Zum Liederabend am 8. September 1959 in Edinburgh
Zeitung unbekannt, 10. September 1959
Mr. Fischer-Dieskaus Schubert Recital
From our special correspondent
At no point does the miller-boy of Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin touch the extremity of despair of the jilted lover of the Winterreise songs. Though he is inflamed with jealous fury and subsequently heartbroken, we always feel that he has the resilience of youth to help him through – and presently find consolation in another. In this respect, then, Die Schöne Müllerin
is a less profound cycle than Die Winterreise. Yet to the singer and pianist it offers far greater emotional variety in that not for a long time dooes the sun go behind clouds; more than half the songs are carefree, radiant, and blissful.
In the Usher Hall last night Mr. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Mr. Gerald Moore presented the 20 songs as one continuous experience, uninterrupted by applause or an interval. The occasion was among the festival’s highlights with a capacity audience so enthralled by Mr. Fischer-Dieskau’s art that they would willingly have stayed to hear the whole cycle a second time as an encore. For the remarkable thing about this young artist is his ability to recreate each song no matter how often he has sung it, with all the freshness and immediacy of a first experience. Moreover, his gloriously mellow, malleable baritone voice has the range of dynamics and tone-colour to carry out all the dictates of his intensely vivid imagination. "Pause" for instance, was a rapt idyll, sustained with the most exquisite, fine-drawn cantabile, while "Der Jäger" was an outburst of almost operatic strength and intensity. Both in the establishment of the mood of each song, and in the subtle delineation of every passing shade of feeling within each verse. Mr. Fischer-Dieskau had a splendid partner in Mr. Gerald Moore, who managed to make detail tell in spite of transposition into lower keys in a very resonant hall, and whose little summarizing postludes to many of the songs (not least to "Tränenregen") were miracles of concentrated wisdom.
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