The seventieth-birthday presents are still coming in, and here is EMI’s to Fischer-Dieskau the opera singer. Neither fully representative nor entirely well-balanced, it is still a more than acceptable offering, with a number of surprises in it, including several of a most agreeable kind. The absence of Mozart and Strauss has to be noted, and some might object that Verdi’s is a disproportionate presence, the performances being at any rate somewhat controversial. The Wagnerian selections will certainly be welcomed, and as the small print comes to be studied it reveals rarities, among them a few from the dying days of the 78, and a couple that may well be new altogether.
One of these is a lengthy excerpt from Pfitzner’s Der arme Heinrich. The insert-notes are no use at all here, for they say nothing about Fischer-Dieskau’s association with the opera (was it in fact confined to this?) or about the piece itself: yet here is a 17-minute stretch of narrative from a little-known work, and appreciation depends on some knowledge of the context. It could have been provided quite briefly, as follows: Poor Henry is a knight whose mysteriously contracted disease prevents him from fulfilling his destiny, which is to be a hero. His vassal, Dietrich, goes to Salerno to consult a famous physician and now returns with the news that recovery depends on the voluntary sacrifice of a young virgin (the only eligible member of the cast being Dietrich’s own daughter). This is “Dietrichs Erzahlung”, performed originally as a concert-piece before the premiere of the opera itself, and rarely can it have been better sung than by the present Dietrich in this recording of 1979.
The items that were allocated 78rpm catalogue numbers are the finale of Act 3 in Lortzing’s Undine and the Falstaff-Fluth duet from Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor. Both are excellent recordings, the first with Rita Streich at her sweetest (both of tone and expression), the second with the magnificent Gottlob Frick. That duet is one of several tracks that show Fischer-Dieskau’s gift for comedy. Another is the Rodolfo-Marcel duet from La boheme with Rudolph Schock (taken from a highlights recording in German), and others are the two extracts from Falstaff, infinitely resourceful, mercurial performances from the Verdi recital of 1959 in which the Berlin Philharmonic was conducted by Erede. Philip Hope-Wallace, reviewing the original issue (3/61), enjoyed it, calling on his store of “old-fashioned German epithets of admiration”: “Prima! Ganz tip-top”. Desmond Shawe-Taylor in his July retrospect was more cautious, unable, for example, to reconcile himself to the mezza voce high G in “Il balen” (it “belongs to another world”). Many listeners will experience a similar difficulty, and yet how refreshing it is to hear Verdi sung on the assumption that there is intelligent, as well as emotional, lyrical and rhetorical, sense to be made. The booklet, incidentally, has a fine selection of photographs (including one of Falstaff in the washing-basket), and the transfers are not invariably of the hard, over-bright, rattly type that sends one back thankfully to the LPs.'