Great Performers: Edwin Fischer
It is hard to imagine a time when the great masterpieces of music were not available for home listening, yet there was a first recording for everything. It took considerable effort for the Swiss pianist Edwin Fischer to produce the first complete cycle of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier in the 1930s: 18 sessions over the course of four years resulted in the 30-plus records (four to five minutes per side) being issued in five volumes of discs, all made possible by prepaid subscriptions. Although hundreds of versions in better sound have since been made, Fischer’s cycle is still considered a reference recording.
Read more…Born in 1886, Fischer studied with Hans Huber in his home town of Basel before moving to Berlin to train with Liszt’s pupil Martin Krause (who later taught Claudio Arrau). After graduation, Fischer himself would become a teacher, a role he relished for the rest of his life – among his more famous pupils are Alfred Brendel, Daniel Barenboim and Paul Badura-Skoda – in addition to his successful international career as a soloist, conductor, and chamber musician.
Fischer’s discography is heavily weighted towards the Baroque and Classical masterpieces of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, as well as Handel, Schubert, and Brahms. His broad repertoire had included the Romantic works of Chopin and Liszt, as well as the then avant-garde Medtner, and in lessons he would demonstrate equal facility with compositions by Debussy, Hindemith, Scriabin, and Stravinsky – regrettably, he recorded not a note by any of these composers. Playing with "the strength and softness of a lion's velvet paw", Fischer fused passion with calm certainty and reverential respect for the spirit of the score. There are glimmers of a volcanic temperament, particularly in his earlier recordings, but nowhere can one detect signs of the nerves that plagued him before concert and studio appearances, and which would adversely affect his health and hasten his retirement in 1955 (he died in 1960).
Fischer’s lyrical, elegant, and sumptuously-phrased Bach might be considered stylistically inauthentic to academics, but with his mindful intent to "revive the works without doing harm to them", his beautiful readings of Bach’s concerto and solo compositions exude such reverence that they continue to delight the present-day listener. His luminous sonority and fluid lyricism bring warmth and charm, as well as depth, to his Mozart. His Beethoven is characterized by his beautiful burnished tone and contrasts – as Alfred Brendel said, "wildness and gentleness were never far from each other."
As a chamber musician, Fischer was attentive to his collaborative role, never overshadowing his partners in performances that are a model of devoted music-making. The Beethoven "Archduke" Trio from a Salzburg concert is rightly seen as a reference recording, as is his inspired traversal of Schubert songs with legendary soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Fischer’s Brahms embodies the dichotomous joy and melancholy of that composer’s oeuvre, the sublime Violin Sonata recordings with Gioconda de Vito seamlessly phrased and richly textured.
A tireless advocate for living, breathing, alive music-making, Fischer epitomized his intent to play truthfully: "from the heart," as Beethoven once said, "may it go to the heart."