One of the most vaunted baritones of the century, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau has sung just about everything. Why? The thing everybody says about him is that he is primarily a highly-skilled Lieder singer with a talent for imbuing every word with meaning. On the other hand, he might be seen as terribly fussy, and rather self-conscious in what he does. In particular, people tend to have difficulty accepting his attempts at Verdi, for example Falstaff, Iago and Rigoletto, all three of which are generally considered to require a big, imposing voice and, in the case of the latter two, quite a frightening one. Dietrich-Fischer Dieskau's voice is neither big, nor frightening. It is in fact extremely ordinary. It is also rather small. And he has an annoying tendency to bark out his high notes and spit out his consonants. Many of the roles he has taken on really require a heavier voice with more depth - he has sung Bartók's Bluebeard, for example, and cannot really sing the low F required of him in the first line. Neither can he convince us that he is really dangerous. In his recording of the work opposite real-life wife Julia Varady, she sounds much more frightening than he does (I know there's an argument for this, but all the same I don't think Bluebeard should be a total wimp). To sing Wotan on Karajan's Rheingold he is very obviously miked closer than all the other singers in order to be heard, which is rather jarring throughout most of the opera.

An additional annoyance is that since he married Julia Varady, they seem to have been compelled to appear together in a good many performances and recordings. This is understandable personally, but often inappropriate artistically. The Bluebeard mentioned above is one example. Another one is their recording of Ariadne in which Fischer-Dieskau is too old to be a wholly satisfying music master. It is a shame that so many of Varady's recordings have been weakened in this way.

There are exceptions. His Count Almaviva on Böhm's DG recording of Le Nozze di Figaro is good, and his Gunther for Solti (often accused of being 'too intelligent' whatever that means) is definitely way above average, both vocally and dramatically. He also sang an excellent Kurwenal in Furtwängler's classic account of Tristan und Isolde with Flagstad and Suthaus, though in all these cases there are singers I would prefer to hear.