Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was a German baritone, born in Berlin in May 1925. Leonard Bernstein, the conductor and composer of "West Side Story", called him "the most significant singer of the 20th century".
The Nazis starved his disabled brother to death and drafted the future baritone into the army. On the Russian front he reportedly sang to the horses in his charge. He ended the war, and began his career, singing for fellow prisoners at an American POW camp near Pisa.
Though Fischer-Dieskau was an opera singer, his speciality was Lieder, German songs. His signature work was "Winterreise", a haunting song cycle by Franz Schubert, which he recorded seven times. Where tenors like Pavarotti threw out a net with a glorious voice reaching every corner of a hall, Fischer-Dieskau sought to "pull the net back with fish in it", drawing the audience to him in an experience that was intimate and as much intellectual as emotional. He was obsessed with words, to the point where some critics accused him of sacrificing the song's melodic line to them.
Benjamin Appl, a baritone and Fischer-Dieskau's last student, has recorded an album in homage to him.
Very few people do anything creative after the age of thirty-five. The reason is that very few people do anything creative before the age of thirty-five.