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As we approach the anniversary of the death of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Mahlerman pays tribute to the great lyric baritone, who provided ‘the soundtrack to my life’…

In so many ways the aristocratic lyric baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who died in Berg, Bavaria almost a year ago, was the quintessential Berliner, a genuine lieder leader.  And although he had long since stopped singing, I was more upset when I heard the news than I could ever have imagined I would be.  He was, quite simply, the soundtrack to my life.

I searched the obituaries for an expression of my loss from better wordsmiths than I, but found little – save the dependable music critic of The New Yorker, Alex Ross, who felt that ‘a world without Fischer-Dieskau seems foreign and unnerving’.  That almost said it for me; he was a keystone in the world of musical expression, a world of truth, dignity, humanity and nobility that is fading fast.  Listen to him here, singing Franz Schubert’s ‘Der Leiermann’, the devastating final song from the Die Winterreise cycle, Op 89, D911, with Murray Perahia at the Siemens-Villa, Berlin.  Little or no body movement; not much (obvious) facial expression; no apparent effort getting the sound out. Yet out it comes, and you are pinned to your seat.

He attained an almost mythical status quite early in his career, to the point where even the greatest artists approached him with trepidation.  Ben Britten, not particularly well known for doffing his cap to any man, was almost overcome with respect when requesting the singer’s involvement in the premiere of War Requiem in Coventry in 1962, a performance I attended.  And the great German academic-modernist Paul Hindemith, while conducting a rehearsal of his own music with DFD leaned across and whispered to him ‘You’re not a singer, you’re a bard’.  Others, less well equipped to make a judgement, went too far.  The film-maker Bruno Monsaingeon suggested in all seriousness that ‘Disliking Fischer-Dieskau is tantamount to disliking Michelangelo or Proust’;  get a grip Bruno.  But you get the picture.  How did he do it?  Try this from Dichterliebe Op 48 by Robert Schumann, performed in Salzburg in 1956.  The text is by Heinrich Heine and in ten lines over two verses unleashes a world of romantic pain in Ich grolle nicht, und wenn das Herz auch bricht: I bear no grudge, even when my heart is breaking.  I (almost) rest my case.

Unlike opera, where you can sit for hours enjoying the music and the staging without really knowing, or even caring what is going on, lieder requests, nay demands, that you pay ardent attention to the text, even if that extends to doing a bit of homework beforehand. Fischer-Dieskau’s pliant, fine textured tone emanated from a large man standing 6’3″ with an expansive (tho’ not fat) frame, and the ability to articulate naturally in any one of a dozen languages comfortably.  For 35 years a two-pack-a-day cigarette smoker, the habit miraculously never coloured his voice in any way, and one day in middle age he just stopped.  His voice was not ‘big’ in the heroic sense, but he possessed a magical ability to project his sound through even the most dense orchestral tapestry, seemingly without strain.  Here, in perhaps the greatest song of Gustav Mahler, from the Ruckert Lieder, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen(‘I am lost to the world’) the sublime voice floats over the heartbreaking orchestral texture, delivered by the 1964 Berlin Philharmonic, directed by the incomparable Karl Bohm.

Though born into a stable academic family in Berlin, Fischer-Dieskau’s youth was disfigured by the loss of an infirm brother, starved to death in Hitler’s eugenics programme, the destruction of the family home by allied bombing and, in 1963, the death of his first wife, ‘cellist Irmgard Poppen, following the birth of their third son Manuel.  He married twice more, briefly, before finding his life partner in the Hungarian soprano Julia Varady, who became his fourth wife in 1977.

When I first saw and heard him in Coventry Cathedral over 50 years ago, and with the pianist Gerald Moore several times after that, I concluded, wrongly, that because everything was delivered with so little ‘fuss’, that he must lack that last bit of soul, that makes a good singer into a great one.  But reading his memoirs recently put me straight.  Recalling the War Requiem premiere he had this to say: ‘The first performance created an atmosphere of such intensity that by the end I was completely undone; I did not know where to hide my face. Dead friends and past suffering arose in my mind’.  A soul then, but kept on a tight rein.

It seems right that we end as we began, with Franz Schubert, the composer most closely linked with this incomparable singer.   Otto Deutsch number 531 is the macabre little song from 1817, Der Tod und das Madchen (Death and the Maiden), here sung by his maiden Julia Varady in a touching excerpt from Bruno Monsaingeon’s film biography.  I doubt we will see his like again.