Creativity Quote by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

Fischer-Dieskau is quietly refusing the museum-glass version of genius. The sentence sounds mild, even politely academic, but its intent is pointed: Schubert's songs should not be treated as floating, ahistorical beauty. They are evidence, and they can do civic work. By saying "rather", he’s positioning himself against an implied opponent - the listening culture that wants Schubert as pure lyricism, safely sealed off from class, labor, precarity, and patronage.

The phrasing matters. "Very good" is deliberately understated, the kind of restraint that signals conviction without sermonizing. "Reminded" also sidesteps the more aggressive verbs (expose, indict), making the argument harder to dismiss as ideology. It’s a performer’s move: he’s asking for a change in attention, not a political program. Yet the subtext is political all the same. Schubert "had to work" under conditions that constrained and shaped the art: limited institutional support, dependence on salons and friends, the economics of publication, the physical demands of constant composing, and a Viennese culture where a composer could be celebrated in a room yet remain financially insecure.

Coming from Fischer-Dieskau - a singer who helped canonize the Lieder recital as high art in the postwar era - the line reads like an ethical check on his own tradition. Lieder can invite bourgeois intimacy: a piano, a voice, private feeling. He insists that intimacy is not innocence. The songs are not just vehicles for exquisite interpretation; they are documents of how artistry survives inside systems that do not reliably reward it. That’s why it works: it turns listening into a form of historical memory, and memory into responsibility.