Fischer-Dieskau
and Me
by Celia Sgroi
State University of New York College at Oswego
It's not unusual for new lawyers to struggle and lack
confidence. Most of them get over it, and some become very good lawyers. What I
found out very rapidly is that the practice of law did not suit my temperament
at all. I didn't like the conflict and the adversarial nature of the law, and I
didn't like most of my clients. "A lawyer is not a social worker," my
father told me soon after I went to work with him, and he was right. Law is not
a helping profession. Many people come to terms with this sooner or later. I
couldn't and wasn't sure I wanted to.
It occurred to me that life might be easier if I got out of
private practice and went to work for one of the many government agencies that
employ lawyers, but then I would be letting my father down, and I didn't want
to do that. However, things are not always as they seem. In the nearly four
years between the time my father suggested that I become a lawyer and join him
in his practice and the time I actually did so, things had changed with him,
too. He was now in his early sixties and thinking very seriously of retirement.
When we finally got all this straightened out, both of us were relieved, and I
set about the task of looking for a different kind of job. One of the first
things I did was send a letter to the Oswego County District Attorney inquiring
whether he had any openings for Assistant D.A.'s. I didn't really want to be a
prosecutor, but letting someone else pay while I gained experience as a lawyer
didn't seem like a bad idea. When my father pointed out that in Oswego County
the D.A. was also the coroner, that dampened my enthusiasm more than a little,
but the letter was already sent by that time.
I got a very prompt reply from the District Attorney. He
called and said that he did not have any openings in his office but that he had
been impressed by my resume and had forwarded it to a faculty member at SUNY
Oswego, where they were searching for someone to teach full-time in their
Public Justice program, in which the D.A. taught Criminal Law as an adjunct
professor. I thanked him and forgot about it until I received a call from the Public
Justice program coordinator at SUNY Oswego, asking if I would be willing to be
interviewed for a teaching position. Given that I had started out wanting to
teach, I agreed to be interviewed.
At about the same time, I was offered the job of part-time
law clerk to the Oswego County Family Court judge, which I promptly accepted.
Doing research and drafting opinions suited me a lot better than banging heads
with unruly clients. I had barely started my work for the Family Court when I
was asked to interview for the college teaching job. What the folks at SUNY
Oswego wanted was someone who could teach a basic Introduction to Law course
that focused on non-criminal law and, most importantly, someone who could teach
comparative legal systems. I didn't know anything about comparative legal
systems, but one thing a lawyer learns very quickly is not to turn down work--I
could learn about the subject, couldn't I? And there was more than a month
before I had to teach it, wasn't there? No problem. I can do it, I told the
interviewers, and they chose to believe me. The salary wasn't very high, but
they didn't object to my keeping the part-time clerkship, so I accepted the job
and became a teacher after all, even though I still wasn't exactly sure what
Public Justice was supposed to be.
So, in the Fall of 1980, I began my career as an instructor
at SUNY Oswego, which I juggled with my clerkship. I won't try to say that it
was easy, but I could feel the difference immediately. In the practice of law,
everything had felt alien, whereas I took to the life of a college faculty
member quite naturally. And even though my students had some traits in common
with many of my former clients (especially the criminals and the bankrupts), it
was a totally different relationship, and teaching was an activity that I
enjoyed.
For a time I was so absorbed in my new jobs that I didn't
quite notice that no F-D recitals were being announced. When several years went
by, however, I became alarmed. At first I assumed that the worst had happened and
that he had decided to retire and devote himself to conducting, but that didn't
seem to be the case. At this time, I was too busy and too short of money to
think seriously of traveling to Europe to hear F-D sing, and there were still
records to listen to, so I reconciled myself to doing without live FiDi for a
while.
However, things were not very calm on the FiDi front around
then. After years of being every critic's favorite baritone, Fischer-Dieskau
was coming in for a great deal of negative comment. At first, I found this very
hard to take, especially the ad hominem character of much that was written. The
criticisms were of two different kinds, however, those that expressed
displeasure with F-D's current recordings and those that expressed displeasure
with his entire approach to singing and everything about him. While I hated and
was distressed by the latter, I more or less went to school on the former. The
fact was that the critics were describing phenomena I could hear myself. Yes,
the voice was in decline. Yes, there was far too much barking and snarling
going on. Yes, he was picking songs apart and overemphasizing words and
syllables to the detriment of the music. I could hear those things, but I
didn't know how to evaluate them. I wasn't really familiar with the concept of
vocal crisis, but I guess I recognized one when I heard it. Was this the end,
then?
This raised another question that I had considered briefly
in the past but never really dealt with: Was I a Lieder fan or merely a
Fischer-Dieskau fan? If the former, then life would go on after F-D's
retirement, even if I would miss him greatly. If the latter, I would either
have to sit home with my recordings or be out of business all together. I had
occasionally attended live recitals by other singers, although I was never
willing to go to the extreme lengths that I routinely went to to hear F-D. Due
to a relative lack of funds, however, I had rarely bought recordings by other
Lieder singers. There were a few exceptions. I had a wonderful recording of
Elly Ameling and Joerg Demus performing Schubert Lieder, including "Der
Hirt auf dem Felsen." When Ameling sang "Die Vögel,"
which I only knew from hearing Fischer-Dieskau, I had to laugh out loud. So,
that's the way Schubert had intended this song to sound-- a light, silvery
voice floating over the fluttering bird wings in the piano part! When F-D sang
it, the birds sounded like a 757 trying to land. I also had Janet Baker singing
Schubert on LP, the collection that has just been re-issued on CD. Again, she
sang some of the songs I had come to know through Fischer-Dieskau in new and
enlightening ways. I loved the way F-D sang "Die Götter
Griechenlands," for instance, but I loved Baker, too. Another LP I had
bought featured Brigitte Fassbaender singing a collection of
"Zigeunerlieder" by various composers. Some of the songs were of
little interest to me, but the voice appealed to me at once. Conversely, I had
tried Elisabeth Schwarzkopf but just couldn't get anywhere with her. She seemed
to make a practice of the nitpicking that was causing me such distress in the
later F-D performances, and I just couldn't warm up to her.
You will notice that I haven't mentioned any male singers.
That was a bit more difficult. When baritones sang the same Lieder repertoire
as Fischer-Dieskau, they rarely pleased me. On the other hand, I liked Peter
Schreier in the Schumann duets collection with F-D and Varady and was willing
to listen to him sing Lieder, even though it was not the most attractive tenor
voice I had ever heard. I tried Fritz Wunderlich, but I just couldn't accept
him as a singer of Lieder. It was a gorgeous voice, and I loved him as Tamino
in Die Zauberflöte,
for instance, and there was a popular song collection of his that I nearly wore
out on LP, but in Lieder he seemed too uninvolved and superficial. Although I
liked Peter Schreier, I couldn't get anywhere with Peter Pears. The voice
repelled me, and his approach to Schubert (even though I had read enormous
praise of the Pears-Britten Schubert performances) just didn't work for me.
I struggled with all these matters, but I really didn't
have to reach a conclusion as long as our FiDi continued to sing, even though
he insisted on doing it far away from me. I did notice that the negative
criticisms were nearly always reactions to recordings rather than live
performances. Maybe if one just avoided the recordings that continued to pour
forth, everything would be okay. And there were other FiDi matters of interest
during that time. In 1981, Kenneth Whitton published Dietrich
Fischer-Dieskau: Mastersinger. I read it with great interest, of course,
and no little amusement. And I thought I was a fan!! I shook my head
over the uncritical nature of much of what Whitton wrote, at the same time that
I envied him all the live F-D performances he had experienced and the
professional contact with F-D associated with his translation of F-D's Schubert
book and other projects. And it occurred to me that, although Whitton claimed
F-D as a "friend," he really seemed to know little more about F-D's
private life than I did.
I should mention that I had read F-D's Schubert book
and liked it a lot, as well as the Wagner and Nietzsche book, which I
didn't like so much. The thing that bothered me about both books was the
unscholarly way F-D handled his sources. I was enough of an academic to want
footnotes, if nothing else. I know the books are not intended to be scholarly
works in that sense, but in fact I wasn't sure what they were supposed to be,
other than to demonstrate that F-D had a strong interest in biography. This
impression continued with F-D's book about Schumann. I also asked myself how
this man found the time to write any books at all with all the other work he
did. For someone struggling to teach and write, this was a vexing question.
In 1985, I found myself reading the increasingly
distressing exchange between Will Crutchfield and Conrad L. Osborne that
appeared in Opus, in "honor" of F-D's 60th birthday. This was
as much a debate about criticism as it was about Fischer-Dieskau, but he took
quite a beating in the process. Not surprisingly, I agreed more with
Crutchfield than with Osborne, but I didn't entirely diasgree with Osborne
either. Some of what he said about F-D made sense to me, even though I hated
the snippy tone of what he wrote. And I agreed wholeheartedly with Crutchfield
when he pointed out that Osborne's writing style was the functional equivalent
of F-D's singing style, which Osborne so deplored. One for our side!, I
thought, but still found it fascinating that one could deplore in others what
one might not even recognize in oneself.
By 1987, when Fischer-Dieskau's memoirs, Nachklang,
appeared, I was a tenured associate professor in the Department of Public
Justice at SUNY Oswego. I had spent almost four years (1983-1986) as Assistant
to the President for Legal Affairs and Employee Relations, but I had continued
to teach at least one course per semester during that time and was very active
in departmental affairs. Now I was back to being a full-time faculty member and
enjoying it immensely after the rough waters of the President's office. Nachklang
appealed to me from the first moment. I know it aggravates many people because
it is not a conventional autobiography or memoir. With the exception of the
first few chapters, it is not organized chronologically, but rather by
theme--memories of conductors, of singer colleagues, of composers, etc., and
even in those chapters things jump around from year to year in a rather
alarming way. I recall one critic noting with amazement that the description of
the death of F-D's first wife, Irmgard Poppen, surfaces in a discussion of
Benjamin Britten. Some of the critical objections, like the fellow who wrote a
review for the New York Times Book Review section, who complained that F-D's
memoirs were not on the same literary level as Nabakov's, or the other reviewer
who suggested that the book would have been more interesting as an "as
told to" work, I dismissed with nothing more than exasperation, but the
organizational question was more serious. Why did Nachklang look the way
it did? Actually the key to the matter is contained in the introduction, in
which F-D said quite explicitly that he regarded Nachklang not as a
conventional memoir, but as a book about memory. And that is what you get:
Memories bring to light other memories, and each chapter is a chain of
associations. This is, of course, how memory works. Most of the time, people
treat these memory "loops" as raw material to reorganize into other
forms, but F-D chose to leave them pretty much the way they were. It is, in a
very literal sense, a book of memories.
There were a great many other things about Nachklang
that interested me. For one thing, I found the early chapters, in which F-D
recalls his childhood and growing up in the Third Reich, fascinating and
enlightening. Here was a shy and lonely child who lived, in large part, in a
self- contructed world populated by images and characters from literature,
music, and painting, a child who thought he was ugly and that everybody was
repelled by him, who wanted acclaim and validation. The stories of his youthful
efforts to attract girls, which always ended in failure, were told with the
gentle irony of distance, but were revealing nonetheless. And the struggle with
the guilt associated with Nazism, the feeling of needing to atone for crimes
committed in his name as a German, said much about the way he acted as an adult
artist. In addition, I found the stories about the rebuilding of artistic life
in Germany after the collapse of the country at the end of World War II
fascinating. F-D is a good storyteller (orally, not just in writing) and the
era comes alive in his recollections in Nachklang. All of this fueled a
curiosity I had had for some time about how F-D had developed as an artist. How
did a person become a Fischer-Dieskau? And from that, how did any person become
an artist of stature? One way this curiosity manifested itself was in my search
for very early recordings of Fischer-Dieskau. I wanted to know what he sounded
like from as close to day one as possible, to be able to understand what came
afterwards.
Around the same time, Wolf-Eberhard von Lewinski published
a little book about Fischer-Dieskau that consisted mainly of interviews, or
"conversations" with F-D about a range of subjects pertaining to
F-D's art, career, and interests. As had been the case with Nachklang,
these conversations revealed a face of Fischer-Dieskau with which I was not
familiar, especially his humor, his irony, and his strongly held, at times
aggressively argued, often unconventional, opinions about art. For those of us
who wondered, as Gerald Moore once put it, "what manner of man this
phenomenon was," these works were a goldmine of information and
impressions.
And at about the same time came the announcement that
Fischer-Dieskau would be returning to New York to give, among other
engagements, three Lieder recitals at Carnegie Hall. The concerts were offered
as a kind of mini-subscription, and I bought tickets to all three. As the
concerts in the spring of 1988 approached, I found myself wondering what I was
going to hear and feeling some real apprehension.
The Fischer-Dieskau Lieder recitals I heard in the spring
of 1988 took place on a Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, March 22nd, 24th, and
27th. I traveled to New York on the Tuesday and returned to Oswego on Friday,
then flew back to New York with a friend to hear the Sunday performance, which
was at 4 PM, and returned to Oswego that evening. I don't recall whether SUNY
Oswego was on spring break at the time or whether I just blew off a few days of
classes.
The recitals I was to hear had been preceded by a
performance of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder with the New York Philharmonic
under Sinopoli, which garnered a positive review from the New York Times. That
was encouraging, because certainly the evidence of recent recordings suggested
that "past his prime" was a generous description of F-D's present
vocal estate. I confess to being nearly as nervous the evening of the first of
these concerts as I was the first time I ever heard F-D.
I had unusually good seats for this series, Row E, in a
perfect location. That had suggested to me that tickets had perhaps not sold as
well for this series of F-D concerts as in the past, and a look at the hall
that first evening confirmed it. Carnegie Hall was well-filled, but it was not
packed, as it had always been before. Eight years is a long time to be away,
and no doubt others had been reading the negative reviews as well.
The first concert was an all-Schumann recital. When
Fischer-Dieskau came out onto the stage, I was astonished by his expression.
The man looked anxious, even a bit scared, as if he wasn't sure what his
reception would be like. He was greeted by an enormous wave of applause, and
the look of relief was plain to see. The opening group of three songs to poems
by Rueckert was a little subdued, but then, F-D was always a bit of a slow
starter at recitals, which is why I have always been amazed that he used to
make a practice of beginning Schubert recitals with "Erlkönig."
He must have done some extra warming up on those evenings. The second
group, two songs to poems by Lenau, started with a beautiful "Meine
Rose," and the final group of the first half consisted of three Heine
songs: "Balsatzar," "Es leuchtet meine Liebe," and
"Die beiden Grenadiere." By that time, the old Fischer-Dieskau was
very much in evidence and the audience was applauding wildly. The second half
of the concert started with four songs to poems by Hans Christian Andersen
followed by two Eichendorff songs, "Der Einsiedler," which has always
been a particular favorite of mine, and "Der Schatzgräber."
The final group consisted of Geibel songs, ending with "Der
Contrabandiste." F-D ripped through this last number with remarkable
flexibility and control for a 63-year-old singer and ended with a triumphant
grin, as if to say, "See? I can still do it!" The audience agreed and
erupted into prolonged cheers and ovations.
I can't tell you how happy and relieved I was. It was a
grand concert, and my hero was still intact and riding high. Moreover, F-D
looked wonderful, and though he may not have sounded as he did in his prime, he
displayed more than enough voice and technique to do what he wanted to do. For
years I had been hearing all sorts of dire rumors about the bad state of his
health. He certainly didn't look ill that evening; in fact, he was positively
blooming. Why didn't I remember what a handsome man he is? I found myself
wondering. Nevertheless, I had still witnessed something I had never expected
to see. F-D had looked so worried at the beginning of that concert, revealing a
vulnerability that I had simply not expected. I had been listening to
Fischer-Dieskau and had been the most devoted of fans for over twenty years,
and yet, for the first time, I think, I asked myself some disturbing questions.
Could it be that performing like this is difficult for him? Could it be that
he's scared when he has to do this? Could it be that, at some level at least,
he's not confident about the outcome?
As purely a listener, a member of an audience, be it for a
live or a recorded performance, I had no conception of what it took to do what
Fischer-Dieskau had just done. I knew as a teacher that my
"performances" in the classroom varied considerably, depending on how
well-prepared I was, how I felt that day, whether the material I was teaching
really engaged me, what sort of response I got from the students in the class.
I knew that those things were factors that must affect how a singer does what
he or she does. But not Fischer-Dieskau, surely. He was not an ordinary mortal
like me, or was he? I think it was then that my relationship with
Fischer-Dieskau entered a new phase, beginning with the recognition that he was
a human being, as I was, not a musical abstraction captured on vinyl, that he
was not perfect and never had been, and that actually the gulf between
Fischer-Dieskau, the idol, and Celia Sgroi, the devoted fan, was not so great
as I had once imagined.
Don't ask me why it took twenty-three years for me to realize
this. In the early days of my infatuation, fandom, whatever the correct term
is, I think it was important to me that Fischer-Dieskau should be perfect. He
should be a being apart from ordinary mortals, someone who could always be
relied upon to be at his best--never tired, never out of sorts, never achieving
less than the very best. And the early Lieder recordings I listened to seemed
to confirm that impression. They were F-D in his prime, at the height of his
powers, seemingly able to do whatever he wanted with no effort at all. I had
neither the will, nor the knowledge, nor the experience to see behind the
"perfection" that came to me from the recordings, much less to
recognize that it wasn't perfection at all. Why are we so obsessed with things
being perfect anyway? I truly don't know. It's a question for the philosophers,
I guess. I do know that as I got older, I gradually became aware that I
was never going to be perfect, that I had never met a person who was. But F-D
remained perfect in my eyes for a long time after that, perhaps because I
didn't know him and it was easy for him to stay an abstract ideal who would
never disappoint me.
But then, of course, had come the sobering-up period with
the obviously less-than-perfect (more accurately, nowhere-near-perfect)
recordings and the critical discussions about "what's wrong with
Fischer-Dieskau" to cast a different light on matters. I suppose at that
point I had several choices of response. For one thing, I could simply ignore
what I was hearing and reading and stand steadfast in my fandom, denying that
there was anything wrong with my idol. For another, I could reject him, the
once-perfect idol who had proven not to be perfect, and find some other object
for my devotion. I had moments of wavering toward the former, but the latter
never even crossed my mind. FiDi and I were in this for the long haul, for some
reason, and I wasn't going to abandon him now. Of course, the other possibility
was that I could do some reassessing, some further growing up, perhaps, and
recognize that human beings may strive for perfection but we never reach it,
even though there are individual moments, accomplishments, works of art that
seem like perfection to those of us with less ability and skill. If I were
still a religious person, which I am not, I guess I would believe, as Catholics
do, that God is perfect, but even in my wildest excesses of fandom I never
mistook Fischer-Dieskau for God.
I had already worked my way through most of this before
that concert on March 22, 1998, but somehow it all crystallized for me that
evening. It was a relief, an incredibly liberating feeling, and I also felt
free to really like Fischer-Dieskau instead of just admiring him. How do you
like an abstraction?
The remaining two concerts were very satisfying indeed. For
the second one, the Mahler recital, the hall was noticeably fuller than for the
first. This was the first time I had ever heard Fischer-Dieskau sing Mahler in
a live recital, although I had cherished several of his Mahler recordings for
years. The program was devoted to Lieder from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Not
for the first time, I admired F-D's program architecture. The first songs,
including "Kuckucks Ablösung
im Sommer," were relatively light in mood, even whimsical, but then the mood
darkened abruptly with a group that ended with "Das irdische Leben."
The final song of the first half, however, flowed back to gentle irony with
"Des Antonius von Padua Fisch- Predigt." The second half followed a
similar pattern, starting with dark, dramatic songs like "Wo die schönen
Trompeten blasen," “Revelge," "Zu Strassburg auf der
Schanz," and "Das Lied des Verfolgten im Turm," and ending with
lighter, more humorous songs like "Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht?",
"Um schlimme Kinder artig zu machen," and "Selbstgefühl."
Perhaps it was the passage of time, perhaps it was that I was sitting in a
location that allowed me to see all Fischer-Dieskau's facial expressions
clearly, but I am sure I never appreciated how funny he can be until that
evening. To quote that song Barbara Streisand used to sing, F-D has more faces
than all the Barrymores put together, and he used a good many of them that
night. From where I sat, they did not seem in the least overdone. In the second
half of the concert, during "Revelge," there was a little mishap.
About two-thirds of the way through the song a string in the piano snapped.
Fischer-Dieskau and Hartmut Höll
carried on to the end of the song without stopping, with the string rattling
around in the piano with a grotesque percussive sound that was rather
well-suited to the song being sung. Once the song came to an end, there was a
pause while the damage was assessed and repairs were effected. Fischer-Dieskau
did not seem in the least fazed by the interruption. Hartmut Höll
raised the lid of the piano fully, and the two of them, Mutt and Jeff, peered
into the depths of the piano together and discussed the matter. Then a
technical person was summoned to cut out the offending string with an
impressive pair of wire cutters. While this was going on, someone yelled
something from the audience. F-D inclined his head, indicating that he had not
caught what the person had said, so it was repeated. "Sue Steinway!"
Fischer-Dieskau grinned and raised his eyebrows, while the techie with the wire
cutters glowered. Once the repair was completed, Fischer-Dieskau continued the
program as if nothing had happened.
I went back to Oswego the next morning in a state of great
ebullience. A friend of mine, then the chairman of the English Department at SUNY
Oswego, accompanied me back to New York on Sunday for the final recital of the
series. This concert was devoted to Moerike songs by Hugo Wolf. I have to
confess that Wolf is among my less favorite song composers. According to F-D,
George Szell once said to him after a concert, "How can you allow yourself
to sing this stuff, Dieter? It isn't music!" I'm with George Szell on this
one, but if you have to listen to Hugo Wolf, the Mörike
Lieder are about as good as it gets. For me, a major problem with Wolf is that
when he tries to be funny, he usually isn't nearly as funny as he thinks he is.
The first half of the program started with some songs I really do like, most
notably "In der Frühe,"
"Fussreise," and "Denk es, O Seele!". The middlepoint of
the first half was a hair-raising "Der Feuerreiter." F-D has recorded
this song several times. There is a version from the mid 1960's that I like
pretty well, but I generally think he overdoes it a bit. When he sang the song
in concert, he did a good deal more "acting" than he usually did. It
was effective, but it relied a heavily on extramusical means to make its
points. In contrast, the "Storchenbotschaft" that closed the first
half achieved its effect solely through F-D's voice and extraordinarily
expressive face. The second half of the concert began with a series of love
songs and ended with humor--"Zur Warnung" and "Abschied."
Frankly, I don't think "Zur Warnung" is very funny when anyone sings
it. However, F-D's facial expressions and body language were priceless. He
stood next to the piano, his body leaning ever so slightly to one side, his
eyes narrowed, his face set in an expression that anticipated the worst, and
kept swallowing painfully, the perfect picture of someone about to barf all
over the place. I thought the audience would lay an egg. Maybe that's what it
takes to get a laugh with this song. It worked for me on this occasion anyway.
In "Abschied," which I really think is a funny song, F-D, Schadenfreude
incarnate, projected such enjoyment as the critic was kicked down the stairs
that it was infectious, but the audience, astonishingly well-behaved, held its
applause until the waltz came to its triumphant end, then broke into thunderous
applause and bravos.
These concerts sent me home with a lot of things to think
about and a renewed optimism that I would be hearing F-D again before he
retired. A further concert was announced for November 1989, but I began to
question whether I wanted to wait that long to hear him again. Leafing through
the pages of Opera News in the spring of 1989, my eye felt on an
advertisement for Great Performance Tours. A picture of F-D decorated an
announcement of a tour to the Munich Opera Festival in the summer of 1989. Why
not, I thought, I have the money, and it's in the summer when I'm not teaching.
So I sent away for further information about the tour.
The fact that the fairly expensive opera tour didn't faze
me much was a sign that things were going well for me professionally and
financially, and I was beginning to feel a certain entitlement to selected
aspects of the "good life," like taking off to Munich to hear
Fischer-Dieskau, if that is what I wanted to do. By this time, I was chairman
of a growing academic department and feeling quite a woman of substance. So,
the woman of substance got out her checkbook and went to Europe.
A pleasant and useful byproduct of this entire venture was
that I would not only hear Fischer-Dieskau but several live operas. Aside from
the occasional trip to Syracuse or the single opera production put on in Oswego
every year by Oswego Opera Theatre, I hadn't paid much attention to live opera
in a good long while. A particular attraction of this opera tour was that Julia
Varady was scheduled to sing Donna Anna in the Don Giovanni that was
included in the tour. Nothing like getting both Mr. and Mrs.
Fischer-Dieskau for the price of one tour, I thought.
I flew to Munich on the same flight with some of the other
tour members, but we didn't get together as a group until our first night in
Munich. As is often the case with such tours, most of the participants were a
good deal older than I was and pretty well off. Some of them were devoted opera
fans, and some of them weren't. There was one strange couple who, I learned
subsequently, were frequent subscribers to opera tours, who seemed to have no
interest in opera at all. As far as I am aware, they never lasted more than one
act before they left. Why they were there at all I really can't say. There were
two other young people on the tour. One was an extremely handsome young man in
his early twenties who was the partner of an elegant older gentleman. The older
man was an opera fan, the younger was being "instructed." The second
was a young woman who was a pianist and allround "artsy" type. She
proved to be an enthusiast of Fischer-Dieskau, which inclined me to overlook
some of her mannerisms.
The first evening we attended a ballet performance, three
Stravinsky ballets choreographed by John Cranko. I must report that I fell
asleep at least once, not because I didn't enjoy the performance but because of
jet lag. That is one of the negative aspects of a lot of opera tours, as far as
I'm concerned. In their efforts to pack as much music as possible into a short
period of time, they nearly always schedule a performance for the first night,
and no matter how valiantly the tour members struggle, a good deal of dozing
goes on. When I make my own arrangements, I always make a point of not
scheduling something for the first evening.
The second performance was the Fischer-Dieskau Lieder
recital, which was held on a Saturday evening. The tour group made an afternoon
excursion to Rottach-Egern. As is so often the case, most of the time was
expended getting there and back, with not much time at the destination.
However, driving through the lakes and Alpine foothills south of Munich is a
pleasure in itself. And, at the destination, there was the obligatory stop for
coffee and cake, which was also pleasant. In this case, however, I have to
admit that I had a hard time concentrating on the sightseeing. All I could
think about was the concert that evening. The three concerts the year before
had been so good and such a positive experience that I was torn between extreme
anticipation and worry that the concert this year could not possibly be as
good. When we returned to our hotel, the Vier Jahreszeiten, which is just a
couple of blocks away from the Nationaltheater on the Maximilianstrasse, I got
changed and was ready far too early. Nevertheless, the time of the concert
finally arrived.
This recital, a Schubert-Goethe program, was one of the
best Fischer-Dieskau concerts I have ever attended, but it did prove
problematic in some ways. When the Nationaltheater is used for this sort of
concert, the space normally occupied by the orchestra is filled with another
six rows of seats. The entire hall was filled by a well-dressed, excited,
knowledgeable audience (with a few exceptions). I had an excellent seat for the
concert, which is a matter of some concern when you are short and you are in a theater
where the audience seating is not raked. I have had a wonderful view of many a
head in the Nationaltheater in Munich. On this evening that was fortunately not
the case. However, I had serious neighbor problems. On one side of me sat the
strange couple who never stayed for a complete performance of anything
(something that had to be related in part, at least, to their serious need to
keep their blood alcohol level as high as possible). They were fidgeters and
talkers. On the other side were two empty seats that were occupied at the last
minute by two young women who spent the first half of the concert nuzzling each
other when they weren't talking, humming, or singing along. Had I had a blunt
instrument to hand, those girls would not have survived five minutes. As for
the couple on my other side, after a good deal of fidgeting and mumbling, the
man chose the beginning of "Meeres Stille" as the best time to lean
across his wife and ask me what time they served breakfast in the hotel. A man
in the row ahead of us turned and shushed him. Disgruntled, they now had the
best possible excuse to leave at the intermission, which they mercifully did.
Someone must have told off the lovebirds at intermission as well, because they
behaved more discreetly and quietly during the second half of the concert.
And yet, with all of that going on, this was one of the
most memorable concerts I have ever experienced. It was a very demanding
program, all Schubert settings of poems by Goethe. One needed the greatest
level of concentration to appreciate what was going on, particularly in the
first half. Because of all the mayhem surrounding me, I couldn't concentrate as
fully as I would have liked to, and I regret it bitterly because F-D was simply
in phenomenal form.
Let me start with some initial impressions. Although a lot
of people don't seem to realize it, Fischer-Dieskau is a very big man, six feet
three, well-built, not exactly graceful, but with a deliberate, majestic way of
moving. When he was younger, his hair was dark brown, which matched his brown
eyes. Unlike the fashion today among baritones and basses, F-D was always clean
shaven and wore his hair cut short. His grand manner and air of maturity were
always somewhat at odds with his pink cheeks, dimples, sparkling eyes, and
impish smile. Of course, you rarely saw the smile in a concert, because he was
so serious. In photos of F-D at the very beginning of his career, you see a
tall, gangling fellow with huge dark eyes who looks about eleven years old. By
the mid-1950's he had gained a lot of weight and had taken on a kind of
monumental character. As fellow-lister Mike Richter puts it, F-D was a physical
giant who seemed to try to look smaller than the piano. To me, the astonishing
thing was not that he was a huge man with a huge voice, but rather that such a
big man was capable of such delicacy. His baritone voice was unbalanced, with
bright highs and dark lows, with a very forward manner of voice production that
gave him incredible flexibility and extremely precise diction. His voice was
capable of an enormous variety of colors and shadings, but it lacked weight and
heft. There seems to be considerable debate about whether it was a big voice or
a small voice. F-D himself says that his natural voice was small and oboe-like
in character, and that he spent a great deal of time and effort finding ways to
expand it and give it resonance. Nevertheless, it was so well used in his prime
that he could make it seem enormous, at least in a Lieder recital. And it was
so well projected that even the quietest pianissimo could be heard at the back
of a very large hall, as I learned when I heard him sing Schubert in Chicago's
Auditorium Theater. As he got older, he was even better at managing his vocal
resources in such a way as to make his full voice, when he used it, sound
thunderous. If you ask me, it was not a big instrument, but it could certainly
sound that way when he wanted it to.
As he got older, F-D lost a lot of weight, and his hair
turned silver, making his fair skin seem even paler and his dark eyes even more
arresting. (Those eyes were worth a million dollars to F-D. I'm convinced that
they contributed mightily to his ability to capture and dominate an audience.)
He was the incarnation of the handsome, elegant, refined and distinguished
"older man." With age, however, he also began to look more remote and
reserved, while at the same time he seemed gentler and more good humored. This
is a mass of contradictions, I know, but that's the way he seemed.
On that evening in the summer of 1989, F-D looked rather
tired and worn out, or maybe stressed is a better word. Nevertheless, he was in
very good voice for that stage in his career and got continually better as the
evening progressed. The pace of the concert was very quick. F-D pushed along
from one song to the next quite rapidly. The audience was in general exemplary
(aside from my barbarian neighbors). Unlike in New York, no one clapped between
songs and there was a minimum of coughing and fidgeting. These were folks who
were quite at home in the "Lieder temple"! As a result, F-D was able
to maintain his concentration extremely well, and I think his quick pace was
both a cause and a result of that.
More impressions. Physically, F-D was very restrained and
low-key, with an absolute minimum of movement and gesture. As usual, his face
was incredibly expressive, but he relied on that totally, unlike a few
occasions I recall when he did a fair amount of physical "acting" to
support a performance. This struck me as a very "classical" Lieder performance,
all voice supported by facial _expression with nothing else wanted or needed.
And the voice was there-- Sixty-four or not, he had everything going in
high gear and his limitations were somehow erased. He seemed to be able to do
anything he wanted with no trouble or effort. The loud and dramatic singing was
very vehement, but technically it was solid, with little problem with being
unfocused or going toneless at climaxes. I was very impressed, especially
considering the monumental challenges of the first half of the program in
particular. A note: I like "Erlkönig" better when I don't see FD
sing it. It was "acted" more than the other songs, and I found that
distracting. Still, it was a masterly performance. In general, I would say that
the interpretations were subdued, controlled. To repeat a word, it was a very
classical performance, the sort of thing that draws the description
"Appollonian," even though the emotions were all there. This was a
very intellectually conceived program, and F-D performed it with both
remarkable restraint and enormous expressiveness.
A little about the program itself. The first half was huge--
Eight blockbuster songs: the 3 "Harfner Gesänge,"
"Prometheus," "Meeres Stille," "Grenzen der
Menschheit," "Der König
in Thule," and "Erlkönig."
This was the monumental Goethe, huge themes and huge emotions. It was a hard
first half, both for the listeners and for the singer. "Meeres
Stille" came about halfway through, and it was a little oasis of calm in
that enormous, moving progression. And F-D sang it exquisitely. To the very end
of his career, his soft singing was simply out of this world. It was tonally
beautiful, perfectly enunciated, and how the man could breathe! The phrasing
was perfect and perfectly natural. I held my breath, and so did everyone else.
"Grenzen der Menschheit" made enormous demands on F-D and he handled
them well. I was struck by how dark his bass notes were, and he reached them
pretty easily. But the contrast between those tomes and his much lighter,
"normal" baritone was very glaring and quite harsh. I was struck, as
usual, by the fact that Schubert's setting does not really measure up to the
greatness of the poem. Maybe nothing could. Nevertheless, you see glimpses in
the song of a "match" between poem and music--it just isn't complete.
I don't recall ever hearing F-D sing the "Harfner" songs in concert
before. Maybe it's true that they are "old man's songs,"-- At any
rate, on this evening he was totally convincing with them, especially "Wer
nie sein Brot mit Traenen ass." I loved the way "Erlkönig"
rounded out the first half thematically and brought out the confrontation of
human and supernatural on a different plane and from a different perspective. I
think that as the final song in this arrangement I was more aware of its
depiction of the helplessness of the human being in the face of death than I
had ever been when hearing it in isolation.
The second half was a fascinating contrast to the first.
The first half kind of rolled over one like a freight train, but the second
half was lighter and more varied-- some humor, lots of love songs, serenity,
communion with nature, a huge contrast to the first half, where the themes were
loneliness, pain, freedom, the relationship of the human and the divine, tragic
love, natural harmony, the demonic and the struggle with death. This was, as I
said, a very deliberate and intellectually constructed program. In a way, you
couldn't experience it completely while it was immediately happening, but in
recollection you could more fully appreciate the development and contrast of
the themes, the connections, the reflections, in a sense, from one half to the
other.
Other thoughts: F-D sang both versions of "An den
Mond." I like the strophic version better, maybe because it is simpler,
but the second version, which he sang as an encore, was also very moving. His
final encore was "Über
allen Gipfeln ist Ruh," and it was exquisite. There, the poem and the
music are perfectly balanced, and the performance was the third level of
perfection. What an incredible way to end the recital. There were long moments
before people could recover themselves and clap wildly.
It was a superb evening, one that will remain in my memory
for a long time, I hope. And it was wonderful to be a part of and also observe
the audience's response to the singer and the achievement. (And not only the
singer. Hartmut Höll
was the pianist, and he matched F-D's performance with a magnificent one of his
own.) In New York, F-D is liked and respected, I think, but I don't think it's
an exaggeration to say that in Munich he is loved and honored. The audience
wouldn't (or couldn't) stop applauding, cheering, and stamping. F-D ended up
with a half dozen bouquets of flowers and seemed very touched. He sang four
encores (somewhat reluctantly, I thought; he must have been exhausted), but
even then the audience didn't want to let him go. At the end, everyone in the
Nationaltheater was on his feet, clapping and shouting bravo. F-D looked both
gratified and embarrassed. It was all very moving and it made me feel good to
be there and be a part of it. And I hope that in some way F-D understood how
grateful we were for what he had done and what he had given. After all, what
other way is there for a person to express it, even if, in a way, you end up
being kind of abusive in showing your love and appreciation?
You may wonder why I can describe this concert in such
detail. It was always the same for me after a Fischer-Dieskau recital-- I was
so excited and keyed up, and had so many thoughts and impressions buzzing
around in my head, that I couldn't sleep for hours. Finally, it occurred to me
to use that time to write down my impressions, which I did in this case. The
rest of the tour was a lot of fun. I heard Strauss's Die Liebe der Danae,
Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni, and a wonderful Lohengrin
with Lucia Popp and Peter Seiffert. The one bad note was that Julia Varady
cancelled and did not sing Donna Anna.
When I returned home, I did something I have never done
before. I wrote F-D a letter expressing my appreciation for the recital. In the
letter, I said I was looking forward to hearing him sing the same program in
New York City in November. He sent a brief reply that ended "with best
wishes until November." But when November came, he cancelled his concert
due to illness.
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