Time & Perspective Quote by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

Panic, dressed up as a rhetorical question. Fischer-Dieskau isn’t just mourning budgets and shuttered venues; he’s mourning a whole civic idea of music: that the orchestra and opera house are places where a society rehearses its values in public, over time, with discipline. When he asks “what unity is to be had,” he’s naming culture as social glue, then pointing to its slow dissolving. The anxiety is institutional, but the target is spiritual: a world that can’t sustain attention long enough to let anything become tradition.

The line about “nothing new... is truly lasting” lands like an indictment of the contemporary pipeline: commission, premiere, polite applause, disappearance. It’s not nostalgia for Brahms as much as suspicion of a culture industry that treats new work like content - consumable, instantly replaceable, optimized for the event rather than the repertoire. “Performed once, and then thrown away” is the language of waste, and it’s deliberate; he’s comparing musical life to a throwaway economy where objects (and, quietly, people and skills) become disposable.

Context matters: Fischer-Dieskau came from the postwar German tradition where Lieder, opera, and orchestral music were not niche hobbies but markers of reconstruction and seriousness. His complaint reads as a late-century warning about fragmentation: when shared institutions vanish, “unity” doesn’t get replaced by freedom; it gets replaced by parallel solitudes. The fear isn’t that music will stop. It’s that it will keep going without a memory.