Biography (read more)
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was born in Berlin on 28 May 1925, the son of a school principal and a teacher, and began formal voice study at sixteen. Drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1943, he served in Italy and was captured in 1945, spending two years as an American prisoner of war, during which he sang Lieder to fellow German prisoners. He returned to Germany in 1947 and launched his professional career, stepping in at short notice for a performance of Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem at Badenweiler. He went on to dominate both the opera and concert platforms for more than three decades, and also worked as a conductor and teacher. He died on 18 May 2012, shortly before his eighty-seventh birthday.
Fischer-Dieskau was the pre-eminent Lieder singer of the post-war era, and his recordings of Schubert, above all Winterreise with the accompanists Gerald Moore and Jörg Demus, remain touchstones of the repertoire. His discography is exceptionally broad, covering opera, oratorio and song across several centuries and in German, Italian, English, French, Russian, Hebrew, Latin and Hungarian. The critic Alan Blyth argued that no singer of his time had matched his range and versatility of repertory while retaining such precision and individuality of idiom. He was widely described as one of the supreme vocal artists of the twentieth century, and a 1999 critics’ poll for Classic CD ranked him the century’s second greatest singer. His text-led, minutely characterised approach to song interpretation shaped the expectations of the generations of singers who followed him.
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