Did you ever walk into a museum room and one piece stood out more than the others? Not a well-known one, nor one you were eager to see, but one you did not know and compelled you to go straight to the other end of the room. It happened to me at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, with a painting of a man in dark clothes standing on a light gray background and gazing to the left.

This article's poem is a part of the most well-known diptych in the repertoire, it is the one that Goethe published under the title Wandrers Nachtlied [Wanderer's Night Song]. It was accompanied, on the same page, by another poem called Ein gleiches, “one of equal”, that is, another wanderer's night song.

Just a few weeks after Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was born, Nicolai Gedda, another great singer from the second half of the 20th century, was born in Stockholm on July 11, 1925.

Being very poor, the parents of Harry Gustav Nikolaj Gädda did not show him much love. The father had [...]

At the end of the article I wrote last week, I mentioned Otto Böhler. But before I published, I thought that maybe not everyone would remember him or at least his name. So I quickly added to the text that I would tell you about him, and here it is.

The boy who would become our Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was born in Berlin on May 28, 1925. And I say our without any intention of disrespecting him, rather it is the opposite. Fischer-Dieskau is a cultural heritage of Lied, just as many other things, material and immaterial, are a culture heritage of humanity.