Background
Albert Dietrich Fischer was born on May 28, 1925 in Berlin to Albert Fischer, a school principal, and Theodora (née Klingelhoffer) Fischer, a teacher.
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Albert Dietrich Fischer was born on May 28, 1925 in Berlin to Albert Fischer, a school principal, and Theodora (née Klingelhoffer) Fischer, a teacher.
Dietrich started singing as a child and began formal voice lessons at the age of 16. When he was drafted into the Wehrmacht during World War II in 1943, tending horses on the Russian Front, Fischer-Dieskau had just completed his secondary school studies and one semester at the Berlin Conservatory.
He studied music with Georg A. Walter. Studied music with, Herman Weissenborn. Doctor of Music (honorary), Oxford University, England, 1978. Doctor of Music (honorary), Yale University, 1979. Doctor of Music (honorary), University Sorbonne, Paris, 1980.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was captured in Italy in 1945 and spent two years as an American prisoner of war. During that time, he sang Lieder in POW camps to homesick German soldiers.
In 1947, Fischer-Dieskau returned to Germany where he launched his professional career as a singer in Badenweiler, singing in Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem without any rehearsal. (He was a last-minute substitute for an indisposed singer. ) He gave his first Lieder recital in Leipzig in the autumn of 1947 and followed it soon afterward with a highly successful first concert at Berlin's Titania-Palast.
From early in his career he collaborated with famous lyric sopranos Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Irmgard Seefried, and the recording producer Walter Legge, issuing instantly successful albums of Lieder by Schubert and Hugo Wolf.
After 1949 he made concert tours in the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, and Italy. In 1951, he made his Salzburg Festival concert debut with Mahler's Lieder Eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer) under Wilhelm Furtwängler. That year, he also made his British debut, at the Royal Albert Hall in London during the Festival of Britain. He appeared in Frederick Delius's A Mass of Life, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. He made regular opera appearances at the Bayreuth Festival between 1954 and 1961 and at the Salzburg Festival from 1956 until the early 1970s.
As an opera singer, Fischer-Dieskau performed mainly in Berlin and at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. He also made guest appearances at the Vienna State Opera, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in London, at the Hamburg State Opera, in Japan, and at the King's Theatre in Edinburgh, during the Edinburgh Festival. His first tour in the United States took place in 1955, when he was 29, with his concert debut in Cincinnati on 15 April (J. S. Bach's Kreuzstab cantata ) and 16 April (Ein Deutsches Requiem). His American Lieder debut, singing Franz Schubert songs, took place in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on 19 April. His New York City debut occurred on 2 May at The Town Hall, where he sang Schubert's song cycle Winterreise without an interval. Both American recitals were accompanied by Gerald Moore.
Beyond his recordings of Lieder and the German opera repertoire, Fischer-Dieskau also recorded performances in the Italian operatic field. His recordings of Verdi's Rigoletto (alongside Renata Scotto and Carlo Bergonzi) and Rodrigo in Verdi's Don Carlos, are probably the most respected of these ventures.
Fischer-Dieskau retired from opera in 1978, the year he recorded his final opera, Aribert Reimann's Lear, which the composer had written at his suggestion.
Throughout his career, his musicianship and technique were flawless. He retired from the concert hall as of New Year's Day, 1993, at 67, and dedicated himself to conducting, teaching (especially the interpretation of Lieder), painting and writing books. He still performed as a reciter, reading, for example, the letters of Strauss to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, read by Gert Westphal, for the Rheingau Musik Festival in 1994; and both performing and recording Strauss's melodrama Enoch Arden.
(The foremost singer-interpreter of Schubert's lieder anal...)
(Reverberations: The Memoirs of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau b...)
((Limelight). This new translation of the original texts o...)
Robert Schumann Society
In 1949, Fischer-Dieskau married the cellist Irmgard Poppen. Together they had three sons. Irmgard died in 1963 of complications following childbirth. Afterwards, Fischer-Dieskau was married to the actress Ruth Leuwerik, from 1965 to 1967, and Christina Pugel-Schule, from 1968 to 1975. In 1977 he married the soprano Júlia Várady.
