Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: "The Great EMI Recordings"
Lieder by Brahms, Cornelius, Liszt, Loewe, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, Strauss, Wagner, Wolf; various arias and songs on bonus disc. Various accompanists. Notes; text provided as downloadable PDF on bonus disc. EMI B00369K29Q (11)
To honor Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's eighty-fifth birthday, EMI has reissued ten discs of remastered plums from its archive, plus a brief bonus CD. The collection glitters with many of the great lieder cycles, as well as discrete songs by eleven composers, with Schubert making up forty percent of the total. We hear from several accompanists, and the time span runs from 1951 to a 1985 item on the bonus disc. Fischer-Dieskau's thirty-five-year opera career and his work with orchestras are represented parsimoniously on the bonus disc, and we hear nothing of oratorio, his French-language work or his collaboration with many contemporary composers including Britten and Henze.
Despite these limits, the collection inevitably reveals a good deal about the nature of Fischer-Dieskau's art. He was lauded as well as chastised for the arsenal of interpretive devices that reinvigorated, or some said distorted, such a vast body of work. In parsing his famous colorist effects, based so firmly on masterful diction and poetic insight, we almost forgot that Fischer-Dieskau was blessed with a remarkable voice in its own right.
The evidence is everywhere in this collection. The magically floated mezza-voce line of Schumann's "Mondnacht" illustrates the voice's supremacy as an instrument for subtle effects, its clear focus and flexibility, and the smooth blending of registers. At his best, as in the 1962 Winterreise — among the three unbeatable Schubert cycles with Gerald Moore that grace this set — Fischer-Dieskau matches finesse with firmness, even in complex lines hurled at top speed, as in "Die Wetterfahne." In a less familiar example by Franz Liszt, there's no flinching in the bold, operatic projection, both high and low, of "Es rauschen die Winde" (1971). Both types of effect are in ideal balance in the breathtaking 1951 version of Schubert's "Du bist die Ruh."
By the 1970s, as we hear especially in some Richard Strauss items, strain set in, but only intermittently. The singer sounds remarkably energized in this collection's gripping 1978 Mahler songs with Daniel Barenboim; his Schumann sets with Alfred Brendel, not heard here, were still fresh in 1985. That idiosyncratic, tenorial upper register seems never to have deserted him, especially in soft cantilena passages. Where vocal heft is demanded, and not just for opera, one sometimes finds a combination of strain and artifice.
His admirable performance of this set's Schumann samples (including the Heine and Eichendorff Liederkreise but, sadly, no Dichterliebe) features disconcerting faked low notes, as if he were channeling some other person. In the vast range he masters for the intensely moving Brahms cycle Die Schöne Magelone (a work that often seems a commentary on Schubert), the adventurer's bravado has an artificial, almost satirical bluster.
The Brahms Vier Ernste Gesänge, daunting in their variety and depths, slip into excesses too, making one wonder whether the singer is trying too hard to make St. Paul and the Old Testament prophet into quirky, individualized stage characters. But then just try to hear these serious songs any other way. In his hands they are not sermons but the lessons of an implied character, based on experience and leaving scars. The means Fischer-Dieskau chooses to make his points can be disconcerting and obtrusive, but their impact remains indelible.
In many of the Hugo Wolf pieces, which do not form a cycle as such, the inflections do not shine gratuitously but contribute to portraits. He gives us a sprightly, confident "Musikant"; a seasoned, somewhat defiant thinker in "Heimweh"; another kind of grim survivor, the invalid in "Der Genesene an die Hoffnung"; a bouncy youth in "Der Tambour" (so different from Mahler's drummer!); maturity with chastened low expectations in the internalized "Verborgenheit"; and so on.
In one of his autobiographical works, Fischer-Dieskau mentioned his general ambition to expand the range of a work beyond its more obvious limits. He does just that, unobtrusively, in a seemingly conventional structure such as Schumann's "Berg' und Burgen schau'n herunter." He is discreet and disarmingly direct in the obscure, modest Cornelius and Loewe efforts in this collection. But at times he can overwhelm a song. He is determined to discover depths in Strauss's "Zueignung," a popular, rousing anthem that can verge on pomposity or kitsch. It succumbs to both those risks in the baritone's overpunctuated, lugubriously slow treatment.
Yet, much of the technique remains a mystery. It's hard to decide whether Fischer-Dieskau is to be preferred in closed forms such as the repeated strophic structures of Mendelssohn, Schubert and Schumann (or in the Bach and Beethoven that this EMI collection does not offer) — to which he brings his enhancing, subtle variations — or in the looser "through-composed" work of a Liszt or better yet Wolf, where his uncanny sense of phrasing bestows unifying links and echoes. Fortunately, we have both effects here in abundance, just as we can experience the most chilling drama in totally contrasting ways — hauntingly and gracefully in the Winterreise, especially the blend of tragedy and mockery in its concluding "Laiermann," or with a bang, not a whimper, in the colossal version of Mahler's "Revelge" accompanied so forcefully by Barenboim.
It's important to recall a comment from Gerald Moore's memoirs: "If I had to put my finger on the key to Fischer-Dieskau's supremacy, setting him apart from every other singer, I would say, in one word, Rhythm. This is the life-blood of music and he is master of it." Nine years later, in 1971, in his own thoughtful book Auf den Spuren der Schubert-Lieder (On the Trail of Schubert's Lieder), the baritone and polymath — who also wrote searchingly about Schumann, besides doing some conducting and painting — in turn salutes Moore, "that king of accompanists." Fischer-Dieskau stresses Moore's "essential trait of rhythmic impetus."
This mirrored compliment cannot be coincidence or an insiders' joke, although both men were famous wits; it suggests a fundamental balance, the deference to musical shape and timing as well as dramatic coloring. This shared commitment between singer and accompanist recalls another great Fischer-Dieskau trait: his devotion to music as a collaborative art, reflected in rewarding work with musicians who were great in their own right. The accompanists sampled here include, besides the indispensable Moore, undeservedly obscure names such as Hertha Klust and Karl Engel as well as the illustrious Barenboim, Wolfgang Sawallisch and Sviatoslav Richter. The capacity to be challenged and inspired by his collaborators must be one of the wellsprings of the phenomenal Fischer-Dieskau longevity, and of his titanic output.
DAVID J. BAKER
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