Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's Inner Life and Chaotic Surroundings
Art, war, politics, and the baritone at 100
“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.
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.”
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.”
