--- In Fischer-DieskauList@yahoogroups.com, "Emily L. Ferguson"
<elf@...> wrote:
>
> Anybody got a copy of that NYT article?

See below:


LexisNexis™ Academic


Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
The New York Times

July 11, 1999, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 2; Page 31; Column 3; Arts and Leisure Desk

LENGTH: 2645 words

HEADLINE: Chasing Perfection: A Portrait of Fischer-Dieskau

BYLINE: By WILL CRUTCHFIELD; Will Crutchfield is the director of
opera for the Caramoor International Music Festival in Katonah, N.Y.,
where he will conduct Rossini's "Gazza Ladra" on Saturday.

BODY:
ALL superlatives for the artistic impact and record-setting
extensiveness of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's singing career have long
since been exhausted. It is to the credit of Bruno Monsaingeon, the
director of a documentary film on the singer just released by
Atlantic Records, that he finds a way to make the stale kudos fresh.
Leonard Bernstein sings tonelessly at an orchestra rehearsal and
dryly admits, "Fischer-Dieskau I'm not." The soprano Elisabeth
Schwarzkopf observes that perfection is unattainable and amends that
with "Fischer-Dieskau, perhaps," kissing the air. Yehudi Menuhin just
says his name, trails off and looks happy.

Nobody recognizes the unattainability of perfection better than the
baritone himself, but the rest of the musical world is with Mr.
Menuhin. We later hear Mr. Fischer-Dieskau say that one rarely gets
as much as halfway toward what one is attempting when interpreting a
great piece of music, and that eventually one must content oneself to
say, "weiter komm' ich nicht": roughly, "that's as far as I'm going
to get just now." But his "halfway" has taken the ears of three
generations farther than they could ever have expected to go toward
the heart of some of the world's most wonderful music, and it is
sheer joy watching him go about that on film. This is a must-see,
surely the most satisfying film yet about any singer's work. And what
work!

The format is simple: some introductory and biographical material,
then long segments on the singer's activity in opera, oratorio,
German song and the various pursuits that have occupied
his "retirement" years. All of it is illustrated with an astonishing
variety of television and concert footage, linked by discreet off-
camera commentary from the director and longer on-camera reminscences
from the baritone himself. These are in German, with an English voice-
over; in two nice touches, Mr. Monsaingeon repeatedly lets the
baritone be heard for a bit in his native tongue before the voice-
over cuts in, and the translation is read by Mr. Fischer-Dieskau
himself.

The commentaries take the story from the singer's childhood (he is a
lifelong Berliner) through his harrowing apprenticeship (called up
for the German army at 17, just after that "Winterreise" debut, he
got his early recital experience singing from the back of a truck to
fellow prisoners of war) to the debuts in radio, concert, opera and
recording that established him after his release. There the "story"
pretty much stops as far as narrative is concerned, because Mr.
Fischer-Dieskau had no long struggle; he became world-famous
practically overnight and maintained his position throughout a long
and honored career.

The important story, though, is of an artistic journey almost
impossible to evoke in words. "Autumn Journey" is packaged with a
second video (in NVC Arts 23031-3; two VHS cassettes), a recital of
Schubert songs with the pianist Hartmut Holl filmed in 1992. One can
hear him singing many of the same songs as far back as 1948 --
"pirate" labels have issued the broadcasts that made the singer's
reputation already before his 23rd birthday -- and in many
intervening versions.

The astonishing thing about the early ones is how much the beginner
was already the Fischer-Dieskau we know: the incisive delivery of the
texts, the beautiful sound uniquely combining darkness of timbre with
lightness of texture, the subtlety of rhythmic direction and
phrasing, the sheer concentration and confidence of address -- all
there from the start. The astonishing thing about the late versions
is the extent to which, notwithstanding wear and tear on the
instrument, the sound is still itself; and the extent to which,
notwithstanding an overall approach that has scarcely changed at all,
he has taken the qualities that matter most immeasurably farther.

The video recital is spellbinding. One notes the agedness of the
voice in the vigorous opening song and quickly forgets it as the
singer moves from world to world in other numbers. He is wonderful to
watch as well as hear: in "Wehmut," only a page long, the way he
moves from the striding span of the opening lines through the "storm
and stress" of their continuation, then suddenly draws himself and
the listener into the utter stillness of the final observation (that
all human endeavor vanishes and falls away) is stunning.

Mr. Fischer-Dieskau became ever bolder in his rubato, in his ability
to make the shifts of rhythm and tempo tell an emotional story yet
never dissolve the musical coherence that contains it. In this case,
when the Schubert goes suddenly into slow sustained notes, he makes
them even slower. This is the opposite of what most musicians would
advise in such a passage: conventional wisdom would say: "Don't
retard the tempo. The effect of ritardando is already built into the
long notes."

And for most singers that advice might be right, because not everyone
has the powers of continuity this one has. He gives a series of
steady pure notes in no hurry to go anywhere, each one like a trance,
each trance bound to the next inexorably but without
overt "direction," the series rising and falling like the human
strivings being described, but the embodiment of it as neutral, as
distanced, as the neutral march of indifferent time past all the busy
activity it passes by.

Who else could sing like this? Who else so learned to live within
these songs that he could seem to be making them up as he went along?
(Cliches can't be evaded when Mr. Fischer-Dieskau is being
discussed.) The recital is filmed in real time, pauses included, and
to watch his stillness -- to hear the quiet of the public -- as he
waits in quiet thought and then composes his face into the pained
beginning of "Die Gotter Griechenlands" is almost as moving as
hearing the singing.

In the documentary portion, the baritone's filmed reminiscences may
have a whiff of scriptedness, and there may be something a
tad "actorish" in the way the narrator recreates his own pauses,
emphases and even chuckles as he reads the translation, but the
effect is agreeable, and some strikingly candid and interesting
comments pop out of the narrative. Unprepared stage directors do not
get off easy, and it is fascinating to hear that in the midst of
praising his colleagues, Mr. Fischer-Dieskau doesn't mind pointing
out that when a conductor is at the piano, the singer must beware
the "invisible wand" with which he is accustomed to control matters.

But the essential material here is the video excerpts. Mr. Fischer-
Dieskau is seen in early operatic triumphs in the 50's, made-for-TV
performances, live concerts, rehearsal footage and late-career
recitals that were actually planned in part to enable filming of
important parts of his repertory that had escaped the camera before.
Some of the music is to be expected -- Mahler's "Kindertotenlieder"
with Lorin Maazel from 1960; favorite songs like
Schubert's "Erlkonig" and Schumann's "Ich grolle nicht" -- and some
is off the beaten path (Britten's "War Requiem," a Bach aria with Mr.
Menuhin and Mstislav Rostropovich, and a Puccini rehearsal scene with
the baritone's wife, the soprano Julia Varady).

Inevitably, some questions are raised without being explored. As he
explains himself, the baritone came up at a time when opera in Europe
was still usually translated into the audience's language. (We see
excerpts from "Don Giovanni," "Don Carlos," "Falstaff," "Le Nozze di
Figaro" and "Il Tabarro" sung in German.) He adds that Mozart had the
language in his ear when composing in Italian and that he himself
would never have consented to sing those works in translation today.
But he does not address the contradiction between that opinion and
his observation that he cannot imagine how the "great stage
personalities" of Ms. Schwarzkopf, Lisa Della Casa and other
colleagues from his early years could have developed outside the
German-speaking repertory system that nurtured them.

There is also some reference to a universality and versatility of
artistic reach (Debussy as well as Schubert, Verdi as well as Wagner)
that is offered as one of Mr. Fischer-Dieskau's great qualities --
and a hint of complaint that this may be insufficiently appreciated.
I think it's more interesting to look at why, wide-ranging as his
interests were, he changed the world's way of hearing German lieder
and not the rest.

In part this was a matter of the nature of the voice. To go to the
simplest aspect, it was a voice that functioned supremely well in
piano and only reasonably well in forte. Not that the voice was by
any means small or weak; rather, even in the full glow of youth his
loud high notes sometimes protested under pressure, and as the
instrument aged, they were apt to turn dry in comparison with the
startlingly vital and beautiful soft notes that he preserved up to
the moment of his retirement on New Year's Day 1993, after almost
half a century of singing in public.

So to the extent that operatic singing is naturally biased toward the
louder end of the spectrum, the baritone was just as naturally more
fully able to realize his intentions in the realm of piano-
accompanied song. On the other hand, his performance at the actual
occasion of that retirement -- a gala concert in Munich from which
excerpts appear in "Autumn Journey" -- is not likely to put anyone in
mind of limitations. There he stands, singing Falstaff's "Honor"
monologue with such uninhibited zest and such vocal firmness right up
to the top G that one feels he could have gone on and on.

His description for Mr. Monsaingeon of the decision to retire is nice
to have. Like any singer lucky enough still to have a full schedule
as he approaches 70, Mr. Fischer-Dieskau had been pondering when he
ought to draw the line. But the actual choice came suddenly during
the performance, and not because he wasn't having a good time. As he
sang the joyous concluding fugue from the same opera, "tutto nel
mondo e burla" ("all the world is a joke"), he recounts, "the thought
came to me in a flash: this is the motto on which I would like to
stop."

The next morning he canceled all scheduled performances and
recordings and threw himself into the other activities in which he
had already dabbled: teaching, writing, conducting and even a bit of
accompanying at the piano.

It is also good to have his precise observations and generous praise
of his colleagues. Of Gerald Moore, who accompanied him so often from
1951 to the early 70's, he says, "he was like a lynx, totally
concentrated on what his soloist was doing." That is true, and the
stature of Moore's contribution is still somewhat underappreciated.
But the great difference when he performed with Mr. Fischer-Dieskau
is that there were two lynxes: the singer was just as intently
focused on the keyboard part.

This is a rarer capacity than might be suspected, and it was crucial
to his collaborations with the long list of virtuoso pianists
(Sviatoslav Richter, Daniel Barenboim, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Maurizio
Pollini, Murray Perahia, Alfred Brendel, Wolfgang Sawallisch,
Christoph Eschenbach, Vladmimir Horowitz and more) who accompanied
him from time to time. When in the film he discusses the process of
collaborating with a great soloist and sums it up by saying, "it
consists in fact of accompanying him," he is not offering a platitude.

The baritone "accompanied" all his partners in the same sense that
the members of a great string quartet accompany one another: an
infinitely subtle, lightning quick, unobtrusive and probably
sometimes unconscious way of responding to the partner's moment-by-
moment rhythmic or coloristic impulses; a joining of two independent
spontaneities into an intricately well-meshed yet still spontaneous-
sounding unity.

The great lieder of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Wolf are
simultaneously "songs" in the ordinary sense of a vocal-poetic
statement with instrumental support, and musical duos in the same
vein as the violin sonatas or piano trios of the same composers. If
dozens -- even hundreds -- of these songs had to wait a century or
more for Mr. Fischer-Dieskau to show that they held more than
specialized appeal, it was in large part because of the rarity of
artists simultaneously equipped to fulfill the traditional
communicative role of "singer" and the subtle musical role implied
above.

AND here we approach the reasons beyond vocal practicality for his
ability to make revelations in this field. Younger audiences today at
the recitals of Bryn Terfel, Thomas Hampson or Matthias Goerne may
not realize what an enormous portion of their repertory lay silent
before Mr. Fischer-Diekau's career. The way he heard this music, the
way his every spontaneous execution of a detail related at once to a
clear conception of the whole and to an in-the-moment awareness of
exactly how and to what purpose the pianist has executed his last
detail: this is a contribution comparable to Callas's reimagining of
bel canto, Gould's or Casals's of Bach, Toscanini's of Beethoven.

In the film we see him performing with (among others) Holl,
Sawallisch, Eschenbach and Moore; recording with Moore and Barenboim;
rehearsing with Richter, Eschenbach and Brendel. In a way the most
interesting bits are the practice sessions with Mr. Eschenbach and
Mr. Brendel, where Mr. Fischer-Dieskau does not sing in full voice
but "marks" his part, striding to and fro and guiding the rehearsal
through his rhythm and the most expressive and precise
gestural "conducting" of the pianist.

It is no surprise at all, watching this physicalization of rhythmic
thought, either that the more restrained physicality of his public
recitals was so compelling to watch or that when he turned to actual
conducting, he met with success.

Tutto nel mondo e burla: Mr. Fischer-Dieskau the grave exponent of
the heart's winter journeys was actually able to feel the truth of
that statement just as roundly as Verdi the tragedian. If there is a
regret over the selection of a Schubert recital for the full-length
program, it can only be that Schubert does not offer the humorous
songs with which Mr. Fischer-Dieskau closed his Wolf and Mahler
recital programs.

No one who heard him in Mahler's "Knaben Wunderhorn" songs on his
last Carnegie Hall visit in 1987 will forget the concluding "Ich
weiss nicht wie mir ist." "I don't know what's the matter with me,"
the singer asks, and the listener gets ready for the conventional
answer (it must be love driving you crazy), but instead comes, "ein
ganzes Narr bist du gewiss": "You're a complete fool, that's what."
And the singer responds in effect, "ah, now I see, that's it."

Mr. Fischer-Dieskau never made one feel that he was "selling" the
joke; he gave the last phrase as a throwaway tumble and was
practically shaking the pianist's hand by the time it was out of his
mouth. It came across as someone pretty keenly alive to the fact that
much of life is ridiculous, and happy to let the public in on that
little insight.

There's something essential about the man in that, and it comes
through in his narration as well. There is a combination of honest
pride with unostentatious humility that is of a piece with his
artistic stance.

Mr. Fischer-Dieskau's life has been marked by tragedy: in youth he
lost a handicapped brother to Nazi extermination policies, and in
middle age he lost his first wife, the cellist Irmgard Poppen, who
died giving birth to their third son. The tragic sense was never far
from his art, but there is nothing of tragedy about his own
story. "Adventurous" is how he chooses to describe himself in one
word, and that is appropriate.

Another that he would never offer is "heroic": the striving hero of
an adventure with a happy ending. Music lovers who have lived in his
time are lucky, and one can't praise the film more highly than to say
it reveals why this is so.


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