"You can't do opera when already from the 10th row you can only see little dolls on the stage. In such an enormous space you can't put much faith in the personal presence of the individual singer, which is reflected in facial expressions, among other things"
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Opera dies when the human scale disappears. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau isn’t just nitpicking sightlines; he’s drawing a hard boundary around what he thinks the art form actually is: a close-range exchange of breath, face, and psychological detail, not merely sound projected into a cavern.
The jab at “little dolls” is doing double duty. It’s funny in a dry, disappointed way, but it’s also a warning about what happens when opera chases monumentality - bigger houses, bigger voices, bigger spectacle - and treats intimacy as collateral damage. From the 10th row, the singer becomes an icon rather than a person. You can admire, even be impressed, but you can’t read the micro-drama that makes an aria more than a well-sung melody: the flicker of doubt, the sly smile, the sudden hardening around the eyes. Fischer-Dieskau, famous for lieder and for bringing almost actorly specificity to text, is staking his claim for opera as storytelling, not athletic event.
Context matters: in the postwar boom, opera institutions expanded, new “temples” of culture promised democratic access through sheer capacity, and recordings trained audiences to value sonic perfection. His complaint pushes back against that modern bargain. He’s arguing that “presence” is part of the score, even if it isn’t written on the page. When the room is too big, the performance becomes generalized, and opera’s supposed grandeur starts to feel like a kind of emotional distance.
The jab at “little dolls” is doing double duty. It’s funny in a dry, disappointed way, but it’s also a warning about what happens when opera chases monumentality - bigger houses, bigger voices, bigger spectacle - and treats intimacy as collateral damage. From the 10th row, the singer becomes an icon rather than a person. You can admire, even be impressed, but you can’t read the micro-drama that makes an aria more than a well-sung melody: the flicker of doubt, the sly smile, the sudden hardening around the eyes. Fischer-Dieskau, famous for lieder and for bringing almost actorly specificity to text, is staking his claim for opera as storytelling, not athletic event.
Context matters: in the postwar boom, opera institutions expanded, new “temples” of culture promised democratic access through sheer capacity, and recordings trained audiences to value sonic perfection. His complaint pushes back against that modern bargain. He’s arguing that “presence” is part of the score, even if it isn’t written on the page. When the room is too big, the performance becomes generalized, and opera’s supposed grandeur starts to feel like a kind of emotional distance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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