His singing helps us understand the poets better – Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was born one hundred years ago

The name Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, whose 100th birthday falls on May 28th, stands for the most universal singer in the history of German music and one of the outstanding musical personalities of the 20th century. He himself would have been shocked by such hymn-like words. For although he was aware of his rank, he always saw himself as nothing more than a servant of music. "We are laborers in the Lord's vineyard and nothing more." He once said this in an interview when asked about the relationship between the performer and the composer. He is nothing more than a "recreator."

Despite his international renown, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was never a "star" seeking to showcase his voice and singing personality at the vanity fair. His relentless self-criticism prevented him from doing so. He once revealed to this author in a conversation that he was never truly satisfied with himself once in his long career. Since he was never happy with himself, he usually disappeared immediately after a performance. Being cheered and showered with compliments at premieres and other events was never his thing.

Not shy of people, but always shy of publicity. Only in a small circle of trusted music lovers was he able to truly open up and be communicative. Thus, he never became popular in a superficial sense. The self-promotion rituals common today among media-seduced artists remained alien to him. He came from an old musical nobility who, unlike the parvenu, don't need to flaunt themselves.

He came from an educated middle-class family with several musicians in its ranks. In 1742, Johann Sebastian Bach dedicated the " Peasant Cantata " BWV 212 to an ancestor, the Elector of Saxony's chamberlain Carl Heinrich von Dieskau. His father, Privy Councillor Dr. Albert Fischer-Dieskau, the Berlin senior school director, was the founder of the Zehlendorf Gymnasium; a street there is still named after him today.

Fischer-Dieskau inherited his father's stature: a didactic inclination that was expressed not only in his teaching—especially in his master classes and his books—but also in the structure of his song programs and in his anthological collecting. In everything he sang, wrote, and spoke, one sensed the ethos of his family's educational tradition; indeed, something German and masterly—despite all his cosmopolitan openness—characterized this universally educated artist, who was also a remarkable painter and portraitist.

He was married to the great Mozart and Verdi singer Julia Varady for 35 years. It was Puccini's one-act opera "Il Tabarro" at the Munich National Theater – conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch, and Günther Rennert staged the haunting production – that became a love story for both of them, in stark contrast to the tragic plot. Their joint performances and recordings represented highlights for many years, especially of Munich's operatic life.

Fischer-Dieskau's unprecedented singing career began in 1947, barely having returned from captivity. In January 1948, while still a student of Hermann Weissenborn, he first sang Schubert's "Winterreise" for the RIAS. That same year, he was engaged by the Berlin Municipal Opera, where he sang two roles with which his name remained closely associated: Marquis Posa in Verdi's "Don Carlo" and Wolfram in Wagner's "Tannhäuser," with whom he made his Bayreuth debut in 1952. From then on, things followed one after the other: in 1949, the first recording of Brahms's "Four Serious Songs," guest performances at the Munich and Vienna State Operas, and in 1951, Mahler's "Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen" at the Salzburg Festival under the direction of Wilhelm Furtwängler.

Within a few years, his career took him to all the world's major opera houses, festivals, and concert centers, with Berlin and Munich soon becoming the focal points of his work, the two cities in which he resided alternately until his death in 2012. Munich and its surroundings—his idyllic house in Berg am Starnberger See—increasingly became his true home. From 1954, he played Mandryka at the Prinzregententheater, alongside the Swiss Lisa della Casa as Arabella, forming a dream couple for the Munich Opera. From the very first day—the opening premiere of "Frau ohne Schatten" on November 21, 1963—he was a pillar of the Bavarian State Opera at the rebuilt Nationaltheater.

After the war, Fischer-Dieskau embodied a better Germany in the eyes of the world like no other musician. As the 20th century's foremost song interpreter, whose repertoire included some three thousand songs by about one hundred composers, his performances restored the innocence of the Nazi-desecrated German language, especially to the ears of many foreign listeners.

The number of his recordings—probably close to half a thousand—makes him the absolute king of the music industry in the history of this medium and of sound recording. The fact that, despite his time-consuming work in the recording studio and his countless concert and opera engagements, he found the leisure to publish more than ten books can only be explained by his exemplary life discipline. No other singer has been honored with as many worldly honors, medals, and honorary doctorates as he has. In 1980, he received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, which is often compared to the Nobel Prize.

Fischer-Dieskau's repertoire encompassed virtually everything a lyric baritone could sing on the operatic stage and in concert, spanning all eras of music history from Heinrich Schütz to Wolfgang Rihm, and always with notorious stylistic confidence. A distinguished list of important composers drew inspiration from his works. Among them—to name just two outstanding examples—Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem" (1962), whose lyric texts Fischer-Dieskau himself translated into German; and Aribert Reimann's "Lear" (1978). Four years later, in the brilliant world premiere of the opera by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, he appeared for the last time alongside Julia Varady on the Munich opera stage.

An alphabetical list alone of the composers whose works Fischer-Dieskau premiered offers a representative piece of music history in the second half of the last century: Samuel Barber, Boris Blacher, Benjamin Britten, Luigi Dallapiccola, Gottfried von Einem, Wolfgang Fortner, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Hans Werner Henze, Ernst Krenek, Witold Lutoslawski, Siegfried Matthus, Aribert Reimann, Wolfgang Rihm, Igor Stravinsky, Michael Tippett, Isang Yun.

After 45 years, he ended his unique singing career at the Bavarian State Opera's New Year's Eve concert in 1992 with the final scene of "Falstaff" and the chanted motto "Tutto nel mondo è burla." It was a memorable concert in several respects, with which Fischer-Dieskau's longtime musical companion and friend Wolfgang Sawallisch bid farewell to the Bavarian State Opera after a quarter of a century. It was hosted by Loriot, Lucia Popp made what was likely her final appearance, Julia Varady sang Beethoven's "Ah perfido!" – and Fischer-Dieskau, although in brilliant form once again in one of his life's roles, spontaneously decided to stop singing from then on. Nevertheless, he has repeatedly stepped into the spotlight as a conductor, pianist, and above all as a reciter.

However, he consistently stuck to his decision to retire. Only on a CD he conducted, featuring Wagner recordings by Julia Varady, also recorded at the Bavarian State Opera, did he sing a few bars of Wolfram von Eschenbach's work himself. And at the Salzburg Festival, where he conducted the "German Requiem," a few years before his death, he sang the baritone part again in the dress rehearsal of the work, as the scheduled Thomas Hampson had to perform Don Giovanni in the Grosses Festspielhaus at the same time. The recording director, Gottfried Kraus, reported that tears streamed down his cheeks: "There he really sang, as if no time had passed, with the same voice the part in which I had first heard him fifty years earlier under Furtwängler."

Fischer-Dieskau never wanted to be just a singer, never just a musician. Literature was his passion almost as much as music. The love affair between poetry and music was the pivotal point of his artistic work, his thinking, and his writing. This is demonstrated by the themes of his books, which span a remarkable cosmos of music history, from Schubert to Schumann, Brahms, and Hugo Wolf to Debussy. His first monograph, "On the Trail of Schubert's Songs" (1971), was the first comprehensive examination of the textual material that became music in his vast oeuvre of songs.

This, as well as his books on Reichardt (1992) and Zelter (1997), repeatedly shines a light on Goethe as a guiding star. As a musical interpreter of the most frequently set poet in world literature, Fischer-Dieskau himself co-wrote (or sang along with) a piece of Goethe's impact. He has also dedicated comprehensive monographs to all of Goethe's major composers, from Reichardt to Wolf. In 2006, he published a biography of Goethe, a man of the theater, in the context of his time. It is the only one of his books in which Fischer-Dieskau leaves the realm of music—no wonder, since for him, Goethe was, to use Shakespeare's own words, the "star of the most beautiful heights."

He repeatedly refuted the myth that what was new about his singing was that he placed melody at the service of the word. This has been asserted both positively and critically, the latter, for example, in a highly curious polemic against Fischer-Dieskau, which, after all, was written by one of the most influential intellectuals of our time. It has the slight disadvantage, however, that its author had too little understanding of singing and, above all, barely spoke German, which led him to make serious errors. This polemic is by Roland Barthes and is entitled "Le grain de la voix." It even sparked a veritable philological debate in Germany.

In his book "Tones Speak, Words Ring" and elsewhere, Fischer-Dieskau has made it clear that the boastful or polemical claim that he placed melody at the service of the word is a false dialectic. Employing melody for textual interpretation would necessarily miss the text, he emphasized. Setting it to music would reveal layers of meaning that would be buried by the priority given to verbal declamation.

Nevertheless, there has probably never been a singer whose lieder also promoted the understanding of poetry as significantly as Fischer-Dieskau. The fact that we read Eduard Mörike, whose novella "Mozart on the Journey to Prague" was one of Fischer-Dieskau's most beloved repertoire pieces, differently and more deeply today than we did half a century ago is not least due to his interpretation of Hugo Wolf's musical settings, which also explore the text incomparably.

The greater a personality, the further their shadows fall—the shadows of criticism, polemics, envy, even hatred. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was not spared from these either—but where there is no shadow, there is no greatness. For a long time, especially in Munich, people played the parlor game of pitting Hermann Prey against him—the naive against the sentimental in Schiller's sense. Even though their inner relationship was certainly not always free of tension, joint appearances between the two, for example in "Figaro" and "Così fan tutte," were among the magical moments in late 20th-century opera history.

But not only polemics and envy, but also anecdotes adorn the life and work of a great artist. One is recounted here as a cheerful ending, just as Fischer-Dieskau himself cheerfully concluded his singing career with Verdi's "Tutto nel mondo è burla." During a rehearsal of the St. Matthew Passion, a disagreement arose between him and Otto Klemperer regarding the tempo at the passage "My soul is sorrowful even to death." The next day, the singer reported to the conductor that he had dreamed of Johann Sebastian Bach during the night, and that Bach had completely shared his opinion regarding the tempo of the passage in question.

Another day later, Klemperer calls Fischer-Dieskau and tells him in his characteristic high-pitched voice and crooked mouth: "I also dreamed about Johann Sebastian Bach last night. And then it came out: He doesn't even know you!"