his career in a comprehensive booklet. (Two new CD box-sets from Warner Classics and Somm Recordings also provide an opportunity to listen to Fischer-Dieskau’s evolution as a singer.) In studying his concert programs, letters, private diaries, and photographs, Appl supplies fresh insights into Fischer-Dieskau’s life and artistry. 

Fischer-Dieskau, who was born in 1925 in Zehlendorf, a suburb of Berlin, grew up in an intensely musical family. His father was the headmaster of a local school and a talented composer. His mother played the piano and his older brother Karl composed a number of songs (some of which Fischer-Dieskau performed). As a child, Fischer-Dieskau vowed to become a singer after attending a performance of Wagner’s opera Lohengrin. At home, he would recreate operas with his beloved puppet theater. At age 16 he began studying with the tenor George A. Walter. A year later he held his first public appearance with Schubert’s Winterreise before an audience of about 150 in January 1942. Three hours of heavy air raids disrupted the lyrical journey, but Fischer-Dieskau returned to resume it after the bombing had finally ceased: “The sheer joy of singing pushed all my fears aside.”

For all his singing prowess, Fischer-Dieskau was not able to avoid induction into the Wehrmacht, which dispatched him to the Russian front, where he was responsible for horse transport and extracting wounded ones from the line of fire. Appl reports that Fischer-Dieskau would sing softly to the nervous horses as he groomed them. His disabled brother, Martin, was murdered by the Nazis as part of their euthanasia program. “The fact that Dietrich has to witness this torment,” writes Appl, “without being able to help had a profound impact on his attitude towards life.” He came to despise totalitarian ideologies and embrace a tolerant humanism. In 1945, he was transferred to Italy, where he ended up in a prisoner-of-war camp for two years in Livorno near the city of Pisa.

Fischer-Dieskau’s renown began in the camp. The camp authorities located a small piano, tied it to a truck, and drove it to various camps, where Fischer-Dieskau performed not only German, but also French, Russian and French songs. His standards could not have been higher. “I often greatly regret the many compromises I have made with my shallow singing and acting,” he confided to his diary. “Soon I’m going to annoy the camp directors with a serious evening—a complete Goethe program with almost exclusively ballads.” 

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In 1947 he was released from prison camp. Wearing pajamas and carrying a wooden suitcase, Fischer-Dieskau traveled to Freiburg, Germany, a medieval university town nestled in the Black Forest, where he was met by his fiancée, Irmgard, and his mother. That year he made his concert debut in Freiburg, where he sang the baritone solo in Brahms’ German Requiem. But Berlin always beckoned. He later recalled that “what Berlin had never achieved in its more glamorous times, it managed to do when it was destroyed. It was loved for its courage and defenselessness; it existed in the minds of those who had moved away.” 

Fischer-Dieskau was often assailed by doubts about the demands his work made upon him. His wife, Irmgard, who was a talented cellist, subordinated her career to him: “I pray to God and make three bows to the moon so that I may become so beautiful that I may resemble the image you have of me in your mind and be worthy of you.” But Appl observes that Fischer-Dieskau experienced a lifelong conflict between the demands of his career and family, not to mention the psychic struggles that revolved around his fame. “Performing artists,” he remarked, “receive huge ovations and have great successes, but after such triumphant evenings, you have to fall down into deep holes of ordinary life. You don’t find the same climate of exaltation every day. But everything you gain has something inside it which you lose.”

Towards the end of his life, Appl writes, Fischer-Dieskau often succumbed to depression, concerned about whether he had already been forgotten by posterity. In May 2012, Appl visited Fischer-Dieskau in his home near Lake Starnberg, where they discussed Schubert’s Harfner Lieder, which explore themes of a longing for death and reproaches to the gods. “I sensed,” Appl writes, “that this was the last time I would be able to see him.” With his fine tribute, Appl has helped to ensure that Fischer-Dieskau’s legacy will endure.