German baritone singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau dies

Berlin’s Deutsche Oper said the singer of opera and artistic songs died at his home in Bavaria, in southern Germany.

Culture minister Bernd Neumann said Fischer-Dieskau “deeply moved countless people around the world for more than half a century through hundreds of concerts and recordings”.

He said Fischer-Dieskau’s recordings of works by composers such as Mozart, Schubert and Richard Strauss set benchmarks for generations of singers to come, especially through his famous representation of Schubert’s Winter Journey.

Klaus Staeck, president of the German Academy of Arts, said Fischer-Dieskau’s “performances of some of the great roles in operatic history shaped the culture of singing”.

The performer was regarded as one of the world’s great singers from the 1940s to his official retirement in 1992.

He went on to become an influential teacher and orchestra conductor for many years.

He was also a prolific recording artist, setting the modern standard for performances of lieder, the musical settings of poems first popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Fischer-Dieskau’s output included the many hundreds of Schubert songs appropriate for the male voice, the songs and song cycles of Schumann and Brahms, and those of later composers like Mahler, Shostakovich and Hugo Wolf. He won two Grammy Awards, in 1971 for Schubert lieder and in 1973 for Brahms’s Die Schöne Magelone.

Pianist Gerald Moore said Fischer-Dieskau had a flawless sense of rhythm and “one of the most remarkable voices in history – honeyed and suavely expressive.”