Professor Elsa Schiller, having suffered terribly during the war as a Jew, was in charge of music at RIAS (Berlin Radio in the American sector) immediately after hostilities ceased. She asked the promising, 22-year-old Fischer-Dieskau to audition. He chose a Bach aria, and was at once engaged to sing in Bach cantatas on the station. Schiller then invited the young baritone to record, on rudimentary tape, Schubert's Winterreise. After many vicissitudes and much taxing work, the recording was completed early in 1948. The singer himself relates these facts in his recently published, highly entertaining and informative book of memoirs, Echoes of a lifetime (Macmillan).
Fischer-Dieskau goes on to comment: ''Today it is not easy for me to judge my work on that taping. It seems to me homogeneous, though burdened with errors of tempo. In general a certain mournfulness prevails that I would not tolerate today. However, the experiment was successful enough to be broadcast again and again, until finally a pirate recording was put on the market by an Italian company.'' It is that version, now commercially issued, that we have here. As ever Fischer-Dieskau is his own most perceptive critic. As in his 1951 EMI Die schone Mullerin, the sound tends to be at times lugubrious, even lachrymose, a fact emphasized by speeds that are too slow (the whole cycle takes 78 minutes while a customary timing is around 73 minutes)—the first three songs and ''Wasserflut'' are fair examples, without going further, of a certain self-indulgence—yet the voice was then so intrinsically beautiful, the tone so full of sap, darker than it was to become, that one is very ready to forgive the sometimes immature reading. This is very much a self-pitying youth, becoming melodramatic at the seemingly terrible loss of his first love and telling his story with heavy underlining and a tendency to plod. We somehow feel that, once over this bleak winter journey, he may forget his unhappiness and find a new love. In his later readings, the greater restraint, the more contained expression tell of a much deeper, longer-lasting tragedy.
Klaus Billing, himself a replacement for the baritone's own accompanist, unacceptable to Schiller, is hardly in the class of Moore, Demus, Barenboim or Brendel, Fischer-Dieskau's later partners on his winter journey, but he is always adequate. There is an occasional ghostly hum on the tape and a few studio noises are discernible, but by and large the recording is clear, forward and astonishingly faithful to the voice. We must be grateful that this historic document is now generally available, for it uncovers the groundwork for the greater interpretations to come.'