Who is singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau?

Hailed as the greatest ever singer of lieder, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau wowed audiences throughout the world during the second half of the twentieth century.

But how did the man from Berlin first develop his talent, and what was it that stood him apart from his contemporaries? Questions we seek to answer in this introduction to his remarkable career.

Dietrich is actually his middle name

Fischer-Dieskau was born Albert Dietrich Fischer to a family of Berlin educators, his mother, Theodora, a teacher and his father, also Albert, a school principal. The ‘Dieskau’ was only added to the family name in 1934, by his father, as a nod to his mother’s lineage; Theodora Ficher, née Klingelhoffer, was descended from the Kammerherr von Dieskau for whom Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his ‘Peasant Cantata’. But the young Dietrich’s music interest had already begun at this point; a keen singer throughout his childhood he began formal voice lessons at 16 and after secondary school he moved onto the Berlin Conservatory.

His first public performance was unexpectedly extended

In early 1943, still aged just 17, Fischer-Dieskau gave his first public performance in the town hall of Zehlendorf, a suburb of Berlin. He was to perform Schubert’s Winterreise song-cycle, but as he reached Rückblick there was an unscheduled interruption, a bombing raid by the RAF, that forced Fischer-Dieskau and his 200-strong audience into the cellar. After two-and-a-half hours the raid ceased, and performer and audience returned above ground and picked up where they left off.

He became a favourite of homesick soldiers

The Second World War ultimately interrupted more of Fischer-Dieskau’s career than just this one performance. That same year, after just one semester at the Berlin Conservatory he was drafted into the Wehrmacht, where he was initially sent to the Russian Front to tend horses. By the winter of 1944-45 he had been reassigned to the Grenadier Regiment 146 of the 65th Infantry Division in Italy and would entertain his comrades at soldiers’ evenings. Eventually captured in 1945 Fischer-Dieskau spent two years as an American prisoner of war, during which he regularly performed singing lieder to fellow homesick German prisoners of war.

He made his name in the opera

By 1948, Fischer-Dieskau was back in Berlin, making his stage debut at the City Opera as Posa in Don Carlos. As an opera singer he would go on to perform most of the major baritone roles in both Italian and German. As well as at Berlin’s City Opera, from 1949 he was also a regular performer at the Vienna State Opera and the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. In the mid-1950s he also gave notable performances of Wagner at the Bayreuth festival.

He recorded in eight different languages

His performances in German and Italian represent just a quarter of Fischer-Dieskau’s language versatility. As the musicologist Alan Blyth observed ‘Opera, Lieder and oratorio in German, Italian or English came alike to him, yet he brought to each a precision and individuality that bespoke his perceptive insights into the idiom at hand. In addition to these three, Fischer-Dieskau also recorded in French, Russian, Hebrew, Hungarian and Latin.

But in the German-language repertoire he was almost omnipresent

By the mid 1960s, Fischer-Dieskau, along with his most frequent accompanist Gerald Moore had carried out a near revolution in the world of German song. Aside from the works written specifically for a female interpreter, he recorded the complete songs of Schubert, Brahms and Richard Strauss, as well as most of those by Mozart, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt and Wolf, not to mention a large number of pieces by other composers including Bach and Henze. It was a singer of Schubert Lieder that he was perhaps most admired; here, such were the new standards he continued to set that according to critic Joachim Kaiser, Fischer-Dieskau’s only serious competitor, was himself.

He was a regular performer here at the Southbank Centre

Though he made his name in the opera halls of Central Europe his voice soon took him all over the world, including notable performances here in the UK. His first London appearance came at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the 1951 Festival of Britain, whilst his Covent Garden debut was in 1965 in a performance of Strauss’ Arabella. In between, in 1962, Fischer-Dieskau was chosen by Benjamin Britten to perform the premiere of his War Requiem at Coventry Cathedral. And he also gave several performances on our stages many of which were recorded and released. They include a 1962 performance of four works by Busoni, a 1970 recital of Mahler, a 1971 series of duets with the mezzo-sporano Janet Baker, and a ‘Homage to Gerald Moore’ a concert dedicated to his longtime accompanist, which featured Fischer-Dieskau, Moore, and the lyric sopranos Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Victoria de los Ángeles.

He was greatly influenced by the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler

In a 2005 interview with The Guardian, Fischer-Dieskau explained that Furtwängler had once told him that ‘the most important thing for a performing artist was to build up a community of love for the music with the audience, to create one fellow feeling among so many people who have come from so many different places and feelings. I have lived with that ideal all my life as a performer’. When he retired from singing in 1993 – having retired from opera 15 years earlier – Fischer-Dieskau himself took up the baton leading, among others, the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, and one of our own Resident Orchestras, the Philharmonia.

In France he was known as ‘Le miracle Fischer-Dieskau’

And you don’t need to understand much French to grasp this level of praise. The writer John Amis agreed, concluding that he was ‘a miracle and that is just about all there is to be said about it’. ‘The most influential singer of the 20th Century’, is how The Guardian’s Martin Kettle labelled him, whilst even the notoriously unsentimental critic John Steane said of Fischer-Dieskau, ‘Here is God’s plenty’. Those who performed alongside him were also in no doubt of Fischer-Dieskau’s talent; ‘He only had to sing one phrase before I knew I was in the presence of a master’, said Gerald Moore, while Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf described Fischer-Dieskau as ‘a born god who has it all’. 

He is remembered as a ‘revolutionary performer’

When Fischer-Dieskau passed away in 2012, the singer’s long-time accompanist Daniel Barenboim, described him as such in an obituary for The Guardian. Barenboim wrote of Fischer-Dieskau that ‘his greatest achievement as an artist is maybe that he has given us an answer to the eternal question ‘prima la musica vs prima le parole’? (music, or words first?) He showed us that question in itself is false: in his interpretations, he created a unity between text and music unlike few before or after him. He set the benchmark in enunciation, and he emphasised key words through changing the sound of the note on which the word was sung. Thus, he not only clarified the sense of the word, but he let every syllable and every note sound together and thereby created a unity of harmony and colours unlike anyone else.’