Fischer-Dieskau
and Me
by Celia Sgroi
State University of New York College at Oswego
This essay, or
perhaps memoir is a more accurate term, owes its title to The New Yorker,
which once gave the title “Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Me” to an article by Wayne
Koestenbaum (The Queen’s Throat). In the article, Mr. Koestenbaum
relates that his favorite way of listening to Schwarzkopf is in the shower. I’m
not very sure that’s very respectful, but what do I know? Anyway, when it came
time to explore my own history as a diehard fan of a singer, I didn’t mind
lifting the title and converting it to my own use. I hope the results are worth
it.
I had my first, fateful encounter with Fischer-Dieskau in
the spring of 1965. When I was a junior in high school, my father fell in love
with a house that was for sale and moved the family from the thriving
metropolis of Fulton, New York ("the city with a future," pop.
14,000) to the village of Hannibal, a rural community with a population of
about 700. My sisters and I had the dubious distinction of being among the
dozen or so students who went to school every day without riding on a
school bus.
It's tough to be transplanted from one school to another in
the middle of the year, and I hated it. However, I soon became friendly with a
young man who represented a truly bizarre phenomenon in rural upstate New York:
At the age of 17, he was a fully developed opera queen. As he was something of
a pariah (for obvious reasons) and I was a newbie, we were more or less thrown
together. Boy, did that change my life!
My new friend was absolutely obsessed with opera. He had
dozens of records, and owned a very impressive reel-to-reel tape recorder, upon
which he replayed Met broadcasts and pirate tapes obtained from
God-knows-where. He made trips to the Met and reported on the operas he saw and
told stories about standing in line for tickets, being a standee, etc. And he
was a passionate fan of Maria Callas and Franco Corelli, in particular. He did
a memorable Maria Callas imitation-- I can still see him romping around the
room fluting: "I am the ineffable Maria Callas. Wanna see my
ineffable?" And he would fling up the skirt of his imaginary dress and
laugh hysterically. (He was, after all, only seventeen.)
I thought he was great, and so I listened to a lot of opera
(usually in the form of rather arbitrary excerpts) for the first time in my
life. I had always had an interest in vocal music, but at that time I was going
through my folk song phase (along with nearly the entire country), so opera was
quite a change. I tried gamely to go along with the program, but I confess I
had a difficult time getting passionate (or even interested) in Callas and
Corelli and the other greats to whom I was being exposed. And then came the day
when my friend played an excerpt from Le Nozze di Figaro with
Fischer-Dieskau.
"Oh! Who's that?" I asked.
You could see from his face how his heart was sinking.
"He's nobody. Don't pay attention to him. That's not why I'm playing
this."
"But he's the one I like," I said.
"Oh God," he said in despair.
When I asked if he had anything else by this guy with the
strange name, he indignantly denied it, and that was the end of the matter for
several months. And then in August of 1965, I picked up an issue of Time
magazine that was mainly devoted to the Watts riots, and there was an article
about Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, "the thinking man's baritone," that
made it sound as if this fellow with two last names could just about walk on
water, and my interest was rekindled.
But what to do about it? My opera friend was of no help
whatever; this was not an interest he was willing to nurture. So I decided to
buy myself a recording and made a trip to Syracuse with that intention. In 1965,
downtowns still existed, of course, as did all the department stores that have
since been casualties of the rise of shopping malls, and the department stores
had sections devoted to selling record players in impressive cabinets and the
records to play on them. And those records included real classical records,
along with the Mantovani and 101 Strings. I didn't even have to ask a clerk
where to find a recording by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (a task I had been
dreading), because there was a little section with a printed divider with his
name on it, with two or three LPs in plastic dust sleeves. The only remaining
challenge was to decide which of them to buy, and it was no small challenge
because I didn't know anything about any of them. Fatefully, they were all
Lieder recordings on the Angel label, all with Gerald Moore as accompanist.
After handling them for a while, hoping for inspiration, I
bought the one with the brown cover featuring a drawing of a very young Brahms
(if Brahms was ever that young), which was called "The Young Brahms"
and bore it home to try out. At first I was pretty perplexed by it. I am quite
certain I had never heard an art song before. They certainly weren't like folk
songs or songs from Broadway shows, both of which I knew and liked, and if
someone had asked me to say what an art song was like, I probably would have
described something like "Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes" (which,
as a matter of fact, I had heard), or some grand utterance with a rolling piano
accompaniment and lots of emotion. (Actually, when I eventually heard Strauss's
"Zueignung," I recognized my stereotypical "art song.")
Nevertheless, I kept playing the recording. I liked the
voice, and I recognized gradually that I liked the songs, even though they were
not what I was familiar with and were in a language I had heretofore considered
impossibly ugly. And I found them much more to my liking than any of the mainly
Italian opera that my high school friend was so devoted to. (He was so
disgusted that he wouldn't even discuss this experiment with me.) The recording
in question, which has long since been folded into a multivolume Brahms
collection on EMI, did not have any of the "big" Brahms songs or
cycles on it. It consisted of Op. 32 and other early Lieder, and the songs were
to texts by poets I have come to love-- most notably Eichendorff and Rueckert,
with some Near Eastern-flavored poems by Platen and Daumer. I don't think I
could have chosen a better recording to fall in love with Lieder, because my
first love was the small-scale, intimate, lyrical face of Lieder. A cycle like Winterreise
most likely would have frightened me away. As it was, I was soon on my way back
to Syracuse to buy more recordings. The second was the Schumann Op. 39 Liederkreis
and other Eichendorff settings. The next was the incredible Schubert collection
with some of the Rellstab songs from Schwanengesang, and F-D's finest
performances of "Der Zwerg" and "Im Fruehling."
My parents were utterly baffled by my strange new taste in
music. However, they were willing to give house room to Fischer-Dieskau and
Moore because they were reasonably easy to listen to and made a nice change
from folk music and rock and roll. As I was to discover fairly soon, college
room mates were not that tolerant.
Why is it that enthusiasms turn into obsessions for some
people? My enthusiasm for Fischer-Dieskau became an obsession very rapidly, I'm
afraid.
As is the case with many high school students, I
experienced the "wasted senior year." My opera queen friend and I lurked
in the school library, aided and abetted by the friendly librarian. I assisted
in the creation of many issues of our own opera magazine, called of course Opera
Nudes, which was filled with in-jokes that only my friend could understand.
He explained them all to me, of course.
I actually went to my first live opera that year, a
production of The Magic Flute, in English, at the Eastman School of
Music in Rochester. My friend, in an excess of high spirits, sang and acted the
entire opera single-handedly on the bus on the way back to Hannibal, to the
great displeasure of the bus driver. Everyone else pretty much ignored it.
However, it was on that very bus trip that a schoolmate told me seriously,
"I really liked the opera. It was all that singing I couldn't stand."
Finding food for my F-D obsession was difficult, however. I
bought whatever recordings were available. I think it says something for the
quality of F-D's Lieder recordings for EMI during that period that I never
bought a bad one, even though I was pretty much buying blindly. But there were
not that many of them to be had in Syracuse, and I didn't have much money
anyway. I listened to my acquisitions constantly. We lived in a house with a
completely finished-off basement level, including a bedroom, which was mine.
That was a real advantage for the whole family, because I did my Lieder
listening away from everyone else. Lieder heard from a distance are quite
tolerable to the uninitiated ear, it turns out. My younger sister Patty used to
join me for Lieder listening some of the time. She was the one who started
calling Fischer-Dieskau "Dieter." Soon he was Dieter to the whole
family.
During my hours lurking the school library I combed back
issues of the New Yorker and the Saturday Review, looking for mentions
of my hero. Occasionally I was rewarded, and the rest of the time I read a lot
of good writing on other subjects, so maybe my senior year wasn't quite wasted
after all. My opera queen friend, tired of fighting my F-D obsession, coped by
adding Fischer-Dieskau to his cast of characters. He began making cameo
appearances in Opera Nudes. In my friend's mind, F-D and Gerald Moore
became a couple. By this time I had discovered a copy of Gerald Moore's
memoirs, Am I Too Loud?, in the public library in nearby Oswego and
protested that this was not the case: They were both married to other people.
It didn't matter. In Opera Nudes, they were a couple.
When I went off to college in the summer of 1966,
Fischer-Dieskau and a small record player went with me. My first room mate did
not like having to listen to F-D. We argued about this frequently. To my great
good fortune, however, she soon acquired a boyfriend and began spending most of
her time in his room. Fischer-Dieskau took over ours.
I hated my first year at Harpur College, now the SUNY
University Center at Binghamton. I was homesick and I just couldn't seem to get
the hang of college. I kept trying to do things the way I had always done them,
and it didn't work. However, Harpur College provided a much better library to
lurk in, with many more opportunities for reading about F-D. I confess that I
was not always good about using photocopiers (which were much more rare in
those days), and I just "disappeared" some of the F-D material. These
days, when I listen to my librarian friends complain about how hard college
students are on a library collection, I still cringe a bit.
But Harpur College and the city of Binghamton provided
other possibilities. There were record stores in Binghamton, and my F-D record
collection grew. Die Schöne Muellerin
was my first purchase, followed by two more Schubert collections on Angel, all
with Gerald Moore, as well as the Brahms folksong settings with Elisabeth
Schwarzkopf. I also discovered DG (or DGG as it was then), and acquired the Dichterliebe
and Op. 24 Liederkreis with Joerg Demus, as well as a further collection
of Schumann Lieder. The best resource, however, proved to be the music
listening library at the college. After all, how much money did a college
freshman have to spend on records? (I can credit F-D for keepng me from taking
up smoking, however. After experimenting for about two weeks I determined that
the habit would be too expensive and would limit my record-buying ability. So,
no more cigarettes.)
The music listening library was a gold mine. I heard Das
Lied von der Erde for the first time, with F-D and Murray Dickie under
Kletzki. I also listened to Britten's War Requiem. I finally dipped my
toe into the waters of Fischer-Dieskau as opera singer with Tannhäuser
and Der Fliegende Holländer.
The two opera recordings with F-D that absolutely floored me could not have
been more opposite to one another: F-D as Papageno in the Boehm Zauberflöte
and F-D as Wozzeck on DG.
In my first semester at Harpur College I acquired a few
friends who had similarly strange tastes. One was a girl who wanted to be a
singer and adored Joan Sutherland. We made a pilgrimage to Philadelphia to hear
Sutherland and Horne in Norma and found our way back to Binghamton in
one piece. Another was a Geology major who studied a lot more than I considered
healthy but who became my closest friend. She had studied German in high school
and was continuing her study of the language in college. She was astonished by
my repertoire of German words, gleaned from Lieder recordings and the dialog of
the Magic Flute. It was she who first made me realize that I could learn
German while I was in college, and I registered for a German course for my
second semester.
It was a strange freshman year. While everyone else spent
their time in the dorm rooms of their boyfriends and staggered back to campus
after nights in the bars, I roamed the library and listened to F-D recordings
in the listening room of an almost-deserted Music Department Library. My
friends and I sent fan letters to our various idols, and I received back a
signed photo of Fischer-Dieskau. My friends were impressed.
We listened to a great deal of music during that first
college year. Three or four of us would go to the Music Library in the evening
and spend hours listening to recordings. One night at closing time we were
dashing through the nearly deserted building in a loose gaggle and cannoned
into all four members of the Guarneri Quartet, who were in residence at
Binghamton that year. A cello (fortunately in its case) hit the floor. With a
squawk in unison, the whole bunch of us turned and tore away cartoonlike in the
other direction.
The New York City Opera performed La Traviata in the
college gymnasium with Beverly Sills and a very young Placido Domingo as Alfredo.
We followed that up with a trip to New York City to hear Sills again as Donna
Anna in Don Giovanni. But the undoubted highlight of my freshman year
was our trip to Carnegie Hall to hear Fischer-Dieskau sing Lieder.
I have no clear recollection of how we acquired the tickets
to hear Fischer-Dieskau. I do recall that we travelled to New York City by bus.
One of my most enduring memories of my freshman year at college is of bus
stations. I traveled back and forth from home by Greyhound Bus, and several of
our excursions were by the Trailways bus. I don't recall which one brought us
to New York, but we disembarked at the Port Authority Terminal and began our
great adventure.
This was not my first trip to New York City. I had gone
twice to the World's Fair, once with a group of Girl Scouts and the second time
with my mother and sisters. But going without adult supervision was a new
experience. When we went to hear Beverly Sills at the New York State Theater, I
remember looking across the plaza at the Met and thinking of my opera friend
from high school, but that was as close to the Met as I got that day. Hearing
Fischer-Dieskau took me to Carnegie Hall for the first time.
There were four of us, and we were invited to stay
overnight at the home of one of girls, who lived in Brooklyn. As the hour of
the concert drew closer, I became more and more silent and apprehensive. What
if we went there and he didn't sing because he was sick? Worse yet, what if we
went there and he sang and it was terrible? I had not considered such a
possibility until it was nearly time for the performance. I had been living and
breathing Fischer-Dieskau for more than two years--what if he turned out to be
a disappointment? The closer we got to Carnegie Hall, the more scared I got. By
the time we were in our seats I could scarcely breathe.
We were there very early and found ourselves sitting in a
nearly empty hall. I inspected the program and absorbed the various admonitions
about not clapping between songs or turning the pages until each song was over.
I read the list of songs to be performed. This was an all-Schumann recital, but
none of the songs listed was familiar to me. The texts were printed in the
booklet with English translations. I looked at the biographical
information--nothing new there. I could have recited F-D's basic biography by
heart at the drop of a hat. In fact, I had been known to do so. The
advertisements for recordings were more interesting. Maybe there would be time
to go shopping before we had to return to Binghamton. Gradually, the hall
filled with people.
I had never been in a concert hall that was anything like
Carnegie Hall. It seemed huge to me, and my fear rose to panic proportions.
This was not going to be like listening to a recording. On the stage was the
enormous black Steinway grand piano surrounded by semicircular rows of chairs.
We had pretty good seats, but even so the stage seemed miles away, and there
was all this cavernous space. One man was going to sing in this and be heard?
It seemed impossible.
And there were so many people! Gradually it dawned on me
that the seats on the stage were for additional members of the audience. And
all of these people were here for the same purpose as I was. Being a
Fischer-Dieskau fan had always been a solitary activity, but not this night. I
found myself looking around at other members of the audience, curious about how
they came to be here. Finally the lights dimmed. The audience grew silent,
except for a kind of excited murmur of anticipation. For a few aching moments,
nothing happened.
Then a tall man in white tie and tails strode rapidly onto
the stage and threaded his way through the rows of stage seats to stand in
front of the huge piano. A shorter man followed him. There was a huge wave of
applause. He acknowledged the applause but seemed tense and a bit impatient, as
if he wanted to get started. Gerald Moore got himself situated at the piano.
Fischer-Dieskau looked toward Moore for a few moments, then gave a barely
imperceptible nod, and Moore began to play. Fischer-Dieskau turned abruptly
toward the audience and began to sing.
I can't really tell you what happened after that. My older
sister, who sometimes uses hypnosis in her clinical practice, tells me that the
way I concentrate on music and "zone" is very much the same as being
hypnotized. This was the first of many Fischer-Dieskau recitals at which I had
the feeling of being pulled under the surface and disappearing as long as
singer and pianist performed. The first half of the concert left me more than a
little dazed. When the second half began, I felt a kind of ache because I knew
that the concert would soon be over. The second half went by so quickly. At the
end there was long applause, much coming and going by singer and pianist, some
encores, even a couple of songs I recognized. Finally, Fischer-Dieskau took a
final bow and waved both hands at the audience, a combination of farewell and
outright dismissal. The lights went up. It was over.
On the way to Brooklyn by subway, I found it hard to talk.
I was still trying to make sense of what seemed like just a jumble of
impressions. I felt exhilarated, but I also felt bereft. There was nothing left
to anticipate. It was over.
A very few lasting impressions remain in my memory.
One is that, in fact, the size of the hall turned out to have no effect on the
impact of the performance. I had the feeling that F-D was singing only to me,
that there was some kind of invisible bond that linked us across that
considerable distance as long as the performance lasted. A second is that his
voice was much more attractive live than on recordings, more full and rounded,
without the sharp edge or nasal quality you sometimes hear in his recorded
voice. And there seemed to be nothing he couldn't do with that voice. The
dynamic range and variety of vocal colors seemed limitless. A third is that
Fischer-Dieskau turned out to be much better looking than I had imagined. All
of the photographs I had seen of him to that time depicted a somewhat demonic
version of the Pillsbury Doughboy. He turned out to be a tall, broad-shouldered
vigorous-looking man of very youthful appearance. This discovery did not
exactly serve to curb my enthusiasm. Finally, I found him incredibly
intimidating--there was nothing of the warm fuzzy about him. Despite the round,
boyish face and the dimples, he projected an aura of tension and extreme
reserve, and he never seemed entirely comfortable in his own body, an
observation I have confirmed on numerous occasions.
When my friends suggested that we should try to get Fischer-Dieskau's
autograph, I vetoed the proposal. At that point, I was not willing to risk
having my "perfect" image of Fischer-Dieskau shattered by finding out
that he was rude or unfriendly or had B.O. or any other unattractive feature I
might imagine. I wanted to take my positive experience of the concert home and
cherish it. And as it turned out, even the boldest of my friends was
sufficiently intimated by F-D in the flesh that after the concert was over no
one really wanted to go backstage.
We stayed overnight in Brooklyn at the home of one of the
girls I had attended the concert with. The next day her father told me that he
had been very distressed when his daughter told him that she was going to hear
Fischer-Dieskau and that he still did not feel right about it. They were Jews
whose family had suffered terribly at the hands of Germans and he thought it
was wrong to listen to those songs in that language, sung by a man who had been
there during that time. I was speechless. He was clearly upset and so was I. I
didn't have an answer for him, and I felt bad. I don't think it would have
helped my feelings of confusion and inner struggle to have known how many other
Jews had been in that overflow audience at Carnegie Hall the night before. Even
if I had known, I couldn't have said that to him.
The next day we took the bus back to Binghamton. Soon
after, my freshman year ended and I went home. I had already decided that I was
not returning to Harpur College for my second year. The little record player
and a greatly expanded F-D record collection went home in boxes in the cargo
hold of a Greyhound Bus.
It had long since been decided that I would not return to
Harpur College for my second year of college but would transfer to SUNY at
Oswego and live at home. I was happy, because I had never really gotten to like
Binghamton, although my grades certainly improved during my second semester,
and my father was happy because he simply couldn't see the point of paying
money to live somewhere else when you had a home to live in.
However pleased my parents might have been to have me back,
they were adamant on one point: I was not going to sit around for the nearly
six-month period until the next college semester began in Oswego, I would have
to find a job. After some difficulty, I got a job at Dey Brothers, a now
defunct department store in Syracuse. My first job was to be "Debbie
Blake," a telephone shopping salesperson. Taking orders over the phone
from newspaper advertisements was a piece of cake; unfortunately, the other
part of being Debbie Blake was to act as a kind of personal shopper for people
who wanted to buy gifts, for example, and wanted suggestions. I was not very
good at this. At 18, I didn't care about things unless they were black
vinyl discs with holes in the center. I soon got myself transferred to the
credit department.
I traveled to Syracuse every day on the bus to work and had
to work a good many nights and weekends. The sole compensation was my proximity
to record stores and to the main branch of the Onondaga County Public Library.
I recall buying, among others, the delightful album of duets with Victoria de
los Angeles and F-D, as well as Gerald Moore's farewell concert. However, my
record buying was somewhat limited because I had to accumulate enough money to
buy a car so that I would be able to commute from Fulton to Oswego to go to
college in the fall.
Even though I had to watch my purchases, it was during this
period that I bought my first books about Fischer-Dieskau. The first was a
small biography with pictures by Friedrich Herzfeld published by Rembrandt
Verlag. I had ordered this while still in Binghamton. It arrived in Fulton
while I was working at Dey Brothers. It was in German, of course, and it was
clear that one semester of German language study was not enough to read it.
This strengthened my resolve to continue learning German. The second book, also
published by Rembrandt Verlag, was mostly pictures. It included an interview
with Fischer-Dieskau and essays about his career as an opera singer by Werner
Oehlmann and an appreciation by Joerg Demus. More incentive to improve my
German! I honestly do not recall how these German books found their way to
Fulton, New York, any more than I recall how I obtained concert tickets with
relative ease. It seemed as if there was nothing that was too hard to
accomplish in support of my FiDi passion.
I started my second year of college in Oswego in the fall
of 1967. Things were very different at Oswego. Harpur College had pretensions
to be an elite liberal arts college, while Oswego had just become an arts and
sciences college after three quarters of a century as first a normal school,
then a teacher's college. Nelson Rockefeller's dream of public higher education
in New York State was at its peak, and the taxpayers' money was being spent
lavishly. Oswego had a new campus, lots of new bright young faculty from all
over the country, and lots of new majors and courses. In those early years,
however, the School of Education still dominated the landscape in every sense
of the word. Practically everyone I knew was either an elementary education
major or studying Industrial Arts Education. My father thought I should become
a school teacher, so of course I immediately declared a major in one of the
arts and sciences disciplines.
The time working with adults at Dey Brothers had wrought a
significant change in me. All of the things that had defeated me as a freshman,
most notably time management and taking responsibility for my work, were no
longer a problem. I had my own bedroom at home, and no one disturbed me. The
little record player and F-D took their places in this new room, but I had to
be circumspect because my parents' room was right next door, and it occurred to
me that they might not want to be serenaded at all hours-- a hard lesson
learned from my dormitory experience. All of a sudden going to college was a
piece of cake. The only setback came in my first semester, when I learned at
registration that the German language course I needed would not be offered
until the spring semester. Dutifully following the professor's suggestion, I
bought a copy of the textbook and reviewed it during the intersession so that I
would be ready for the course.
I had landed in Oswego as a French major. In those days,
there was none of this wimpy "undecided" nonsense, you started
college with a major or else. Everyone I knew declared themselves an English
major because it seemed pretty safe. I was always a smartass, so I declared
myself a French major instead. I discovered only one problem with that--French
majors had to study French. By my third semester of college I had decided this
was not for me, so I became a history major, which was much more satisfactory.
In the spring of 1968 I took my second German course and made good progress. I signed
up for another course without a second thought.
A few things stand out in this final three years of
college. In June of 1968, I spent three weeks up to my knees in mud
participating in an archaeological field school in northern New York. While I
grubbed little pot sherds out of the dirt, the BBC film The Golden Ring
was broadcast on PBS and I couldn't watch it. My sister Patty watched it in my
place and sent me an admirably detailed report, with appropriate focus on
Fischer-Dieskau, of course. As I recall, she called him "Dieder"
throughout the entire letter.
In October of 1968, I went to Carnegie Hall to hear F-D
sing Die Schöne
Müllerin
with Norman Shetler at the piano. This had been preceded by some newspaper
reports of F-D's marriage to a young American student. This was of interest, of
course. I looked at the photographs in the newspaper. She was a very beautiful
girl. Was I jealous? Not exactly. I was curious about F-D's personal life, all
the more so because he kept it very private, but I had never entertained
fantasies of being Mrs. F-D. I realized dimly that my obsession with
Fischer-Dieskau, although it had its sexual element, was a bit more complex.
The fact was, I didn't want to sleep with Fischer-Dieskau, I wanted to be
Fischer-Dieskau.
One thing that did begin to occur to me around this time
was that F-D's life was perhaps not so neat and tidy as it appeared in the
press. I has read what Gerald Moore had to say about him, and there were
articles about him in High Fidelity and Stereo Review from the
early 1960's that I had searched out and read. In all of these, F-D emerged as
an insufferably worthy individual. I had to admit that I couldn't figure out
how I had become attached to such a paragon. From one of my Rembrandt Verlag
books I knew that F-D had been previously married to Irmgard Poppen, who had
died in childbirth, which did nothing to harm the prevailing Romantic image of
F-D, and subsequently to a film actress, Ruth Leuwerik. When The Sound of
Music was immensely popular on Broadway, somebody got the bright idea of
distributing an amalgam of the two original German Trapp Family films that had
inspired the musical, and Ruth Leuwerik was Maria Trapp in those films. I had
seen The Trapp Family long before I knew who F-D was and had been very
favorably impressed with Ruth Leuwerik, a beautiful and talented actress. It
seemed a colossal coincidence that F-D should be married to someone I
recognized. But not for long. Now he was married for the third time.
For quite a while, it was important for me that F-D should
be perfect, even though being perfect made him just a bit boring. All these
marital adventures suggested that perhaps he was not perfect after all. I
really wasn't ready to deal with that at 19, but there would come a time when I
would be very relieved to acknowledge that F-D was no paragon after all. When I
was a college kid, however, I would have battled anyone who cast aspersions on
my hero, and persons who expressed a preference for Hermann Prey, for example,
were scarcely to be tolerated.
Something quite strange happened to me when I got to be a
junior. The chair of the Foreign Languages Department called me into his office
and proposed to me that I should major in German. I liked the idea, and I was
astonished that someone thought I was doing good work and wanted me to
continue. So German became my second major, along with History, and I plunged
into advanced language courses and literature courses. They were difficult, but
I already had quite an extensive background in German literature due to my
Lieder and opera listening. And my pronunciation of the German language was
close to exemplary. Why wouldn't it be? I had been immersed in the best
possible language laboratory since I had been in high school. F-D was proving
to have a practical value I had never anticipated.
When it came time to think of going to graduate school, I
followed my German professors' urging and applied to German programs. My
history professors thought this was quite odd, but none of them had ever
suggested that I do graduate work in history! The chair of the Language
department, who had appointed himself my mentor, wanted me to get accepted into
a prestige institution. I was accepted at Harvard, which was exactly what he
had hoped for. However, Harvard did not want to give me any money, and I was
sufficiently my father's daughter to not want to pay for something that someone
else was willing to give me for free. So I accepted a four-year University
Fellowship from the Ohio State University. Before I went to Columbus, however,
I spent a summer studying German in Austria, which gave me additional
opportunities to pursue my FiDi passion.
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