Schubert’s song “An die Musik” (“To Music”) sets to music a poem of thanks by his friend Franz von Schober. The poem is transmuted from simple verse into a reverential and moving hymn of gratitude for the ways music can transform life. Appropriately, Benjamin Appl chooses this song to open his latest album, For Dieter: The Past and the Future, which is simultaneously a tribute and a memorial to his beloved teacher, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Schubert’s music attempts the impossible -- to express thanks when no words are sufficient. Appl has set himself an equally daunting task: to memorialize one of the giants of classical music and to pay homage to a man whose art and teaching (to borrow Schober’s words) “opened a heaven of better times” for his listeners and pupils.
This album is at least three different things. First, it’s a mini-biography of Fischer-Dieskau, with a nearly 150-page book complete with photographs and artifacts of the great singer's life.
More uniquely, it's a musical biography, with songs chosen to illustrate different aspects of the singer's career. There are rare songs by Fischer-Dieskau’s family, as well as the music that he discovered in his youth and that sustained him through his forced service as a soldier in World War II and his years in a POW camp. His four marriages are captured in music, too. A song for baritone and cello written by Klaus Fischer-Dieskau, the singer’s brother, takes on new meaning in the context of the singer’s grief at the loss of his first wife (a cellist) in childbirth. This relationship was followed by several stabs at finding companionship, until his final union with the soprano Julia Varaday. In a well-chosen pairing, Appl juxtaposes Schubert’s “Liebhaber in allen Gestalten” (“Lover in All Guises”), and Clara Schumann’s “Liebst du um Schonheit” (“If You Love for Beauty”). The first humorously catalogues the mistakes that people sometimes make in relationships, while the second (less familiar in Clara Schumann's setting than in the more famous Mahler version, but just as affecting) comes to the conclusion that we can only be satisfyingly loved for our ability to give love, not for qualities like beauty, youth, or wealth.
Fischer-Dieskau’s musical career is evoked in a wide range of songs (composers range from Tchaikovsky to Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel to Aribert Reimann) and through several significant works that were composed just for him. Appl looks back on his teacher’s life and career with affection and gratitude, while suggesting that others, like he, will continue to be inspired by the great baritone’s example to explore the vast repertoire of art song.
Finally, this album is a memorial -- a very personal and touching tribute from one musician to another. Fischer-Dieskau left his own massive recorded legacy. Appl, in his words, his song selections, and his performances, offers something different, a glimpse of the man in the artist, a portrait that is both affectionate and slyly humorous at times. He reports that on one visit, Fischer-Dieskau told him that he should shorten his name – “Benjamin Appl is too complicated for an international career. You should call yourself Ben Appl from now on.” Appl refrained from pointing out that his teacher’s name was hardly a short and snappy one!
In his program notes, Appl describes preparing for his first masterclass with the man who would become his teacher. He had to send a list of ten Schubert Lieder he would be prepared to work on. Knowing the master's dedication to his art, he submitted thirty possible songs and Fischer-Dieskau responded by asking him to prepare four songs, none of them songs from the list! It must have taken Appl hours to research, plan, assemble, and perfect this album, but it’s clear that he embraced the task with love, curiosity, and a sense of gratitude. The result is a fitting tribute to Fischer-Dieskau in the year that he would have turned 100. If you happen to be able to make it to Carnegie Hall on Tuesday, October 28, 2025, Appl is presenting this material in a program there -- it should be as memorable an evening in the concert hall as it is in its CD incarnation here.
