May was a month to remember. The man who was (for my money) the greatest singer of the 20th century, up there in my personal pantheon with Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday and Janet Baker, was born 28th May 1925 in Berlin and died 18th May 2012 in Berg, on the banks of Lake Starnberg. He was the German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.
I first heard him on a recording in an O-level German class, singing Schubert’s “Erlkönig”, with Gerald Moore playing the famously devilish piano part (hammering repeated octaves for pages, enough to induce RSI in even the most virtuosic of virtuosi—most pianists, including Moore, cheat a little; some refuse to play it). I didn’t understand every word of the song, but I knew the story (father rides through dark forest with his boy; sinister elvish Erlking tempts boy to come away with him; father soothes boy; boy dies) and I found Fischer-Dieskau’s delivery absolutely electrifying. The way he personified the different voices in the song—narrator, boy, father, demon—and the way his singing voice could colour itself for anxiety, reassurance and seduction.
After that, I couldn’t get enough of his singing: in opera (an unlikely but thrilling Iago in Verdi’s Otello for example; a devastating Wozzeck); in concert works (the original baritone for Britten’s War Requiem; a noble Jesus in the St Matthew Passion); but most of all, of course, in German song, the Lied. He recorded everything and appeared in recital all over the concertising world. The audience for Lieder has never been bigger—he could fill London’s Royal Festival Hall or the Royal Opera House with a serious, hardcore Lieder recital. I heard him late in his career in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a more intimate space, and when he sang quietly you could have heard a pin drop.
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In the end, it was this soft singing that was most compelling, an inimitable, velvet, embodied pianissimo, far more emotionally connected than mere crooning. Listen to him singing Schubert’s “Meeres Stille” (a Goethe poem about a becalmed ship, terrifying in its stillness) or Strauss’s saccharine “Morgen”, which in Fischer-Dieskau’s hands is transformed into something deeply moving. I became a singer, I think, because of him; and singers of classical song still live in his shadow, more than 30 years after he stopped singing, 13 years since he died.
I first met him in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990. Working as a researcher for a little TV production company in north London, I’d suggested a South Bank Show on his life and career. The hook was that he was an inveterate Berliner and, as such, a mirror of his times. He had come back from the war to live in a shakily partitioned room in the house in which he spent the rest of his life, gradually occupying the whole place. I visited him there a few times, both for the (in the end, abortive) documentary and afterwards, as I got to know him better when I became a singer. Tall and upright, his was a compelling presence. I dreaded him coming to one of my concerts, surely he would have hated what I do—too expressionistic for this master of classicism—and I sometimes hallucinated his features onto the face of an innocent audience member. He never came; but his intense and contained expressivity was a jumping-off point for me, and I return to it as an example as I get older.
Remembering Fidi (as he was known in the business) reminds me that I have had my own career as a singer at a very particular historical moment. If Fischer-Dieskau was an ambassador for the soft beauty of the German language after the disasters of war, he was also a creature of the LP age, as eager fans bought box sets of the complete Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Wolf. This was also a world constrained by Cold War realities: Russia and China were terra incognita for this West Berliner and it was his involvement in the premiere of Britten’s War Requiem in 1962 (months before the Cuban missile crisis) that stymied the participation of the Soviet soprano Galina Vishnevskaya.
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I have floated on waves of globalisation and new technologies, as faxes morphed into emails, mobile phones arrived, flights got cheaper and borders opened. British artists established themselves at the centre of European musical life. Who could have imagined a British conductor as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic or British operas repeatedly conquering the continental heights? Until the Ukraine war, Russia was a regular recital destination; China opened itself.
In the middle of a career and a busy life, one can often think oneself immune from the currents of history; as a historian, I should have known better. Musicians feel the ground shifting. We live in interesting times.
