Music: Busy Baritone

To help quiet his preperformance jitters and tune up his musical perception, German Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau packs his luggage with a few tested literary tranquilizers: some volumes of poetry, selected detective stories, classics such as Crime and Punishment. As he wound up his third U.S. tour last week on the West Coast, nobody thought to ask him whether he was stoking his emotional fires on Donne or Dostoevsky or Dashiell Hammett. What mattered was that he was in top vocal form, and that meant that he was giving his audiences the most moving performances of German lieder to be heard in the world today.

Concert-Tour Legend. At 33, Fischer-Dieskau has become a concert-tour legend in Europe and the U.S.: almost singlehanded, he has accounted for the postwar popularity of the German art song. On his U.S. tours, he has held audiences rapt through the whole of Schubert’s song cycle Die Winterreise and through the complete Schumann Dichterliebe. He has reached an even wider public through his 40-odd LP recordings, including Hugo Wolf’s 16 Songs, Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, Brahms’s German Requiem, albums of Mahler songs.

Fischer-Dieskau is also one of the most consistently popular opera singers in Germany; aided by an imposing 6-ft. 2-in. figure, he has shaped a number of moving characterizations, e.g., Wolfram in Tannhäuser. Sir John Falstaff, and the title role in Busoni’s Doktor Faustus. Even more surprising than the scope of his success is the fact that he had no early singing experience: he took his first voice lesson when he was 16, had scarcely started to sing professionally when he was drafted into the German army. As an American prisoner of war, he made such a hit singing for his captors that he was one of the last prisoners released. Ten years ago the Berlin Municipal Opera hired him on the spot after only a brief audition. Today he is booked solid two years in advance, has turned down offers from the San Francisco Opera, Covent Garden, La Scala. He is one of the rare singers who can perform in lieder and in opera equally well. To Fischer-Dieskau, lieder are often vocally more of a challenge than opera. “In Winterreise,” he says, “you have more than an hour of emotion without pause. But the role of Amfortas in Parsifal amounts to only 35 minutes of singing.”

Spine-Tingling Blasts. There are showier, more opulent-sounding baritones than Fischer-Dieskau. But there are no singers about nowadays who use their voices with more intelligence, accuracy or theatrical effect. Fischer-Dieskau never uses his texts as excuses for mere vocal gymnastics. In the art songs of Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, he sings his way into moods alternately tragic, boisterous and nostalgic with subtle modulations of his dry, husky voice. And when at climactic moments he throws his baritone out in a high, ringing fortissimo, the effect is as spine-tingling as a trumpet blast.