Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau - Biography
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau the great German baritone was born on May 28th 1925 in Berlin. His father and mother were school teachers. He had just entered the Berlin High School of Music when he was drafted into the German army and was eventually taken prisoner in Italy in 1945 and spent nearly two years in an American POW camp. While at the camp he put on Lieder (Song) recitals for other POW’s upon his release he returned to Germany and gave a number of Lieder recitals. He soon made his debut in opera in Verdi’s Don Carlos at the Berlin State Opera conducted by the young Hungarian Conductor Ferenc Fricsay who would become a frequent collaborator..
By his mid twenties he was already established as a recitalist and started to record for Deutsche Grammophon. By 1952 he was signed to EMI by the legendary recording producer Walter Legge. Legge besides his prowess as a recording executive was one of the most knowledgeable experts on the German Lied. Legge whose wife Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was becoming the preeminent female singer of German art song wanted a male counterpart and felt that the young Fischer-Dieskau would be the dominant male German singer of his generation. He teamed up Fischer-Dieskau with the masterful piano accompanist Canadian Gerald Moore. He also formed a close relationship with the great conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler who died in 1954 with whom he was to record Mahler’s Songs of the Wayfarer and participate in his legendary Tristan und Isolde. Fischer-Dieskau married the cellist Irmgard von Poppen with whom he was to have three sons with before her early death in 1963. Fischer-Dieskau’s early recordings on EMI with Moore of the songs of Wolf, Brahms, and Schumann and particularly of the great Schubert song cycles Die Schone Mullerin and Die Wintereisse were international critical and commercial successes and before he reached thirty-five he was the preeminent active German male singer only rivaled in overall eminence by soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.
Fischer-Dieskau while continuing to record for EMI had started in the late 1950’s to begin recording again with Deutsche Grammophon who enabled him to record more opera. He participated in Fricsay’s recordings of Don Giovanni, Marriage of Figaro, Magic Flute and Fidelio. He recorded a highly regarded version of Verdi’s Rigoletto with Rafael Kubelik and gave a towering performance of Berg’s Wozzeck under Karl Bohm. At EMI he participated in eminent recordings of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman and Tannhauser under conductor Franz Konwitschny and Lohengrin conducted by Rudolf Kempe. Fischer-Dieskau was well on his way to becoming perhaps the most recorded of all artists in any genre.
Fischer-Dieskau is a tall darkly handsome man who had a deeply expressive and commanding podium manner. In his early years he was a big man with a cherubic face as he grew older he trimmed down and was a bit more reserved in his stage manner. In the late 1960’s he collaborated often with Leonard Bernstein in Maher but also in the title role of Verdi’s Falstaff in Vienna .Fischer-Dieskau participated in the premiere of another friend Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem at the dedication of the restored Cathedral in Coventry that was destroyed by the German’s during the war. The work was deeply moving plea for peace and Fischer-Dieskau’s rendering of the part of a German soldier was particularly affecting. Through their mutual friendship with Britten he gave concerts with the great pianist Sviatislav Richter of the songs of Schubert and Wolf that were of great intensity. Fischer-Dieskau was a powerful advocate of contemporary music and besides Britten he was involved with the premiers of the works of famed German composer Hans Werner Henze. Contemporary composers as different as Ives, Barber, Orff, Shostakovich and Frank Martin received memorable performances from him. His final operatic role on stage was King Lear by modern German compose King Lear.
In the 1970’s he rerecorded his vast repertoire of Lied on Deutsche Gramophone recording for the first time all of nearly 600 of Schubert’s songs for male voice with Moore and vast amounts of Schumann, Brahms, Beethoven and Liszt Lieder with pianists Daniel Barenboim and Christoph Eschenbach. After two short lived marriages he married soprano Julia Varady in 1977 and of this writing they are still together. In the 1970’s Fischer- Dieskau successfully took up conducting and made recordings of Schubert, Schumann and Berlioz. Besides his skills as a musician Fischer-Dieskau has written a number of books on musical subjects dealing with Schubert, Schumann and Wagner’s relationship with Nietzsche.
Fischer- Dieskau is probably the most universally admired of contemporary musicians. The only criticisms are his assumption of certain Italian roles like Tosca’s Scarpia where some critical opinion is that the obvious intelligence of his portrayals doesn’t compensate for a lack of a big Italian baritone. There has been some critical carping that Fischer-Dieskau’s thousands of Lieder recordings have made him a “Lieder Machine” and he has dominated German singing so much that he has thwarted singers who wished to take a different path. This is firmly a minority opinion. Fischer- Dieskau has lived a very private life, for a singer as celebrated as he has been there is been very little extra musical publicity about his life. Dignity and reserve can be interpreted to some as aloofness. As mentioned before Fischer-Dieskau has made more recordings than any other performer. His mastery is still available in an amazing amount of recordings.