Hi folks,

Below is the full text of an article about DFD that appeared in 2006
in the New England Review. The author doesn't seem to like DFD much
as a person, but the article is generally positive.

Celia

Celia A. Sgroi
sgroi@...
----------------------------------------

A Voice of the Century Past

Copyright New England Review 2006
Benjamin Ivry. New England Review. Middlebury: 2006. Vol. 27, Iss. 1;
pg. 187, 13 pgs


The Berlin-born baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau celebrated his
eightieth birthday last spring, on May 28,2005. As many readers may
know, Fischer-Dieskau is the single most-recorded musician in
history. He has made an estimated one thousand recordings (complete
LPS and CDS) of music from Bach to Zemlinsky, during a half-century
career which stretched from the 19405 through the 19905. By
comparison, the second-most recorded musician of all time, with
around seven hundred records, is the omnipresent Spanish tenor
Placido Domingo.

Fischer-Dieskau has made so many recordings that in some future age,
a music researcher may be excused for believing that "Dietrich
Fischer-Dieskau" is merely a generic term for baritone or singer. The
sonorously triple-barreled name appears on albums of works by Samuel
Barber, Benjamin Britten, Luigi Dallapiccola, Hans Werner Henze,
Ernst Kreiiek, Witold Lutoslawski, Igor Stravinsky, Michael Tippett,
and many others. That who's who of modern composers wrote new works
premiered by Fischer-Dieskau. For recording music by dead white men,
no one can or is ever likely to rival Fischer-Dieskau. A completist
with encyclopedic energy, he has made permanent versions of the works
of nearly every major composer and dozens of minor ones.

How did this singer manage a repertory of this amazing breadth and
volume? His voice was a pliant, finely textured baritone, surprising
in its volume and able to descend well into the bass range. In the
earlier years of his career, the lower notes could sound like those
reached by a young singer stretching for added gravity. The higher
notes are often floated softly, but with enough breath control to
reach the back of an auditorium. Critics have written misleadingly
about the drying out of FischerDieskau's voice over the years,
implying that his earliest recordings are uniformly his best.
Although his voice may sound leathery in recordings as early as the
19708, his artistry remained intact until he ceased performing.

A REFUGEE IN MUSIC

According to Hans A. Neunzig's hagiographie but indispensable
Dietrich FischerDieskau. Eine Biographie (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-
Anstalt, 1995; in English, Amadeus Press, 2003), the singer's father
was Albert Fischer-Dieskau (1865-1937), a classical scholar and
secondary school principal. The elder Fischer-Dieskau wrote operettas
in his spare time, an avocation which reportedly made his son disdain
the genre of light music for much of his career. Young Fischer-
Dieskau shared a bedroom with a handicapped brother whose epileptic
seizures woke him at night. Bombarded with the blandishments of the
Hitler Youth program in his early years, the artist sought refuge in
the world of books, music, and the visual arts. He began vocal
studies at age sixteen. In 1943 he was drafted into the Nazi
Wehrmacht, and two years later became a prisoner of war in Italy,
where he gave lieder recitals for fellow prisoners.

When he returned home in 1947, Fischer-Dieskau found that his older
brother had been killed along with thousands of others in Hitler's
eugenics plan for the Aryan race. With Berlin still in disarray, the
young singer began almost at once to sing heavy operatic roles in
Verdi's Don Carlos and Wagner's Tannhauser. He also gave recitals,
beginning with a 1948 Radio Berlin broadcast of Schubert's song cycle
Die Winterreise. Soon he met the British pianist Gerald Moore, the
longtime in-house accompanist for EMI records. With Moore, Fischer-
Dieskau would go on to record nearly every song by Schubert,
Schumann, and Wolf, as well as hundreds by Brahms, Strauss, Loewe,
and Beethoven. In recording orchestral songs he was just as prolific.
What accounts for a mastery achieved so early?

Just watch a DVD of his live performance from 1960 of
Mahler's "lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen" (Songs of a Wayfarer,
EMI). In the performance recorded for French television, Fischer-
Dieskau at thirty-five is tall and long-legged, with a flat-faced
chubbiness reminiscent of the actor Tim Robbins. The baritone
succeeds in capturing every nuance of language and music in the manic-
depressive emotional world of Mahler, expressing the alternating joys
and miseries of love. In close-up, the singer's face places itself
precisely in position to emit each separate note. Fischer-Dieskau's
artistry was always rational, deliberate, and calculated to a fare-
thee-well. Even his bow at the end of the performance is perfectly
calibrated to the occasion. Although the performance took place in
Paris under the Polish conductor Paul Kletzki, the orchestra is all
Japanese, Tokyo's NHK Symphony. When the singer bows to them, it is
with exquisite Asian-style politeness, worthy of Toshiro Mifune in a
samurai epic.

Suvi Raj Grubb, an EMI record producer, observed in 1986 in Music-
Makers on Record that Fischer-Dieskau's voice is:

difficult to balance because of its enormous dynamic range, much
greater than that of any other singer I have recorded. No microphone
can comfortably accommodate this range of dynamics; at close quarters
even the ear cannot do so. We have had to compress it; in the best
Fischer-Dieskau recordings this compression has been kept down to a
minimum, and has been successfully camouflaged by the engineer's
anticipating extremes of dynamics and compensating for them in
advance. But once these initial hurdles have been negotiated the
recording proceeds fast, as FischerDieskau works very fast. He comes
to recordings well rehearsed. He sings a song through once, and
repeats any section he feels needs to be improved; it is very rarely
that he thinks it necessary to sing a song through a second time in
full.

The extremes of dynamics, from loud to soft tones, are part of what
made a FischerDieskau concert unique. Sudden drops in volume always
challenged the audience to listen more and more closely to the
performance. The need to pay intense attention is one of the
principal elements of a lieder recital. Unlike opera, classical song
ideally demands that the audience be familiar with the text of the
poem that has been set to music. Real devotees know by heart the
classic works of the repertory, by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and
others.

As obsessed with his material as the most ardent fan, this singer is
an aristocratic performer, one who might be described as a Berlin
Mandarin. That aspect of his presentation emerges in his sometimes
world-weary tone in songs like "'Allerseeleri" (All Souls' Day) by
Richard Strauss. When he sings, "Sfc// aufden Tisch die duftenden
Reseden/ Die letzten roten Astern trag herbei" (Put the fragrant
mignonettes on the table/ Bring the last red asters inside), it
sounds like he is giving haughty orders to a housemaid, rather than
speaking to his beloved. The natural hauteur and exalted tone are
understandable in Fischer-Dieskau, who readily assumes for himself
the mantle of all Western culture. Once during a rehearsal of a work
by Paul Hindemith conducted by the composer, Hindemith leaned over to
Fischer-Dieskau and exclaimed, "You're not a singer, you're a bard!"

In another incident, after a 19605 concert of the songs of Hugo Wolf,
the Romanianborn German poet Paul Celan appeared backstage. Celan
shook his head disbelievingly in response to the baritone's high-
flown performance of "Gesang Weylas" (Weyla's Song), a piece which
speaks of an impossibly ideal world as imagined by the German

Romantic poet Eduard Morike (1804-75):

Du hist Orplid, mein Land!

Das feme leuchtet. . .

Vor deiner Gottbeit beugen

Sich Konige, die deine Warter sind.

(You are Orplid, my land!

distantly gleaming . . .

To your godliness Kings

bow, as your footmen.)

This vision represents an obviously unattainable ideal to most modern
listeners, especially Celan. But in some ways Fischer-Dieskau has
spent his adult life in what might be seen as a similarly exalted
artistic kingdom of Orplid. He has single-mindedly assimilated the
Romantic ethos. As a musically erudite and intellectually complex
performer, the singer is generally at his best in multifaceted music.
Works by Mahler, Strauss, and Wolf, marked by multiple levels of self-
awareness and sophistication, suit him best. Yet Fischer-Dieskau can
also triumph in more straightforward songs by Schubert, for example,
if the main subject is the Romantic cultural ideal. Schubert's "Das
lied im Grünen" (The Song in Greenery), written in 1827, declares:

O gerne im Grünen

Bin ich schon als Knabe und Jünjjling gewesen

Und habegelernt und geschricben, gelesen

Im Horaz und Plato, dann Wieland und Kant.

(O glad was I in greenery

as a boy and youth

to study and write

while reading Horace and Plato, then Wieland and Kant.)

Rare is the baritone-let alone the tenor-who can convince an audience
that he has in fact read Horace, Plato, Wieland, and Kant. As for
Fischer-Dieskau, he gives the impression that he probably has their
volumes in his dressing room backstage. After all, this highly
cultivated singer has himself written studious, if derivative and
overly portentous, volumes on subjects ranging from Schubert,
Schumann, and Wagner to Nietzsche. His lifelong ethos is summed up by
that phrase from "Das lied im Grunen": "gdernt und geschrieben,
gelesen

ANCILLARY ARTS

Fischer-Dieskau's tentacular grip on the arts does not stop with the
printed page; he is also an accomplished painter, the creator of
intriguingly expressionist portraits of the composers Ravel,
Bruckner, and Hindemith, among others. In these works, the musicians
are depicted with burning eyes, surrounded by streams of wormlike
confetti which may represent the melodies flying out of their minds.
The most interesting of these canvases are emotionally authentic,
deserving notice as artworks in their own right. Typically
professional with his art as with everything else, Fischer-Dieskau
has had exhibitions of his paintings in Germany, Austria, France, and
Japan. The Galerie Georg Jaud, located in the Bavarian Alpine town of
Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a mere stone's throw from Oberammergau,
dedicates a substantial portion of its website to the singer's
paintings [www.galerie-jaud.de]. The images appearing there include a
recent monumental portrait of his fourth wife, the gifted dramatic
soprano Julia Varady, garbed in a glaring red gown.

Yet all of Fischer-Dieskau's artwork is a mere accessory to his music
making (which also includes orchestral conducting and narrating),
only part of his adamant urge for ultimate self-expression. He scales
artistic Matterhorns because they are there. Benjamin Britten, a
composer with whom he worked closely, died before writing an operatic
adaptation of King Lear, which Fischer-Dieskau had requested. The
baritone had his accompanist Aribert Reimann-a far less talented
composer-undertake to write a Lear for him, which was subsequently
staged and recorded. For this singer, it is better to have sung Lear
by a minor composer than not to have accomplished that at all.

His determination extends to far less important matters. I last met
Fischer-Dieskau about a decade ago in Stuttgart, where it fell to me
to interview him for an American newsweekly. We spoke for an hour,
briskly, like people who had much to get done and no time to waste.
When 1 mentioned musicians he had worked with, he would sum each one
up concisely, such as when he dismissed Herta Klust, the pianist on
some of his early recordings: "She was deaf in one ear!" When the
conversation was concluded, Fischer-Dieskau dismissed me with a
friendly but determined tap of his index finger on my chest, much
like a commanding officer sending a cadet off to fight in the culture
wars. When the interview duly appeared, occupying a full page of a
publication not known for its extensive cultural coverage, Fischer-
Dieskau made it known through his assistant that he had hoped for
more space than that.

On that occasion, Fischer-Dieskau was in Stuttgart to teach master
classes in singing at the Hugo-Wolf-Akademie. He arrived heavily
laden with two suitcases containing musical scores, looking a bit
like Willy Loman in a Prussian production of Death of a Salesman.
Although not an overtly sadistic teacher like his elder colleague the
soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Fischer-Dieskau had little patience
with the limitations of his students. He asked a dumpy, dull tenor to
produce more onstage "charm" instantaneously, which proved impossible
for that hapless young performer.

During our interview, he explained that recordings are
like "snapshots" of a given day's singing, which is why he felt that
it was natural to record the same works repeatedly. This may
rationalize why there are over a dozen versions available of Fischer-
Dieskau performing Schubert's Winterreise. An entirely frank answer
would also need to recognize the singer's endless appetite for new
challenges. His career included operatic roles which were not ideal
for him, like Verdi's Rigoletto. In Reverberations (Fromm
International, 1989), his volume of memoirs written in the pompous
tone of a great explorer or statesman, the singer mentions that
during one visit to Rome, a hotel bellboy called him "the greatest
Rigoletto in the world." That hopes of a gratuity, rather than any
particular musical acumen, might have prompted this remark goes
unnoticed by the self-serious autobiographer.

Fischer-Dieskau's eye on new challenges has not always taken human
limits into account. In late 1992 he performed at a Munich concert in
honor of the conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch, who was leaving the
Munich Opera for a new post leading the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Fischer-Dieskau chose to sing a challenging aria from one of his
operatic roles, Verdi's Falstaff. By then sixty-seven, the baritone
did not have one of his best nights vocally on that occasion. Also on
the program that evening was the thirty-seven-year-old American
baritone Thomas Hampson. Listening to what a younger colleague could
produce in comparison with his own relatively uninspired performance,
Fischer-Dieskau abruptly decided to retire from singing, canceling a
series of planned performances.

THE VALUE OF ACCOMPANISTS

A number of colleagues, included Sawallisch, felt that the singer's
retirement was premature. For the last thirteen years of his career,
Fischer-Dieskau had been giving hundreds of concerts with his best
regular accompanist ever, the German pianist Hartmut Holl. A spiky
and deeply emotional pianist, Holl is a consummate practitioner of
the art of vocal accompaniment, as displayed in dozens of superb CDS
of lieder on the Capriccio label with his then-wife, the Japanese-
born mezzo-soprano Mitsuko Shirai.

Classical songs are written for piano as well as for voice, and the
combination of the two makes a full artistic statement. Holl created
an intellectual and emotional balance that Fischer-Dieskau had not
enjoyed since his performances with his two other best accompanists
on record, Benjamin Britten and the Russian pianist Sviatoslav
Richter. Britten, Richter, and HoIl all shared a profound musical
understanding with the singer, an expression of intense emotional
intimacy with the music and poetry. Perhaps not coincidentally, like
HoIl, Richter also performed for years with his life partner, the
soprano Nina Dorliak, as Britten famously did with his lifelong
companion, the tenor Peter Pears. This kind of emotional intimacy and
familiarity of work in common can create great results, although it
must be said that there are also a number of wretched husband-and-
wife teams who record lieder.

With other accompanists, Fischer-Dieskau had a less uniformly
rewarding rapport. Gerald Moore could be chilly and perfunctory,
offering the musical equivalent of a clipped British accent; the
Viennese pianist Jorg Demus, although inhabiting FischerDieskau's
esthetic universe as the son of the great Byzantine art historian
Otto Demus, often sounded faded and self-effacing; Alfred Brendel and
Wolfgang Sawallisch, both frequent accompanists, could be too lumpy
and heavy-fingered; Vladimir Horowitz, cited in almost every survey
as one of Fischer-Dieskau's accompanists, actually performed only
once with the baritone, at a 1976 Carnegie Hall gala performance of
Schumann's Dichterliebe that was a disaster, as the singer's memoirs
admit.

By the 19805, Deutsche Grammophon, Fischer-Dieskau's longtime record
company, was no longer interested in producing new recordings with
him. Undeterred, he began cutting albums for smaller labels like
Claves, Capriccio, Orfeo, and many others. Some of these late efforts
are excellent, especially when Hartmut HoIl is involved (e.g.,
performances of Wolf, Weber, and Mendelssohn, all on Claves). Despite
his many years of work with the company, Deutsche Grammophon has
persistently and inexplicably shown itself to be largely clueless
about what to do with Fischer-Dieskau. A twentyone-CD commemorative
set, the Fischer-Dieskau Edition, issued on his seventieth birthday,
was a surprising dud. It included some of the singer's uneasiest
recordings, like his disc of songs by Charles Ives in impossibly
Teutonic English, as well as some operatic arias recorded late in his
career. Similarly, an eightieth birthday DVD from Deutsche
Grammophon, The Art of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, is a dog's breakfast
of odd filmed performances, like a bit of Puccini sung in German, or
a snippet of an awkwardly lip-synched film of Mozart's Marriage of
Figaro. Deutsche Grammophon has also issued a new CD set of the
singer reciting "melodramas" by Schumann, Strauss, and Liszt for
piano and spoken word, in which the accompanying pianist is the
relatively weak and inexperienced Burkhard Kehring.

Far more emblematic and impressive is an eleven-CD set produced by
Orfeo, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: Die Salzburger liederabende 1956-
1965. With decent sound quality for an historical reissue, this set
offers radio broadcasts of complete recitals, which display in a
compelling way the art of programming, how one song offsets another
in concert. This art, absent from Fischer-Dieskau's recordings of
complete works by composers, is in fact one of the most refined
aspects of lieder performance, which calls for mixing and matching
songs by different composers like the dishes and wines on a chef's
menu. With typical high seriousness, Fischer-Dieskau favored building
recitals around a single composer, but the arrangement of songs
nonetheless reveals a sense of artistic structure absent in the CD
box sets, which are ordered chronologically.

In the Salzburg recitals, the accompanist is again Gerald Moore,
slightly more motivated than in some of the pair's studio recordings,
but still showing less of the artistry evident in Fischer-Dieskau's
finest partners. The contrast becomes clear when we listen to the
Orfeo DOr recordings of a live Munich recital from 1977 of Hugo
Wolf's Goethe-Lieder, in which the singer is accompanied by
Sviatoslav Richter; a Schubert recital by the pair from that same
year; and a 1970 Salzburg Festival Brahms recital by Fischer-Dieskau
and Richter. In all of these performances, Richter has an absolute
command of the notes, playing with the vigor and command of a
composer playing his own orchestral score on the piano, yet he also
listens intently to the singer and varies his performance accordingly-
a rare skill, which Britten and HoIl display as well.

Britten's work with Fischer-Dieskau is available in a series of
performances from the composer's Aide burgh Festival. A set often
Schubert songs from 1972, available as a BBCD recording, is an
exquisitely symbiotic occasion. Fully appreciating the grandeur of
Hartmut HoIPs contribution to the singer's extraordinary artistry is
a somewhat more difficult task. A 1991 Schubert recital from
Nuremberg by Fischer-Dieskau and Holl has yet to be issued on DVD. It
is available, though, as the second videocassette of an adulatory
documentary, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: Autumn Journey, issued by
Warner Music Vision. The film is by Bruno Monsaingeon, the Frenchman
who also lavished filmic adoration on Glenn Gould and Sviatoslav
Richter.

Monsaingeon makes some extreme assertions in his film, such as the
declaration that "disliking Fischer-Dieskau is tantamount to
disliking Michelangelo or Proust." But the concert performance, quite
late in the singer's career, shows how undiluted stage presence and
ability to sing a varied program are not inevitably dependent on
vocal freshness per se. More snippets of Fischer-Dieskau and HoIl may
be glimpsed on a recent DVD release by TDK DVUS, which features a
1991 performance of Schubert's song cycle Die schone Mullerin (The
Maid of the Mill), in which the accompanist is the gifted Hungarian
pianist Andras Schiff. Fortunately, a bonus section of this DVD
offers some discreet-and unidentified-appearances by HoIl from mid-
1980s recitals with Fischer-Dieskau. The difference is immediately
apparent between Schiff, a splendid pianist with strong musical ideas
of his own-ideas that the singer is obliged to keep up with-and HoIl,
an equally astute musician who is pliant and attentive to the aging
singer's every inflection without being in the least servile or
excessively accommodating.

FAREWELL, FAREWELL

Over the years, Fischer-Dieskau often ended a series of encores after
a recital program with the song "Abschied" (Departure)-from
Schubert's Schwanengesan0-with its repeated farewells: "Ade! du
muntre, dufrohliche Stadt, ade!" (Farewell, lively, merry town,
farewell!). This manner of signaling that a recital is over may seem
over-literal, but sometimes it was necessary to dismiss an audience
still clamoring for encores. I recall a 19705 Carnegie Hall recital
of Schubert songs in which people were shouting out repeated requests
for the popular lied "An die musik"; Fischer-Dieskau politely
demurred and ended the recital without performing this familiar song.

His 1991 CD of songs by Weber (issued by Claves) starts with the
song "Meine lieder, meine Sange," which declares:

My lieder, my songs

are consecrated to this instant

their melodies and chords

fade as time passes.

Great singers have died

and are mentioned no more

What madness it is that I strive

for fame in this world below.

It is most unlikely that there will come a time when Fischer-Dieskau
is "mentioned no more." According to ArkivMusic.com, a website
listing currently available CDs, almost three hundred of this
singer's recordings are still available, with new historical items
and other reprints appearing regularly. Over a dozen years after his
retirement, he is still the source of more CDS annually than many
active musicians. More significantly, he has insured that he can
never be forgotten in the history of Western music performance
because he has made permanently accessible a precious repertory of
works.

To choose a single quintessential recording by this artist is
impossible, but one song by Hugo Wolf may be the most endearing: "Nun
lass uns Frieden schliessen, liebstes Leben" (Now let's make peace,
love of my life) is part of Wolf's Italienisches liedcrbuch (Italian
Sonjj Book; see recommended recordings below), a setting of poems by
his friend Paul Heyse (1830-1914). A Berlin-born philologist who won
the 1910 Nobel Prize for Literature, Heyse translated the song from
its original Italian version, "Facciam Iapace, caro bene mio," as
published in a collection that appeared in Venice in 1841. It is a
gentle plea for reconciliation, tender without being wheedling.
Wolf's softly rocking melody suggests that the reticent beloved is
being cradled in the arms of the importunate lover.

In this plea for domestic peace, Pischer-Dieskau's intimate singing
expresses an immensely subtle emotional intelligence as he offers to
take the first step toward reconciliation: " Wenn du nicht tvillst,
will ich mich dir ergeben;/ Wie konnten wir uns auf den Tod
bekriegen?" (If you are not willing, I will yield to you;/ how could
we fight a war to the death?). The song goes on to refer with tender
irony to kings, princes, and soldiers who manage to find it within
themselves to make peace; its conclusion is an ardently direct appeal
to the estranged lover's heart: "Meinst du, daß, was so gßen Herrn
gelingt,/ Ein Paar zufriedner Herzen nicht vollbringt?" (Do you mean
that what such great men manage,/ A couple of satisfied hearts might
not accomplish?). The singer extends the song's last floated syllable
with inquiring, seductive grace.

Finding simplicity within complexity, using masterful breath control
to make an emotional point, Fischer-Dieskau is uniquely plausible in
this lied. Steel-hearted listeners who remain stubbornly unaffected
by his performance may find any one of the remarkable recordings
listed below more to their taste.

RECOMMENDED LISTENING:

For the listener curious to experience some representative examples
of FischerDieskau's extraordinary artistry, here are some
suggestions, ordered chronologically by recording date. Recordings
already mentioned in this essay (with the exception of the Wolf song
described in the previous paragraph) are not included among these top
twenty-six. Caveat emptor: some of the releases do not include
English translations of the song texts in the CD booklets. Philip L.
Miller's The Ring of Words: An Anthology of Song Texts (Norton) or
the singer's own The Fischer-Dieskau Book ofLieder (Limelight) are
indispensable companion reference works for listeners who do not know
German.

1) 1951: WILHELM FURTWANGLER-SALZBURG ORCHESTRAL CONCERTS 1949-1954.
Orfeo D'or 409048 (distributed by Qualiton Imports; www.qualiton.com)

This 1951 performance of Mahler's lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen
with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra shows the singer at his early
best.

2) 1951-8: SCHUBERTSONGS.

EMi Great Recordings of the Century 67559 (www.emiclassics.com)

Fischer-Dieskau performs Schubert's "Erlkonig" "Standchen" "Nacht und
Tr Hume" and "Du hist die RuIi" with vocal freshness that makes up
for Gerald Moore's cool pianism.

3) 1952: WAGNER: TRISTAN UND ISOLDE.

EMI Classics 85873 (www.emiclassics.com)

Conducted by Wilhelm Furtwangler, this is the performance in which
FischerDieskau sings the role of Kurwenal with heft, more plausibly
than on a CD set led by Carlos Kleiber thirty years later.

4) 1952-3: DIETRICH FISCHER-DIESKAU SINGS BACH & BRAHMS.

Profil Edition Gunter Haussier PH5013

In two solo Bach cantatas conducted by Karl Ristenpart, "Ich will den
Kreuzstab gerne tragen" (no. 56) and "Icb habegenug" (no. 82), the
artist sings most mellifluously.

5) 1952: PFITZNER: PALESTRINA.

Myto Records 21060 (distributed by Qualiton Imports; www.qualiton.com)

This live radio recording also features the bass Gottlob Frick, the
tenor Julius Patzak, and the baritone Hans hotter.

6) 1954: BACH: SAINT MATTHEW PASSION.

EMI Classics 65509 (www.emiclassics.com)

The singer is an aptly transcendent Jesus in this rendition conducted
by Furtwangler, more moving than in a 1949 recording led by Fritz
Lehmann (Music & Arts CD 1091).

7) 1955: BRAHMS: A GERMAN REQUIEM.

EMI Classics 64705 (www.emiclassics.com)

Alongside the splendid soprano Elisabeth Grummer and conducted by a
fine Brahmsian Rudolf Kempe, Fischer-Dieskau is exceptionally
eloquent in this choral work.

8) 1955: WAGNER: TANNHAUSER.

Orfeo D'or 643043 (distributed by Qualiton Imports; www.qualiton.com)

A Bayrcuth Festival live performance offers conductor André Cluytens
and a solid cast alongside Fischer-Dieskau as Wolfram, one of his
most plausible Wagnerian roles.

9) 1957: BRAHMS: A GERMAN REQUIEM.

EMI Classics 66879 (www.emiclassics.com)

Another Brahms Requiem; this one boasts the delectable soprano Lisa
della Casa and preternaturally fluid conducting by Herbert von
Karajan.

10) 1957: BEETHOVEN: FIDELIO.

Deutsche Grammophon DG 453106 (www.deutschegrammophon.com)

Possibly Fischer-Dieskau's finest operatic recording, as the
hysterical villain Don Pizzaro, conducted dynamically by the
Hungarian maestro Ferenc Fricsay.

11) 1957-8: STRAUSS: CAPRICCIO.

EMI Great Recordings of the Century 67391 (www.emiclassics.com)

The high-flying sophisticated verbal world of Richard Strauss's late
opera suits the singer perfectly in this fine recording.

12) 1957-9: WOLF: MORIKE LIEDER.

EMI CMS 7 6356.3 2 (www.emiclassics.com)

Despite the chilliness of Gerald Moore's accompaniment, Fischer-
Dieskau in his youthful vocal prime possessed die complex artistry
needed for these supreme creations by Hugo Wolf.

13) 1958: WOLF: ITALIAN SONGBOOK.

Orfeo DOr 220901 (distributed by Qualiton Imports; www.qualiton.com)

The tender melodies of Wolf are knowingly rendered by Irmgard
seefried and Fischer-Dieskau, accompanied by Erik Werba, in this live
1958 performance from Salzburg.

14) 1959: MAHLER: SONG OF THE EARTH.

EMI Classics 69665 (www.emiclassics.com)

The Polish conductor Paul Kletzki is a convincing Mahlerian, and the
singer is in his element here, rhythmically strong and persuasive.

15) 1963: BRITTEN: WARREQUIEM.

Decca 414383 (www.cieccaclassics.com)

Written for Fischer-Dieskau and Peter Pears, who both perform
authoritatively, despite the unseemly yowls of the Russian soprano
Galina Vishnevskaya. Britten himself conducts.

16) 1967: BARBER: DOVER BEACH.

CBS Masterworks 46727 (www.soiiybmgmasterworks.com)

Also written for Fischer-Dieskau, this setting of Matthew Arnold's
bitter ode is astringently performed with the Juilliard String
Quartet.

17) 1968: HINDEMITH: CARDILLAC.

Opera D'oro 1427 (distributed by Allegro; www.allegro-music.com)

One of the singer's most intense roles, as a possessive, murderous
goldsmith who gets his comeuppance in seventeenth-century Paris.

18) 1968: MENDELSSOHN: ELIJAH.

EMI Classics 86257 (www.emiclassics.com)

A charming multinational cast in Mendelssohn's oratorio led by Rafaël
Fruhbeck de Burgos with Fischer-Dieskau, Nicolai Gedda, and Gwyneth
Jones.

19) 1968: BERNSTEIN CENTURY-MAHLER: LIEDER.

Sony Classical 61847 (www.sonybmgmasterworks.com)

In this rendering, with Leonard Bernstein at the piano, Mahler's
songs are emotionally wrenching, although Bernstein's approach seems
mannered and extreme compared to that of other Mahlerians.

20) 1970: GREAT PERFORMERS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY-FISCHER-DIESKAU

BBC Legends 4035 (dist. by Koch International;
www.kochentertainment.com)

Maliler songs from a live recital in London's Royal Festival Hall,
with the accompanist Karl Engel; more straightforward and unadorned
than the version with Bernstein.

21) 1971: HUMPERDINCK: HANSELUND GRETEL.

RCA Victor Red Seal 25281 (www.bmgclassics.com)

The role of Peter, broom-maker and father of Hansel and Gretel, is
rarely taken as seriously-both musically and dramatically-as it is by
Fischer-Dieskau in this performance. Kurt Eichhorn conducts.

22) 1983: ROMANTIC LIEDER.

Orfeo 153861 (distributed by Qualiton Imports; www.qualiton.com)

Lesser-known composers like Neukomm, Reissiger, Herrmami, and
Kraussold, authoritatively rendered by Fischer-Dieskau and Hartmut
HoIl.

23) 1985: THE ESSENTIAL LUTOSLAWSKI.

Philips Duo 464043 (www.deccaclassics.com)

The Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski wrote "Les espaces du sommeil"
an impressionistic work for voice and orchestra, for Fischer-Dieskau;
the composer and singer join to perform it here.

24) 1986: OTHMAR SCHOECK: UNDER THE STARS -SONG CYCLE TO POEMS BY
GOTTFRIED KELLER.

Claves CD 50-8606 (www.claves.ch)

The Swiss composer Schoeck wrote this romantic song cycle during
World War II. Fischer-Dieskau and his accompanist Hartmut Holl
capture the range of moods expressed by these pieces.

25) 1990: BRAHMS: LIEDER.

Bayer Records 100006 (www.bayermusicgroup.de)

Songs sensitively interpreted by Fischer-Dieskau and Hartmut Holl,
ranging from less familiar works to the well-known Feldeinsamkeit and
Wie hist du meine Konigin.

26) 1993: OTHMAR SCHOECK: DAS HOLDE BESCHEIDEN (SWEET ACCEPTANCE).

Claves CD 50-9308/9 (www.claves.ch)

Alongside the mezzo-soprano Mitsuko Shirai and Hartmut Holl, Fischer-
Dieskau offers an imaginative rendering of Schoeck's songs addressed
to questions concerning God, nature, and metaphysics.

[Author Affiliation]
BENJAMIN IVRY is the author of biographies of Ravel, Poulenc, and
Rimbaud. He has also translated a number of books by authors
including Gide, Jules Verne, and Balthus.