Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: touchstone of perfection

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau at his home in Berlin in 2011

Ivan Hewett pays tribute to the masterful German classical singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who has died aged 86.

To describe Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as a giant among post-war singers is actually an understatement. For many he was, and is, the singer of the period, and a model of what a singer of art-song should be.

He had a voice with the mysterious quality of being both instantly recognisable and a touchstone of perfection. ‘Fischer-Dieskau is a miracle and that’s all there is to be said about it’ said the writer John Amis. Of course Fischer-Dieskau had his critics. Roland Barthes famously scorned his smoothly honed sound, saying it lacked the ‘grain’ of a really memorable voice.

And yet Fischer-Dieskau was anything but bland. It was encountering Fischer-Dieskau’s recordings of Hugo Wolf’s songs that first made me aware of their colossal intensity and layers of irony. Beauty of tone may have been what the audience heard, but it was the always the meaning of he song that Fischer-Dieskau’s sights were fixed on.

The other thing that made Fischer-Dieskau unique was his sheer productivity. Artists who are admired for their ‘perfection’ are usually careful to keep their rarity value, like the pianist Michelangeli or the conductor Carlos Kleiber. Fischer-Dieskau poured out his talent unstintingly. He simply sang more operatic roles and had a greater repertoire of songs than any other baritone - around 3000 by some estimates.

He worked with numerous composers, notably Hans Werner Henze and Benjamin Britten. He sang in the premiere of Britten’s War Requiem at Coventry Cathedral in 1962, and in 1978 appeared as King Lear in Aribert’s Reimann’s opera Lear, one of several roles created specially for him.

Fischer-Dieskau’s last operatic role was Falstaff, in 1992, and he retired from the concert platform the following year. But he continued to lead a hectically busy life as lecturer and author of, among other things, a study of Nietzsche’s relationship to Wagner. In his later years he observed stoically that he was being forgotten, but the constant reissue of his recordings on CD suggests otherwise. For young singers like Ian Bostridge he is still the model to aspire to. And for those of us who love art-song, his recordings are like a companion one wants to keep for life.