Background
Emil Friedrich August Fischer the son of Ignatia Caroline Achten, a concert soprano, and Johann Friedrich Fisher, a well- known court opera singer of Gratz, was born in Brunswick, Germany.
Emil Friedrich August Fischer the son of Ignatia Caroline Achten, a concert soprano, and Johann Friedrich Fisher, a well- known court opera singer of Gratz, was born in Brunswick, Germany.
He made his début in Gratz, Austria, in 1857, as the Sénéchal in Boieldicu’s Jean de Paris. After singing in Pressburg, Stettin, and Brunswick, he became director of the Dantzig Opera in 1863, a position he held until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War.
He was more or less intimately associated with the Metropolitan’s activities until his final retirement in 1898. Versatile, a good natural actor, he was at home in French and Italian as well as German opera.
As Mephistopheles in Faust and Ramfis in Aida he was well known, but he was at his best in the Wagnerian roles of the Landgrave, Tannhäuser; King Henry, Lohengrin, King Mark, Tristan, Wotan, Walkiire; Hagen, Siegfried; and Hans Sachs, Die Meistersinger.
His interpretation of this last role is generally regarded as its superlative American exposition, and his felicitous mingling of bluff good-nature, humanity, and idealism in the characterization of the cobblerpoet is still regarded as a model.
He was opposed to singing Wagner in translation, and insisted that in the Wagner operas, “the function of the singer is to explain in words what the orchestra is saying. ”
During the long years of his connection with the Metropolitan Opera House Fischer sang in 101 operas and appeared in America 839 times. Both as a man and as an artist he was very popular. The benefit performance given on March 15, 1907, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of his appearance on the operatic stage, in which he took part as Hans Sachs in an act from Die Meistersinger, yielded nearly $7, 000. After his retirement he devoted part of his time to teaching, spending his winters in New York.
He died in Hamburg, of cancer of the stomach, on one of his summer trips to Europe.
His interpretation of this last role is generally regarded as its superlative American exposition, and his felicitous mingling of bluff good-nature, humanity, and idealism in the characterization of the cobblerpoet is still regarded as a model.