The perfect overall package of musical intelligence

Musicologist Thomas Erlach on the most important baritone of the 20th century: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

The German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was born in Berlin on 28 May 1925. With over 400 record productions, he is considered the singer with the most recordings of his interpretations on disc. Leonard Bernstein called him: "The most significant singer of the 20th century". How did he come to this judgement?

Thomas Erlach: Bernstein knew what he was saying, because he was an exceptional musician himself and recognised an equal partner in his somewhat younger German colleague, with whom he also occasionally performed and recorded together. Fischer-Dieskau possessed the ideal overall package of musical intelligence: a melodious voice, an astonishing technique, a sense of language and sound colouring, a talent for acting and characterisation and, like Bernstein, great communication skills. While many star singers are and were tenors, "FiDi", as he was often called by his colleagues, was a baritone, i.e. the middle male vocal range between tenor and bass. He once commented on this somewhat humorously: "The baritone is a hermaphrodite and spends his life in no man's land between lyricism and drama."

He did not come from a family of musicians, but from a music-loving home. Even as a child, he performed Freischütz (an opera by Carl Maria von Weber) with his puppet theatre to the sound of a record. Initially, he wanted to conduct rather than sing, which he actually realised much later, at the age of almost 50. He began his vocal training at the age of 16 and gave his first public performance in Berlin in 1942. Even then, he sang almost the entire Winterreise, but the concert had to be interrupted due to a three-hour air raid and was continued afterwards. Certainly a formative experience for a debut at that age. He was then drafted into the Wehrmacht and, among other things, was deployed in Russia with a veterinary unit to rescue injured army horses, to whom he sang to calm them down. He later studied at the Berlin Academy of Music, but this played a subordinate role in his professional training, as the encouragement and advice of conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler and other mentors were more important to him. Heinz Tietjen, director of the Berlin Opera, where FiDi performed from 1948, enabled him to pursue a varied career as he gave him leave of absence from the regular programme for concerts - a rare privilege even then. Fischer-Dieskau also made important contributions to international understanding without making a big fuss about it. In 1962, for example, he took part in the world premiere of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem in the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral and was the first German artist to perform in Israel in 1971.

A first highlight in his career was his portrayal of Wolfram in Tannhäuser in Bayreuth in 1954 under the baton of Wilhelm Furtwängler. Did that open the doors to the really big opera houses for him?

Thomas Erlach: Yes, but he mainly appeared as an opera singer in German-speaking countries, while he became internationally known primarily for his art song interpretations. He didn't apply for opera roles, they were offered to him and he was very selective when he could be. He preferred to sing only one opera role at a time in order to be more focussed - something that is not really possible in the normal German repertoire.

He had a few ideal roles, which he said were: Almaviva (in Mozart's Figaro), Wolfram, Falstaff and Mandryka (in Strauss' Arabella). He was particularly convincing in certain music expressing suffering (Schubert's Winterreise, Brahms' Vier ernste Gesänge and operatic roles such as Wozzeck and Lear by Aribert Reimann), no doubt also due to his own experiences in the war and the early death of his first wife, who died in childbirth. He also enjoyed taking on some Wagner roles, above all, as mentioned, Wolfram, but also Hans Sachs (in Die Meistersinger) and Amfortas (in Parsifal), great roles that epitomise maturity and renunciation. It was only Wotan (in Walküre and Siegfried) that he did not dare to tackle, as he said he lacked the "resounding depth" for it.

His operatic repertoire comprised over 70 roles, he also sang less frequently performed works, e.g. Bizet's Perlenfischer, Busoni's Faust or Wolfgang Fortner's Bluthochzeit, and championed 20th century operas, including contemporary new compositions. His advocacy of performances in the original language is also interesting - a novelty in opera at the time - even if he had to learn the parts phonetically (e.g. he sang Bartók's Bluebeard in Hungarian). On the other hand, he was sceptical about opera direction that was too "modern", which did not want to serve the work and was often based on ignorance of the music. He considered such concepts to be ideological ("agitprop propaganda"), because for him the music is paramount in opera.

His repertoire comprised around three thousand songs by around a hundred different composers. That's hard to believe, isn't it?

Thomas Erlach: Yes, according to his own statement, he sang around 1500 songs by heart, in addition to the opera roles already mentioned. He was particularly fond of the classics of German art song, i.e. Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Hugo Wolf. However, he also championed song cycles that received little attention at the time, such as the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen by Gustav Mahler, which had been ousted from the concert programme during the Nazi era. In 1951, he succeeded in convincing the conductor Furtwängler of their quality and thus made them truly known to the public. Another special feature of Fischer-Dieskau's work was his unusual programme design at the time. At song recitals, he broke with the usual "kettle of colour" of the time and instead performed well thought-out combinations of songs by a single composer, songs to texts by a single poet or innovative combinations such as Schubert and Anton Webern, i.e. older and newer works that were intended to mirror each other. This certainly raised the intellectual level of the concerts.

He is regarded as one of the most famous representatives of the art song. What exactly is that?

Thomas Erlach: Art songs are settings of lyrical poems for a singing voice and piano, especially from the period between 1800 and 1950. Unlike folk songs or pop songs, for example, they are always works that are set to music and whose professional performance requires a classically trained voice and a suitably trained pianist. This genre was primarily cultivated by German-speaking composers, starting with Franz Schubert and ending with Richard Strauss, since when production has tended to fall by the wayside. "Lieder recitals, in which art songs are performed, are part of European bourgeois musical culture and were initially held in private settings as so-called "Schubertiades", later in concert halls in front of larger (and paying) audiences. Due to the triumph of sound recordings and later the Internet, the number of such recitals in Germany has declined sharply. At the beginning of Fischer-Dieskau's career, however, recitals were still held more frequently, even in smaller German cities.

The special thing about his interpretations was the clean diction. He himself once said: "People resented the fact that I was understood, that the text was pronounced clearly". Did he break a taboo in the music business?

Thomas Erlach: Fischer-Dieskau regarded good text declamation as part of the singer's craft. Speech and singing should merge and form a unity. In doing so, he set himself apart from a singing tradition that focussed exclusively on a beautiful vocal sound, but ignored text comprehensibility and meaningful interpretation. Above all, "FiDi" wanted to liberate the well-known Schubert songs from a performance tradition that he found "cloying and sentimental". The specialist press wrote about his interpretation of Die Schöne Müllerin that it was "characterised more by intellect than by emotion", but at the same time praised his precision and his vocal fit. It is interesting to compare Fischer-Dieskau with his famous "rival" Hermann Prey, also a baritone, who also sang a similar repertoire. Both singers got on well and regarded the competition as challenging, but had different emphases in their interpretation. In an interview, Fischer-Dieskau eloquently described Prey as a "flatterer of the ears". In any case, Fischer-Dieskau can be described as a very self-critical singer. He liked to listen to his own and other people's recordings often in order to scrutinise his sound and interpretation and to develop artistically.

His international awards include six Grammys out of a total of 25 nominations. Did Fischer-Dieskau bring the "art song" to the world, so to speak?

Thomas Erlach: You could say that. Fischer-Dieskau has performed with around 150 piano accompanists. In 1951, he had his first encounter with Gerald Moore, whom he later described as the "king of accompanists", with whom he performed for almost 20 years and recorded all of Schubert's songs for men's voices on disc around 1970 - that's over 500 songs, some of them very rarely performed. These recordings are characterised by rhythmic conciseness and optimal tuning, and are therefore exemplary and precisely crafted. He even recorded the two most famous Schubert cycles, Winterreise and Schöne Müllerin, several times in their entirety. However, he never signed an exclusive contract with a record label because he wanted to remain a free artist. His musical partners report that even in live performances, he adhered exactly to the tempo and nuances agreed during rehearsals, but was never pedantic. He advised young singers to begin by studying art songs and only later switch to opera, as opera singing puts more strain on the voice and the opera business is also associated with a harmful routine. However, he was sceptical about the future of art song as a genre of composition. Unlike in the field of opera, he did not believe that there would be any significant new compositions in the future - and he could be right.

After his death, the press was full of superlatives. Le Monde in Paris, for example, described his vocal artistry as "bordering on a miracle". Colleagues praised his "friendly" but also "natural authority." What did the man have that others lack?

Thomas Erlach: Fischer-Dieskau was a respectable figure in appearance alone: over 190 cm tall, well-groomed and agile, serious, reserved and calm in tone. He was considered somewhat shy, disliked publicity, did not like appearing on television and revealed little about his private life - the opposite of today's influencers. He was often very modest in interviews and refused to answer questions at magazine level. By his own admission, he had no sense of mission, but many self-doubts, only wanted to serve the work and did not experience any major crises of meaning. He cultivated intensive friendships with selected people, mainly artists. His lifestyle was very disciplined: he spoke and laughed little on concert days to protect his voice, did little sport, avoided draughts and air conditioning and avoided long "night sessions" after performances with smoke and alcohol. He was a rather apolitical person, worked on himself and on his artwork, was sometimes considered somewhat humourless and "Teutonically" serious, but was charismatic on stage and captivated the audience's attention.

Although he died in 2012, he is still an authority in classical singing today. How do you recognise that?

Thomas Erlach: He is still present today in reference recordings, which are still widely used, and in vocal pedagogical practice. This is certainly primarily due to his striving for fidelity to the original, his demand for a meaningful compilation of concert programmes, his fight against "routine", i.e. the slovenliness of the concert and opera business, and his demand that every new rehearsal should be as committed as the first performance. But also because of his versatility: he also painted and wrote numerous books about music, in other words he was concerned with contexts, backgrounds and connections - a "knowledgeable singer". He delegated purely organisational tasks to a private secretary, which could be a role model for all intellectual workers. His music education activities were certainly also influential - he was a professor at the Berlin Academy of Music from 1983 and gave numerous masterclasses, some of which were filmed and can be found on the Internet today. He wanted prospective singers to have a versatile education with a sound knowledge of music history and did not separate "singing" and "interpretation" in his lessons, but rather regarded both as a unit.

Uwe Blass

Prof Dr Thomas Erlach has been Professor of Music Education at the University of Wuppertal since 2014.