{"id":3830,"date":"2012-05-18T07:49:12","date_gmt":"2012-05-18T12:49:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/?p=3830"},"modified":"2012-05-18T07:49:12","modified_gmt":"2012-05-18T12:49:12","slug":"obituary-the-great-baritone-dietrich-fischer-dieskau-dead-at-86","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2012\/05\/18\/obituary-the-great-baritone-dietrich-fischer-dieskau-dead-at-86\/","title":{"rendered":"Obituary: The great baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau dead at 86"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau with one of his favourite accompanists, Gerald Moore.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, considered to be one of the finest interpreters of German art song of the 20th century, has died in Bavaria, 10 days shy of his 87th birthday.<\/p>\n

Although he had retired from singing in 1992, for years afterward he continued to conduct and offer master classes, sharing a lifetime of insights with younger singers.<\/p>\n

Two of his most notable German pupils were baritones Thomas Quasthoff and Christian Gerhaher.<\/p>\n

His flexible, lyric voice, as much as a thick volume of the collected Lieder of Franz Schubert, were as much a part of my childhood as Pok\u00e9mon or transformers have been to others. Through his dozens of recordings of song and aria — many reinterpreted as the decades went by — he revealed the magical depths and possibilities behind each printed note.<\/p>\n

The singer’s repertoire covered the full two-and-a-half centuries of German art song. He also sang opera, but rarely outside his home country.<\/p>\n

This singer worked best without a set or costumes.<\/p>\n

Fischer-Dieskau would conjure entire scenes of love, abandon and grief with a toolbox of inflections, pauses and breaths that he came to wield as a master craftsman and artist.<\/p>\n

In his memoirs, Gerald Moore, the equally legendary piano accompanist of the 20th century, wrote of Fischer-Dieskau: “He had only to sing one phrase before I knew I was in the presence of a master.”<\/p>\n

The singer’s childhood experiences no doubt had an influence on the power of his artistry.<\/p>\n

His first public recital, of Schubert’s Winterreise<\/em>, was cut short by an Allied bombing raid on Berlin, in 1943. He was 17.<\/p>\n

As he told the Guardian<\/em> in an interview several years ago, “the whole audience of 200 people and myself had to go into the cellar for two-and-a-half hours. Then when the raid was over we came back up and resumed.”<\/p>\n

He even remembered where the break had occurred: “It was ‘R\u00fcckblick’ (Backward Glance), so we looked back to the part already completed.”<\/p>\n

Drafted into the German army along with any man with the strength to march and carry a gun, Fischer-Dieskau spent the last two years as an Allied prisoner of war — and entertained his fellow inmates with Lieder recitals.<\/p>\n

Fischer-Dieskau no doubt had a chance to put many of his war experiences into perspective when Benjamin Britten invited him in 1962 to sing in the premiere of the War Requiem<\/em> at Coventry Cathedral, which had been destroyed by German bombs during the war.<\/p>\n

The baritone graced pretty much every storied concert hall in the world, and woked with all the great conductors. His favourite was Wilhelm Furtw\u00e4ngler, in whom he found a kindred flame of musical humanity.<\/p>\n

“He once said to me 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,” Fischer-Dieskau told an interviewer. “I have lived with that ideal all my life as a performer.”<\/p>\n

The book of Schubert Lieder is at my mother’s. When I last visited, in March, I started playing my way through — and the voice that attached itself to the songs in my mind was Fischer-Dieskau’s.<\/p>\n

Lucky are all the people who have been able to experience the same associations over the past 70 years.<\/p>\n

He is survived by his fourth wife, Julia Varady and three sons, including conductor Martin Fischer-Dieskau, who had a tumultuous two-year tenure with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony.<\/p>\n

Here are two clips: Schubert’s Im Fr\u00fchling<\/em> (In Spring), with pianist Sviatoslav Richter in 1978, and Gustav Mahler’s Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen<\/em> (I have let go of the world), with conductor Riccardo Chailly and the Berlin Radio Symphony in 1989:<\/p>\n