Greg Stepanich

Celebrating Fischer-Dieskau at 80

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau turns 80 next Saturday, and that's a good reason to look back with admiration at the work of this wonderful German singer (here's a good interview from the Guardian).

As I type, I'm listening to Fischer-Dieskau's 1990 recording of a dozen songs from Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn, recorded with Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Philharmonic. The tempi are a bit on the slow side in some cases, but overall I love this rendition of these great songs, as well as the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen that's also on the disc.

For me, this performance captures Mahler's aesthetic perfectly. The composer's precisely judged orchestrations come across with superb clarity, and there's something supremely intelligent about Fischer-Dieskau's singing that's hard to put into words. His baritone has strength and lightness at the same time, his diction is flawless — but I also get the sense that here is an artist who has committed himself to as faithful and committed a performance of this music as he can.

I think I feel that way because there's something human about his voice that I find easy to warm to: With some other singers there's something overwhelming about their instrument that dominates the discussion to the exclusion of the music. But with Fischer-Dieskau, the voice, and the masterful way he uses it, not only allows the discussion to be about the music itself, it encourages it.

That's probably a good way of saying he seems every time to give a definitive performance; certainly my appreciation of Mahler grew after I listened to this disc.

His recordings of the Schubert lieder with Gerald Moore were staples of most of the singers I knew when I was a kid, and I'm quite fond of his performances in other literature. A compilation of arias and excerpts I have somewhere here in my study has him doing marvelous things with the music of Puccini (Tosca) and Verdi (Don Carlo) as well as the War Requiem of Benjamin Britten, in which he demonstrates his excellent command of English.

I've also kept a Gramophone magazine promo disc from last April that has Fischer-Dieskau singing the most exquisite rendition of Mache dich, mein Herze, rein, from the very end of Bach's St. Matthew Passion. It's a 1958 recording with Karl Richter leading the Munich Bach Choir and Orchestra, and here again, something about Fischer-Dieskau's voice and his approach to the aria allows us to indentify with the passion of the supplicant as he pleads with his heart to cast out the world and invite Jesus in.

Many much finer words and apter critiques have been offered in respect to Fischer-Dieskau's art, but I wanted to mention his coming birthday and the press coverage that's being generated to mark that anniversary. Artists like him — always an advocate for the music, and willing to perform huge amounts of repertoire, much of it underappreciated — define a sort of classical music best practices; it's the kind of example that all classical musicians, not just singers, would do well to follow.