Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (1925-2012)

The New York Times obituary describes Fischer-Dieskau's experience as a German in World War II:

[I]n 1943, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and assigned to care for army horses on the Russian front. He kept a diary there, calling it his “attempt at preserving an inner life in chaotic surroundings.” . . .

“Lots of cold, lots of slush, and even more storms,” read [one entry]. “Every day horses die for lack of food.”

It was in Russia that he heard that his mother had been forced to send his brother to an institution outside Berlin. “Soon,” he wrote later, “the Nazis did to him what they always did with cases like his: they starved him to death as quickly as possible.”

And then his mother’s apartment in Lichterfelde was bombed. Granted home leave to help her, he found that all that remained of their possessions could be moved to a friend’s apartment in a handcart. But as early as his second day home, he and his mother began seeking out “theater, concerts, a lot of other music — defying the irrational world.”

Instead of returning to the disastrous campaign in Russia, he was diverted to Italy along with thousands of other German soldiers. There, on May 5, 1945, just three days before the Allies accepted the German surrender, he was captured and imprisoned. It turned out to be musical opportunity: soon the Americans were sending him around to entertain other P.O.W.’s from the back of a truck. The problem was, they were so pleased with this arrangement that they kept him until June 1947. He was among the last Germans to be repatriated.

Here's Fischer-Dieskau singing "Gute Nacht," from Schubert's Winterreise (with Murray Perahia on piano):



Many of the comments on that YouTube video were posted today, echoing the song title:

Gute Nacht, meine freund ;(

(The third movement from A German Requiem by Brahms.)

The top 10 greatest classical composers (8, 7 . . .)

(The complete list.)

8. Chopin

The quintessential lone pianist exploring his soul through the instrument. The most intimate and introverted of the greats.

Some of the most characteristically Chopinesque pieces are his 58 Mazurkas. (A mazurka is a traditional Polish folk dance that might have been fairly obscure if not for Chopin.) Here are 7 of them, played by Evgeny Kissin (for a list of the specific pieces, click through to YouTube):



Here are Chopin's 24 Preludes, played by Yuja Wang:




7. Schubert

Impossible to neatly label or summarize. Is he Classical or Romantic or what? Who cares? His body of work is fascinatingly varied and staggeringly huge, yet he died at only 31 — a terrible loss to music.

He's known for his over 600 songs (in the traditional sense of "short pieces that are sung"). But I'm more interested in classical music without vocals, so here are a few of my favorites:

Schubert's 5th Symphony is like the best Mozart symphony Mozart never wrote. He was only 19 when he wrote this (conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada):



His String Quintet (for the unusual lineup of string quartet plus an extra cello, instead of an extra viola) is at the highest level of any chamber music by anyone. It was his last instrumental composition, written just two months before he died. This performance by the Afiara Quartet plus Joel Krosnick starts at 8:20, after Krosnick's introduction:



I had lent a few CDs to a friend who was getting into classical music, and he brought up the last movement of the "Trout" Quintet (which also has an unusual lineup: piano, violin, viola, cello, and double-bass). I've talked before about how it's the rare piece of music that gives me a strong feeling of: "Aha, this is it!" My friend essentially told me he felt that way about the "Trout" finale. So do I, and here it is (played by Julian Rachlin, Mischa Maisky, Mihaela Ursuleasa, Nobuko Imai, and Stacey Watton):



The "Unfinished" Symphony has a profound sense of completeness: