The great baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau died the other day, at the age of 86, and all I could think of, with the loss of this man whose recordings I have loved since I began listening to serious music, was that he was only twenty-two years older than I am. He was always twenty-two years older than I, and, when I was young, the distance put him in another generation entirely. As a prisoner of war, he had entertained Allied troops, several years before I was born! “Several years” is a long time when you are 14. It is nothing at all when you are my age. If anything, the number “twenty-two” is a crazy kind of reminder — like a defective Christmas cracker that makes too loud a bang — that I actually was 14 at one time. Is that possible? It seems completely impossible, because I was an utterly disorganized mess when I was 14, and not at all the man that I began to be, about twenty years later. And yet, mess or not, I would play the “Libera Me” from Fischer-Dieskau’s first recording of the Fauré Requiem over and over, eventually daring to sing along. Dying, the baritone whisks me back to the beginnings of my life, as I always think of it — my childhood happened to another creature — when his beautiful voice was always there, always. He was in some quite genuine way a guardian.  

I heard him sing only once, back in the early Eighties, when he toured a Schumann program with his fourth wife, Julia Varady. I remember nothing of the music that he made that night. I was no connoisseur of Schumann, but, more than that, I was secretly let down (although very grown-up about it) to be in the same room with him. He was supposed to exist on an ethereal plane, as a voice in a studio in London or Berlin. My presumption was encouraged by the snapshots that were reproduced in the booklets that were boxed with the LPs, “candids” taken during the recording sessions. Singers dressed in dowdy street clothes stood in front of microphones, making strange faces, or they sat around tables of utilitarian design, laughing over coffee while listening to the takes. I think that these images were supposed to make the artists more conceivably approachable, but the effect for me was precisely the opposite: I learned to blot out everything incidental to the voice. I would never know Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as a man, and those little pictures saw to it that I wouldn’t want to. Everything but the polished recordings was stripped away.

It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I was surprised to hear music in the concert hall with the immediacy that it had always had for me on recordings, and another twenty years passed before I understood that the performance of music is essentially unrecordable. (See Jeremy Denk’s fascinating memoir of editing, as it were, a recording of Ives’s Concord Sonata for a demonstration of the point.) Not to worry: I knew that the music itself was easily captured, and for all time. I have it here now. “Dum veneris judicare saeculum per ignem.” The voice of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau will never perish. Not, at any rate, until I do.

***

Because Kathleen planned to have dinner with old work friends this evening, I decided to throw myself, after lunch, into a major household chore: straightening the blue room closet in which I hang my clothes and store our luggage. To beguile the hours, I fed Season Five of Lewis into the DVD player. I knew the episodes well, it seemed; I had no trouble remembering who the killers were, right from the start, in each of the four episodes. That was hardly a drawback. Wondering whodunit would have interfered with the pleasure of watching the interesting detectives and the lovely pathologist stroll through the paradise that is Oxford. Somewhere in one of the mysteries, it hit me that, mere days ago, I myself was walking around a spring-greened Bloomsbury, and that Bloomsbury was close enough: for all intents and purposes, I’d been there. Courtesy of smells of soil and stone, a previously unsuspected dimension swung open. (I remembered noting how sweet the air was in the Euston Road — of all places — how foreign and yet, from earlier visits, familiar. In a snap, Oxford ceased to be an exotic Xanadu. It was not so very far away at all.

Didn’t I just wish. In any case, Season Six comes out in two weeks.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012 at 7:16 am.