Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's Inner Life and Chaotic Surroundings

Art, war, politics, and the baritone at 100

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (Photo: Siegfried Lauterwasser/DG)

“Recognizing the truth always brings disenchantment,” says the Commendatore in the Komische Oper’s new production of Don Giovanni — one of the many lines that Kirill Serebrennikov interpolates into the libretto via the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The director structures this Don Giovanni as a sort of journey through the Bardo: Giovanni is fatally wounded in his opening skirmish with the Commendatore, and the opera plays out as a long day’s journey into death. He also uses the Prague version of the work, which ends with Giovanni’s descent to Hell (dispensing with the final moralizing sextet) and, in this version, moves fluidly into a truncated version of Mozart’s Requiem, focusing on the 20 minutes or so that Mozart himself composed. The booming D Minor/Major rift of the infernal tragicomedy becomes the sober, plodding D Minor chords that open the Requiem.

I’ve followed Serebrennikov’s Mozart/Da Ponte cycle for the last two years, and Don Giovanni is the most jam-packed of the productions, and at times loses its grip on the number of ideas it’s juggling, but each one is so well-conceived that I’ve become fixated on the truths in the disenchantments. Reading Ben Miller’s article on the production for the New York Times after seeing it, I was especially struck by one line from an interview with Serebrennikov: “It’s a requiem for all of us.”

Serebrennikov doesn’t elaborate on this, leaving the statement a bit of a loaded Chekhovian gun. But it’s easy to read between the lines: In 2017, he was convicted of an alleged embezzlement operation that led to 18 months of house arrest. Given his status as both an openly gay man and a vocal critic of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, however, Serebrennikov has been seen by many as a victim of the Kremlin’s attacks on artistic expression and free speech. That pattern, nearly a decade later, has begun to play out in other high-power countries.

Watching the Komische Oper’s Don Giovanni in this context, I was reminded of an anecdote that Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau mentions in his 1987 memoir, Reverberations. Encouraged to meet with Walter Felsenstein after World War II, he was given a hard sell from the Komische Oper’s then-director: “We’re the only ones that will let you train yourself adequately for Don Giovanni.” Fischer-Dieskau demurred; he had just been hired for the Deutsche Oper Berlin where, a little over a decade later, he would open the company’s reconstructed opera house as Don Giovanni, just weeks after the construction of the Berlin Wall.

Where Serebrennikov’s Don Giovanni is a requiem, moving from life to death, the 1961 Don Giovanni at the Deutsche Oper is its opposite, a symbolic move from the destruction of World War II into a new life. At least, that’s what most Berliners wanted to think.

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Born in the Berlin neighborhood of Zehlendorf on May 28, 1925, Fischer-Dieskau’s childhood was dominated by the Third Reich. He was still a few months shy of his eighth birthday when Hitler was appointed Chancellor on January 30, 1933 and his childhood memories often play out under the shadow of the “Brown Wave.” His uncle, though not shy about criticizing Hitler’s government, was “slightly tinged with Brown” and would leave the house in disgust if his daughter and nephews began to have too much fun at the Nazi Party’s expense.

His father, who was already quite old when Dieter was born, died in 1937 — which his son saw as a blessing in disguise. He could, Fischer-Dieskau reflects, easily have been persuaded into the party as well. Declaring as a child that he would “rather be a poet” than a soldier, he is nevertheless enlisted, perhaps by default, into the Hitler Youth. One of the most telling moments in this era is at his father’s funeral, when he describes “the feeling that I was inappropriately dressed in my Hitler Youth uniform.”

A passage from Reverberations

Young Dieter comes of age in step with totalitarianism, walking to school the morning after the November 1938 pogroms, participating in youth rallies in the Olympia Stadium, and seeing neighbors rounded up out of their apartments, destined for camps. When the first footage from these camps was shown in celebratory newsreels at the movie theater, he noted how people “buried their heads in the sand, preferring what they believed to be the security of the moment.”

While young Dieter seems uncomfortable with the testosterone-laced excursions of the Hitler Youth and uncomfortable with the visible signs of Germany’s moral decay, it’s obvious that he is recalling these years of totalitarianism from hindsight: “A man could find out that he was a Nazi, get the fright of a lifetime but recover quickly from the shock, and just as quickly think himself a man again,” he writes of the ease with which civilian complacency set in. Yet he avoids open acts of opposition out of fear.

But in the moment, he is also aware, at least subconsciously and to at least an extent, of the regime’s tyranny. Just before leaving for the Wehrmacht, his cousin Edith tells him that, even if peace were to happen overnight,: “Your awareness that all beauty continues to give pain, that all joy is merely melancholy, cannot be erased.” Some time after he is deployed in Italy, his disabled brother Martin is forced into custody. “Soon the Nazis did to him what they always did with cases like his: They starved him to death as quickly as possible.”

Throughout his time in combat, Fischer-Dieskau kept a diary, “an attempt at preserving an inner life in chaotic surroundings, not unlike the will people exerted after the war to construct a new culture.” This is the most compelling chapter of Reverberations, breaking from the standard celebrity memoir format and offering poetic, fragmented impressions from his four years of service — first as a soldier and then as a POW.

An excerpt from Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s wartime diary, published in Reverberations.

Moving in and out of chaos, he dwells on “the unconscious content” of Brahms’s Third Symphony as he shoots his daily ration of cartridges into the sky. He recalls finding a mostly-working organ in a bombed-out church in Vicopisano and playing it, soon gathering an audience of monks and war-scarred civilians in a moment that reminds him, “only when we are completely separated can we understand that we belong together.” With the right composer, these diary entries could be arranged into a compelling companion cycle to Winterreise, the undertones of the text carrying the same introspection and anguish as Schubert’s isolated wanderer.

When his family home in the Berlin neighborhood of Lichterfelde is demolished during an air raid, Fischer-Dieskau is allowed to go back to Berlin to check in on his mother, whom he is relieved to find alive. The rest of his leave is spent attending “theater, concerts, a lot of other music — defying the irrational world.” The Germans, he adds, “are very proficient at this.”

Captured in 1945, Fischer-Dieskau spent two years in an American POW camp, where he was able to give recitals, copy down poetry he had memorized in his youth, and perform Schiller’s Don Carlos with fellow inmates. (Singing in the Verdi opera based on this play would be one of his early breakthroughs after the war.) He was among the last to leave the camp, catching the last American hospital train back to Germany in June, 1947. When he gets home, he learns his “Brown-tinged” uncle had been shot in his courtyard by a Russian soldier; his mother had, on a separate occasion, narrowly avoided the same fate.

But by the time he’s back in Berlin, nobody wants to discuss the war, despite the fact that rubble women were continuing to clear away the visible evidence of it next to temporary theaters performing light operettas like Emmerich Kálmán’s The Countess Maritza. Lichterfelde was in the American sector, and the managing troops were ready to “move on” from the “farce” of denazification. “The Americans tolerated wholesale amnesia more readily than the other occupation forces did.”¹

“Did life turn out so well for us so soon because we did not make use of all our opportunities for inner renewal?” Fischer-Dieskau later asks. “Did we fail at so much because life turned out so well for us so soon?”

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His career began to take off shortly after his return to civilian life, particularly when he met Heinz Tietjen. Tietjen first managed the Bayreuth Festival, and then all government theaters, during the Third Reich, purging Berlin stages of “Reds and Jews.”

Despite this, he got off with a slap on the wrist for “behaving opportunistically,” as one of the many Nazis who later argued that they never actually believed in any of the party lines. And so the darling of Göring (and onetime romantic rival of Hitler) was placed in charge of the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1948. He offered Fischer-Dieskau a contract that began with him singing the role of Posa in Don Carlo on four weeks’ notice.

Tietjen had left the company long before the theater itself was rebuilt, but Fischer-Dieskau remained part of the ensemble. Thirteen years after that first Posa, he sang the title role in a Don Giovanni that reopened the house’s home on Bismarckstrasse. The premiere took place six weeks after the border between East and West Germany was closed off, dividing the city and isolating West Berlin on all sides by the German Democratic Republic.

If any of this affected the rehearsals, it’s not something Fischer-Dieskau revisits in his memoir, though the rehearsal process was fraught enough that he likely felt he had bigger fish to fry. He was now among the people exerting a post-war will to construct a new culture, and chaos happening inside the opera house was enough to block out the chaos happening beyond its doors.²

For the most part, this is where Fischer-Dieskau begins to distance himself from history, drawing a line between politics and art in a way that I think made more sense in the middle of the last century than it does today. But this is where I also find the book, if not at its most poetic, then certainly at its most instructive. Of Tietjen, Fischer-Dieskau only refers to him as “a controversial character” who “can be charged with much that was bad, with intrigues and underhandedness,” but he also credits his skills as a manager and how they accommodated the baritone’s early career.

He draws his biggest line in a section that juxtaposes two major premieres: Hans Werner Henze’s Das Floß der Medusa in 1968, and Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem in 1962. A friend of Henze’s, Fischer-Dieskau was slated to premiere the composer’s secular oratorio, described as a requiem for Che Guevara, in December 1968. The story came from the real-life wreck of the French frigate Méduse in the early 19th Century, which left many stranded on a raft that became the scene for a carnival of humanity as 147 passengers dwindled to 15 in less than two weeks.

However, the premiere was aborted before the first note (although its dress rehearsal was recorded). That evening, a group of students hung a red flag in the concert hall, as well as posters of Guevara, which led other audience members and musicians to protest. The scene necessitated police intervention. From there, eyewitness accounts differ as to what happened next, but Fischer-Dieskau writes that Henze refused to conduct the work without the red flag. The musicians, all coming from West Berlin, were “not a little astonished that they of all people, who owed their freedom from the Red Threat to the Allies, were expected to demonstrate in favor of Communism.” He left the stage with many members of the chorus before the premiere was officially cancelled. This caused an irreparable rift in Fischer-Dieskau’s friendship with Henze.

It’s one of the few moments where Fischer-Dieskau seems to avoid any sense of nuance, understandable to an extent but also surprising for someone for whom the world presents a seemingly endless spectrum of greys. Perhaps, though, he saw enough grey to agree to sing the work to begin with. He had, by then, become disillusioned by Henze’s political turn as an artist. “While art must not be allowed to establish itself in a vacuum above the heads of those for whom it is intended, neither may it exist solely in opposition to society.”

Right after this memory, however, the baritone moves into telling the story of working on the 1962 premiere of Britten’s War Requiem. It’s hard not to take this pairing as coincidental, and it shows where Fischer-Dieskau saw some more shades of grey.

Conceived by Britten as a requiem for “the dead of all nations” during World War II (and written to reopen Coventry Cathedral, another victim of combat), Britten interpolated a series of poems by World War I casualty Wilfred Owen, serving as commentaries on the Latin requiem service. Fischer-Dieskau, alongside tenor Peter Pears, sang these settings as though they were soldiers, while a soprano (originally intended to be Galina Vishnevskaya³) sang the Requiem texts, joined by a chorus. The Owen texts — filled, in Britten’s words, “with hate of the rage to destroy” — underlined the senselessness of the deaths in his context. Britten also quoted Owen in the work’s title page: “My subject is War, and the pity of War./The Poetry is in the pity…/All a poet can do today is warn.”

Fischer-Dieskau was “completely undone” by the premiere.“I did not know where to hide my face. Dead friends and past suffering arose in my mind.” Perpelexingly, he undermines this incredibly humanizing and moving image a few paragraphs later, when he suggests that the only good audiences are those in capitalist societies: “By the way, during the Nazi dictatorship one hardly ever heard vocal acclaim. I have observed that loud and cheerful applause as an expression of joy gradually increases from totalitarian systems to capitalism.”

It’s one of the oddest passages in Reverberations, but I don’t entirely blame Fischer-Dieskau for it. Later, when expressing his mixed feelings towards the student movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s, he’s also able to pinpoint why it sits so poorly with him: “Everyone over forty, whether he wanted to or not, began to look inward, asking himself where he might have contributed to the mistakes that had led to it.” Reverberations is full of moments that read as pretty blatant poetic warnings in 2025, in both ways I imagine its author could and could not have predicted in 1987. But some of the most effective passages are those that become accidental warnings; warnings that show how close we remain to the past, and of how disenchanting the truth really is.

1. By contrast, in the ’80s Fischer-Dieskau gave a recital in the Netherlands and received a small silver laurel wreath engraved with the words, “To the beloved enemy.”

2. That chaos got a little closer in 1967, when Benno Ohnesorg was shot in the head by a Berlin police officer just outside of the opera house, during a protest against the Shah of Iran who was attending a performance of another Mozart opera, Die Zauberflöte.

3. Due to visa issues, Vishnevskaya wasn’t allowed to participate in the premiere (although she was approved to travel to the west to record it). Interestingly, Fischer-Dieskau’s participation in this may have contributed to those issues: “As [Vishnevskaya] herself tells in her book, the minister of culture Irina Furzeva talked some kind of drivel to her about West Berlin and all the enemies of the Soviet Union lying in wait. It is also quite possible that Moscow interpreted my participation as a ‘provocation’ since I was and am a West Berliner.”