Albert Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was born on May 28, 1925 in Berlin. He was the youngest of three sons from his father's second marriage. His father, Albert (1865-1937), a classical scholar, was a secondary school principal, and his mother, Dora (1884-1966) was a teacher. Fischer-Dieskau's family background was rooted in what might be called the 'professional' middle class of teachers, doctors, architects, and clergymen; however, his father's mother was a member of the von Dieskau family, one of whose ancestors was that Kammerherr von Dieskau for whom J.S. Bach wrote his 'Peasant Cantata' in 1742.
'Edith Schmidt (nee Fischer), later a close confidante of her cousin Dietrich, who was younger by some years, was certainly right when she wrote to him: "Your father lived in a wonderful world; he represented a generation that still had so much strength, which we of 1914 no longer possessed." There follows a passage that throws a revealing light on the son, so much more insecure because of the times and his own cast of mind: "for, in addition, as a real Fischer, he kept his own private life inside him, into which not even those closest to him could ever enter." Thus, Fischer-Dieskau's energy and his tendency to introversion are part of his parental inheritance. How much the singer has drawn on both traits is marked, for taciturnity can also indicate a wish to be private, something that was first notable in his singing, in music-making generally, then later in his painting and his writings.' (Hans A. Neunzig, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: A Biography).
