Thinking Man's Baritone

While Dietrich is making records in London, Fischer is giving a lieder recital at Carnegie Hall, and Dieskau is appearing as Falstaff at the West Berlin Opera. Or so one critic claims. Actually, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is not a brother act but one man. It is just that, as one of the world's busiest, most sought-after singers, he often seems to be--smiling, stage center, ready to go --everywhere at once. Last week he popped up at the Munich Opera Festival singing the lead role in Hindemith's rarely performed Cardillac. Premiered in 1926, the opera --a starkly sketched exercise in early expressionism--is hardly everyone's cup of tea. Yet as interpreted by Director Rudolf Hartmann and Fischer-Dieskau, cast as a goldsmith who peddles his handiwork by day only to redeem it at night by killing off his customers, Cardillac proved the surprise hit of the month-long festival. Stable Serenade. At 40, Fischer-Dieskau is a comparative newcomer to the world's opera houses. Long the foremost interpreter of German lieder, he only recently turned to opera on a more than part-time basis, now divides his time equally between the two mediums. He is, essentially, the thinking man's baritone. With a musicologist's lore and fidelity to the text, he meticulously works out each vocal inflection until, as one critic put it, "he not only knows what he sings, but also why he sings." Not a splashy, booming singer, he achieves the utmost theatrical effect with subtle shadings of his husky, light-timbered voice. Son of a Berlin high school principal, Fischer-Dieskau had barely begun his career when he was drafted into the Wehrmacht at 18. Hopeless as a cavalryman, he was demoted to tending the horses, pacified the animals in their stables by serenading them long into the night. Captured in 1945, he spent the next two years performing before captive audiences at various P.O.W. camps in Italy, was so prized by his U.S. captors that he was one of the last prisoners released. He embarked on a career in lieder singing in 1948, since then has almost single-handedly managed to elevate the art to its present high level of widespread popularity. Celebrated Export. A beefy 6 ft. 2 in., with the dimpled look of a heavyweight cherub, Fischer-Dieskau is today Germany's most celebrated musical export. He is booked three years in advance, shuttles between continents like a suburban commuter to meet his breakneck schedule, averages an income of $225,000 a year. Betwixt and between, he turns out records like flapjacks. With 166 LPs to his credit, he is far and away the most recorded classical singer ever. While enthusiastic about the wealth of opera roles he has yet to try, Fischer-Dieskau is less optimistic about the future of the lieder. "There is no question that contemporary music finds itself in a grave crisis," he says sadly. "As a result, there are far too few lieder being written now. For all purposes, this art form is extinct."

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