He sang these to family friends at home as a teenager, they were on his first released record, he programmed them in the first song recital after his return from being a prisoner of war, and finally sang them to Furtwängler, which changed his career.
A person very close to him later told me that while working with me, it took him back to his own first steps as a singer in the early days of his life, which were overshadowed by war and imprisonment.
The third song, “O death, how bitter you are,” took on a whole new dimension for him when his beloved first wife, Irmel, tragically lost her life in 1963 during the birth of their third son.
In the summer of 2009, as a young singer, I hesitantly signed up for a masterclass in Austria with Fischer-Dieskau, and so first met and got to know this titan of the music world.
For FiDi, it was not Schubert’s Winterreise that played the greatest role in his artistic and personal life, but Brahms’s Four Serious Songs.
