From: TIME Magazine Archives
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,810740,00.html

Monday, Dec. 15, 1958
Busy Baritone

To help quiet his preperformance jitters and tune up his musical
perception, German Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau packs his
luggage with a few tested literary tranquilizers: some volumes of
poetry, selected detective stories, classics such as Crime and
Punishment. As he wound up his third U.S. tour last week on the West
Coast, nobody thought to ask him whether he was stoking his emotional
fires on Donne or Dostoevsky or Dashiell Hammett. What mattered was
that he was in top vocal form, and that meant that he was giving his
audiences the most moving performances of German lieder to be heard
in the world today.

Concert-Tour Legend. At 33, Fischer-Dieskau has become a concert-tour
legend in Europe and the U.S.: almost singlehanded, he has accounted
for the postwar popularity of the German art song. On his U.S. tours,
he has held audiences rapt through the whole of Schubert's song cycle
Die Winterreise and through the complete Schumann Dichterliebe. He
has reached an even wider public through his 40-odd LP recordings,
including Hugo Wolf's 16 Songs, Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice,
Brahms's German Requiem, albums of Mahler songs.

Fischer-Dieskau is also one of the most consistently popular opera
singers in Germany; aided by an imposing 6-ft. 2-in. figure, he has
shaped a number of moving characterizations, e.g., Wolfram in
Tannhäuser. Sir John Falstaff, and the title role in Busoni's Doktor
Faustus. Even more surprising than the scope of his success is the
fact that he had no early singing experience: he took his first voice
lesson when he was 16, had scarcely started to sing professionally
when he was drafted into the German army. As an American prisoner of
war, he made such a hit singing for his captors that he was one of
the last prisoners released. Ten years ago the Berlin Municipal Opera
hired him on the spot after only a brief audition. Today he is booked
solid two years in advance, has turned down offers from the San
Francisco Opera, Covent Garden, La Scala. He is one of the rare
singers who can perform in lieder and in opera equally well. To
Fischer-Dieskau, lieder are often vocally more of a challenge than
opera. "In Winterreise,'' he says, "you have more than an hour of
emotion without pause. But the role of Amfortas in Parsifal amounts
to only 35 minutes of singing."

Spine-Tingling Blasts. There are showier, more opulent-sounding
baritones than Fischer-Dieskau. But there are no singers about
nowadays who use their voices with more intelligence, accuracy or
theatrical effect. Fischer-Dieskau never uses his texts as excuses
for mere vocal gymnastics. In the art songs of Schubert, Schumann,
Wolf, he sings his way into moods alternately tragic, boisterous and
nostalgic with subtle modulations of his dry, husky voice. And when
at climactic moments he throws his baritone out in a high, ringing
fortissimo, the effect is as spine-tingling as a trumpet blast.