Fischer-Dieskau was probably the greatest singer of the twentieth century. He was certainly the greatest singer of Lieder the world has ever known. Seldom is any one person so important and influential that he becomes universally acknowledged as the best in his field. Who is the best pitcher ever? The best film director? The best painter? The best guitarist? Many people will argue about those in any number of ways. But if you ask anyone anywhere who’s the best interpreter of Schubert, for example, Fischer-Dieskau will invariably be the answer. You might ask, “what’s the best recording of Winterreise?” The answer is, one of Fischer-Dieskau’s. Indeed, the second- and third-best recordings may also be Fischer-Dieskau’s. He recorded the cycle at least a half dozen times over a career of some forty years.

Indeed, an unparalleled body of recorded works may be Fischer-Dieskau’s greatest professional legacy. He is perhaps the single most recorded singer of all time. He sang thousands of songs, and an enormous number of roles in oratorios and operas, in German, French, Italian, English, Russian, Hungarian, Spanish, and on and on. My personal collection contains more Fischer-Dieskau recordings than I can count (hundreds of discs, at least), and yet I have barely scratched the surface.

My first exposure to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau came in the form of his recording of Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe with pianist Alfred Brendel. To this day, it remains among my favorite compact discs. [Note: in a future post, I will review several different recordings of Dichterliebe, including several sung by Fischer-Dieskau.] In the process of acquiring recordings of vocal repertoire, it became inevitable that I would find a great deal of Fischer-Dieskau in my collection, since he was so versatile and prolific. After a while I had grown so fond of his voice and style, I began actively seeking out his recordings. Some are easy to find, others presented challenges. A years-long quest to obtain a deluxe twenty-one-disc set of material new to compact disc was successfully concluded a couple years ago. Likewise, his recording of Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler was nearly impossible to find until last year. My collecting continues, and probably always will.

Though no short remembrance on this or any other webpage could do justice to a career as important as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s, I would be remiss if I did not post a few short clips of the singer’s miraculous voice. These selections are not intended to be broadly representative of anything; they are merely recordings I like and have ready access to at the moment. The first is an early recording of “Auf dem Hügel sitz ich spähend” from Beethoven’s song cycle, An die ferne Geliebte:

Fischer-Dieskau recorded the major song cycles of Schubert several times over. Here is “Der Atlas” from a 1962 performance of Schwanengesang:

Fischer-Dieskau owned Winterreise. Early versions from the LP era with pianists Jörg Demus and Gerald Moore are considered classics. But even in the mid-1980s, Fischer-Dieskau’s was still beautiful, as you’ll hear in this performance of “Der Lindenbaum”:

Finally, among my favorite recordings is a 1968 Des Knaben Wunderhorn conducted by George Szell. From the moment I first heard it, I loved how Fischer-Dieskau sings “Wir hat dies Liedlein erdacht?”:

It is not possible for me to post here clips from all my treasured Fischer-Dieskau recordings. Instead, as time goes on I will post reviews of these discs and sets individually. It cannot be overstated how important an artist Fischer-Dieskau was, and still is, to me.

Years ago, I wrote to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in Berlin, at an address supplied to me by Monika Wolf. I did not really expect a reply. I wanted only to tell the master how much I appreciated his work. A few weeks later I opened my mail box to find a small envelope, on the back of which was written, “Fischer-Dieskau”. Inside was an autographed photo. Looking at the envelope even today, I am still struck by the idea that this great musician—a man who, a hundred years from now, will be spoken of with reverence—put pen to paper and wrote down my name.

Farewell, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. And thank you.

For the record, I use Facebook. I find it a convenient way to stay in touch with a small group friends and family, some of whom live in far away places. I may see most of these people in person on a regular basis, but some I cannot, and Facebook makes staying in touch much easier. I have frequently noted that I graduated high school just before the internet became the ubiquitous entity it is today, and, in spite of my best intentions, within a year or two of graduation, I found it impossible to keep tabs on the many friends whose company I enjoyed, but who had moved away to attend college or see the world. I wasn’t able to exchange email addresses with my classmates, and none of them knew at the time what their telephone numbers would be for the next six months, let alone six years. (Remember, too, that, at that time, almost no one had a mobile phone, and even those who did had to get a new number each time they moved.) Facebook, for better or for worse, has made it possible to keep up with the lives of the people you care about, even if you cannot be near them.

Facebook reportedly has nearly a billion active users worldwide, with revenue, mostly from advertising, at over $3 billion per year. When its stock goes public on Friday—at an initial price of nearly $40 per share—it is expected to bring in more than $100 billion, and make its CEO one of the richest men on earth.

But let us put this in perspective. The Coca-Cola Company, in business since 1892, sells well over a billion drinks every day. It earns tens of billions of dollars each year in revenue and employs well over a hundred thousand people. There is a Coke bottling plant in my town. The Ford Motor Company, in business since 1903, is the world’s fifth largest auto maker, selling millions of vehicles each year in the United States alone. Its net profit in 2011 was over $6.5 billion. Ford employs over two hundred thousand people not including the many thousands who work at Ford dealerships across the country, selling and servicing the vehicles. As I write this, Ford stock is trading at $10.28 per share; Coke is trading at $62.46 per share.

By the end of trading on Friday, who knows where Facebook’s stock will be trading? Maybe $75 per share. Perhaps $100. It will certainly be trading higher than Ford, but may trade higher than Coca-Cola, or even McDonald’s. It will be trading higher than Microsoft, the company that makes the software that a vast majority of Facebook users use to access the site. This defies reason. Facebook may have millions of users; it may be hugely popular; it may be open in your internet browser right now, but Facebook is not worth more than Ford, or Coke, or McDonald’s.

I am not saying Facebook is not a valuable brand. Obviously, with so many users, the potential for ad revenue is substantial. But the internet is an entity even more mysterious than the stock market, and history has shown us that investor enthusiasm for internet companies has a tremendously costly downside. America Online was once the most-used internet service provider in the United States. Its name was practically synonymous with “internet”. It became so large that it was able to buy Time Warner, the company that owns half of the entertainment you consume each year. A decade after the AOL/Time Warner merger, AOL had a net revenue of -$700 million per year.

I don’t know if I believe that Facebook will someday crash as spectacularly as AOL did, but I don’t believe it will be the final social networking site on the internet, and I don’t believe it will worth much ten years from now. Amazon.com is one of the few websites that survived the dot com bubble of the early 2000s and came out stronger. But Amazon actually sells things. Lots of things. So does Ford. So does Coke. Facebook doesn’t. In fact, if Facebook tried to sell its service, tens of millions of people would immediately stop using it. Likewise, the advertising that supports the site can only become so pervasive before users resent it and flee to some other, perhaps yet-to-be-developed service. This may already be happening. Ask yourself how Facebook, whose revenue is dependent on advertising, could become worth more than the Time Warner Company (trading today at $35 per share), which owns Time Warner Cable, and at least ten cable television channels, all of which are bursting with advertising. It doesn’t make sense. And when you consider how readily users abandoned Friendster and MySpace, the future doesn’t look bright for Facebook.

So, consider my warning: Unless you can buy Facebook stock when it goes on sale on Friday—and quickly dump it—don’t buy it at all, because I don’t see any way that, ten years from now, Facebook’s stock price will be anywhere near where it closes on Friday afternoon. And however popular it is today, no serious person could believe that Facebook will be around as long as Ford or Coke.

I don’t listen to top-forty radio, and I never see music videos, so whatever exposure I have had to current pop music has been on late-night television. The current season of Saturday Night Live has had its share of disposable “musical” guests, but it has also had some (to me) surprises – performers I had never heard of, whose music intrigued me.

The first was Bon Iver. When I saw the performance, I immediately thought, Steve Winwood lives! And that’s a compliment, since I am not used to many artists today going to the effort to make such elaborate arrangements. Multiple guitars, keyboards, horns, and a host of percussion make for a very rich sound. At a time when, it seems to me, what passes for a song is little more than an electronic drumbeat and a musical hook lifted wholly from another, superior song, I am comforted to hear something so sophisticated. Watch the clip (probably available for only a short time), and see if you can spot the Winwood.

The second performance that pleased me was by Gotye, who played a song called “Somebody I Used to Know”. Much more compelling than the typical break-up song, “Somebody I Used to Know” seems to be about guy whose ex-girlfriend has shunned him, which would not be so unusual absent his surprisingly self-aware observations, notably, “I told myself that you were right for me, but felt so lonely in your company”. Indeed, listening closely to the lyrics, I was taken by the complexity of the emotions. On one hand, the song claims that “you can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness, / Like resignation to the end, always the end”. Nevertheless, the speaker is hurt by his former lover’s coldness: “But you didn’t have to cut me off; / Make out like it never happened and that we were nothing. / And I don’t even need your love, / But you treat me like a stranger and that feels so rough”. Next, in a clever but lifelike twist, we hear the ex-lover’s perspective, and it contradicts his own. He is not, it seems, the innocent victim of her callousness, but the oblivious saboteur of their relationship. And in a brilliant turn, she turns his own phrasing against him: “You said that you could let it go / And I wouldn’t catch you hung up on somebody that you used to know”.

The arrangement is also compelling, particularly given the simplicty of the song itself, and so far from what I would have imagined had I written it, that I have to smile at its efficiency. Watch this video (probably only available for a short time) to see what I mean. Pay attention, too, to the visual performance, especially after the female singer appears. Both singers seem to be acting their roles, and the cameras do a good job framing the confrontation, notably by showing her in the foreground facing away from him. (Also, he looks and dresses just like my grad school adviser.)

Two years on and the scars from that night’s storm are still visible. Two blocks north of me, a house that was heavily damaged that night now stands vacant. A tree had fallen across the roof and driveway, damaging the house next door in the process. The next door house got fixed, but a few months after the storm, and the tarpaulins that had been placed temporarily over the damaged roof had broken down or blown away, leaving massive holes open to the elements. Only a couple months ago did a new, more secure looking tarp appear over that house. Elsewhere, the half-ground stump of the giant tree that crushed the sidewalk along 6th Street is still visible in the now otherwise bare yard of the old farmhouse at 31st Avenue. The city replaced the sidewalk shortly after the storm, and the street has been repaved, too. The white house at the corner, the back half of which had been almost flattened, has been completely repaired. If you look closely you can see that the bricks on the east side have been replaced, and the spot where the enormous oak tree stood is bare.

We were lucky that night: our house, and the houses of our neighbors were unharmed. They say it may have been a tornado that plowed through. I can’t say, but I was glad to get by unscathed. Still, two years on that storm is fresh in my memory.

Unlike another ball park that opened the same day, however, Tiger Stadium is only a memory now. Its demise is one of the most unfortunate in the history of baseball, and, in a city that is a pale shadow of its former glory, it is surely missed. Its destruction must count as another shameful example of the short-sightedness, iconoclasm, and willful disrespect for tradition that has severely hurt baseball, and has seen too many great old parks fall victim to the wrecking ball. Consider this: after Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, the next oldest parks in Major League Baseball are Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, Angel Stadium of Anaheim, Oakland Coliseum, and Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City. Tropicana Field is the eighth oldest ball park in the Majors. Now, Dodger Stadium is, in my opinion, a modernist masterpiece, and I appreciate Kauffman Stadium, too, but the destruction of Comiskey Park, Cleveland Municipal Stadium, and Yankee Stadium ought to be considered scandalous given the banality of their replacements.

Surely, few people miss Jack Murphy Stadium, the Metrodome, or Three Rivers Stadium. And even if I personally have fond memories of Fulton County Stadium, and even if the Astrodome was a modern marvel, they had their flaws. So did Candlestick Park (which still stands) and Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. In any event, Camden Yards and PNC Park are each striking in their own way. Rangers Ballpark is one of my favorite designs, and the view from the new Busch Stadium is vastly superior to the old, closed-in design that obstructed views of St. Louis’ most iconic landmark.

Of all cities, New York—where memories of Ebbets Field seem to send old Brooklyn fans into fits of reverie—should have been more appreciative of the majesty of Yankee Stadium, if not the style of Shea. Alas, greed proved more potent than pride and tradition, and the House that Ruth Built is lost. Ages hence, a white-haired Billy Crystal will look into some documentarian’s camera and lament the loss of his childhood.

What difference does it make, so long as the crowds want to come? Nostalgia is my answer. Red Sox fans who attended games at Fenway with their fathers, who attended games with their fathers, can give those same memories to their own sons. When I visited Wrigley Field in 2008, I could tell my wife how it looked exactly the same as it did when I saw it on television with my grandfather almost a quarter century before. And, though he never saw a game there in person, had he gone there as a boy it would have looked the same. That means something.

Fenway Park turned one hundred years old today, and tens of thousands of Bostonians turned out to wish her a happy birthday, with best wishes for another hundred years. Alas, Detroit lost that chance when Tiger Stadium disappeared in 2009. However appealing construction of Comerica Park may have seemed at the end of the last century, the new stadium will not live to see its one hundredth birthday; I’d bet money on it. But I wouldn’t bet my memories, and that’s what makes me and the iconoclasts different.

Consider the popular image of the ship as a floating palace, with opulent ballrooms, elegant dining halls, grand staircases, and vast promenades, where passengers of different classes were kept separate, and where your class largely determined whether you survived the voyage. Almost all of the first-class female passengers survived, while many, if not most, of the female third-class passengers perished. Consider the spirit of hubris and optimism that caused its builders to provide lifeboat capacity for fewer than half the passengers under the best-case scenario. Given that some lifeboats were launched with as few as a dozen passengers, the picture becomes much more bleak. The same irresponsible forces were at play in other disasters of the era. The Iroquois Theatre fire comes to mind.

Titanic fascinates us because, in some ways, it stands as a metaphor for nineteenth century society. Beneath the ship’s splendid exterior were men and machinery, making it all work. And the photographs of elegantly-dressed passengers amid the splendor of Titanic’s luxurious rooms belie the tremendous danger that all were in, though they didn’t know it. Plus, shipwrecks are just fascinating in general. In 1750 Samuel Johnson wrote that “almost all the fictions of the last age will vanish, if you deprive them of a hermit and a wood, a battle and a shipwreck”. Shipwrecks make for good stories, and, as it has been commonly observed that nothing is more dramatic than real life.

I remember reading or hearing about Titanic when I was a small child. But I recall being spellbound when, in the mid-1980s, the wreck was located. National Geographic made a television special about the discovery, and I watched it with tremendous interest. They showed images of the wreck at the bottom of the sea, and it was like seeing a ghost. The ship’s bell, its wheel, the rail above the bow – it all astonished me.

Ten years after Titanic was rediscovered, I had largely forgotten about it. I mean, if I was asked a Jeopardy question about it I am sure I would have answered correctly, but I didn’t think about it often. So, when the film Titanic was released in 1997, I didn’t really care. All my friends went to see it. We refered to it as “Crytanic”. Mostly I just thought Leonardo DiCaprio seemed like a terrible over-actor. Then, in 1998 or 1999, I went to see the band NRBQ play a show in Tampa. They played a song that sounded made up on-the-spot, but that I remember to this day. It was a sort of list of all the stuff that was making headlines—indeed, the stories that wouldn’t go away—at that time. Prominently mentioned were “el Niño”, “Year 2000 Computer Disaster”, and, of course, Titanic. The verse went like so:

That was a pretty accurate summation of public consciousness at the time.

I did eventually see the film, and my opinion of Mr. DiCaprio’s performance was confirmed. But Kate Winslet was fair of face, and the story was gripping. Friday night we went on a double date with a lovely couple, Michael and Mandy, and we saw Titanic in its newly-engineered 3D format. (I will say, for the record, that I do not like 3D movies. It never looks like real life because photography itself cannot mimic what the eye sees. That is, 3D films rely on a standard formula of shallow depth-of-field and selective focus. The director chooses an object in the frame to focus on, and the rest goes totally soft from the wide aperture. Often, he will adjust focus so that the a new object becomes the subject, while the other goes soft. Granted, our eyes do this all the time, but they do it instantly.  What the human eye can accomplish the lens cannot, and, too often, the 3D film looks like a Viewmaster slide.) Though it was not originally shot in 3D, the transfer was skilfully handled, by which I mean it was not obnoxiously done, with silly gimmicks, like chunks of iceberg seeming to fly out of the screen. With so many distant-perspective shots in Titanic, it seems like a logical choice to give it a go, and I admit it could have been a lot worse. My opinion of Leonardo DiCaprio has not changed. Why does he always seem like he’s acting in a high school play? And while Kate Winslet remains beautiful, I did not realize before that her character is supposed to be seventeen. I was not convinced. Though I still found the story compelling, many of the special effects look awful. I have criticized CGI for years, and in spite of substantial improvements in computer technology, CGI still does not look as good as traditional special effects with models. Nearly every film I have seen that uses a considerable amount of CGI has disappointed me. Both Incredible Hulk-inspired films looked terrible. Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films looked fake. Not quite Elliott in Pete’s Dragon fake, but close. And last night we watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes and it looked so cartoonish that I couldn’t decide which was worse, the special effects or the story. Both were nearly unwatchable. I am not exaggerating when I say that Dr. Zaius looked far more realistic in 1968 than Caesar did in 2011. The Titanic filmmakers used lots of models, and those look great. But the CGI effects, especially long sweeping shots of the ship’s deck and surroundings, look cartoonish. Indeed, in several instances, the computer-generated passengers walking along the decks looked like a video game. Grand Theft Auto: Titanic. Considering the film’s budget, that is disappointing. They would have done better to build a model on a set and use cranes to shoot it.

All that said, we had a splendid time with Mandy and Michael, and the sinking of Titanic is still fascinating, even a century after it happened.

MLB.TV is like Netflix, insofar as you stream content through a device like a video game console, and select from menus like on Netflix. But instead of movies, you are selecting baseball games. Any baseball game, in fact, being played across all of Major League Baseball. So, want to see the Hated Yankees playing against the Orioles in Baltimore? No problem. St. Louis at Cincinnati? Sure. Kansas City at Oakland? Yep. You can even chose which announces you want to hear. That is, if you want to hear the regular Atlanta announcers in the game against Houston (playing tonight as the Colt .45s), you can do that. Or you can hear the Astros’ announcers. And, unlike, say, a DVR, which only allows you to rewind an unrecorded program as far back as the moment you tuned in, this service lets you rewind any game to the very beginning. Oh, and when the inning ends, instead of going to commercials, you see a blank screen. It’s enormously refreshing.

In 1989, Back to the Future, Part II predicted that by 2015 we would have hoverboards, flying cars, and holographic billboards for Jaws sequels. It didn’t predict this.

First,spring is here officially, and so is Daylight Saving Time, which I love. I’ve been going in to work at half past five in the morning this week, and yesterday I was in class until after six o’clock at night. Still, though I had dinner out last night, I still made it home before dark. That makes me happy. The azaleas are just fading, but the jasmine is getting ready.

What also makes me happy is that we had the warmest winter I can ever remember. It was genuinely cold only a handful of days this year, and we barely ran the heater at home. Our electric bills were lower than ever.

We are in a Golden Age of University of Florida baseball. Last night was their first loss in something like nineteen games, and UF is the number one team in the country right now. But, sadly, it won’t last. Many of the team’s best players are seniors, or juniors who will be tempted to go pro. Next year’s team will look a lot different. Meanwhile, I have been doing my best to get to the ballpark for every game, but school work has made me miss a couple now.

I am looking forward to putting this writing project behind me so I can get back to the things I really care about.

On Tuesday night Satchel’s caught fire. Fortunately, no one seems to have been injured, and the structure was not a complete loss, as was the case with Napolitano’s some years back. But the kitchen was pretty well trashed, and the restaurant will likely be closed for weeks while they get it back in order. These will be a long few weeks, then, for a lot of people who love Satchel’s.