The obiuaries tended to speak of the end of an era when the greatest German singer died last week and it is easy to see why.  In many ways he encapsulated the experience of being  German in the  twentieth century like few others.  He was born just before he qualified for what Helmut Kohl called “Die Gnade der späten Geburt”, the mercy of having been born too late to have been forced to make some kind of  decision on what to do about the German catastrophe of World War Two.  As  a late teenager he was conscripted into an  army and a war that his family hated – the Nazis had killed his brother as part of their eugenics campaign – and ended up serving briefly and harmlessly on the Eastern Front before being captured just before the end of the war and sent off to allied POW camps.
From then on his life became a triumphal march through the world of European, and especially German, music, something the Germans could be proud of after their miserable performance in history.  He rarely left Europe and never sang at the Met,  as he dominated the repertoire of German song as no one else will ever do, while makin relatively rare forays onto the opera stage as well, mainly in Munich and Berlin.  While the obituaries focussed on the monumental scale of his Lieder recordings, those who saw his on-stage dramatic performances of characters as different as the wily comic Gianni Schicchi and the towering tormented Lear may well consider these life-encompssing portrayals to be his most enduring performances.  There will probably always be a new singer who can come close to the dramatic sensitivity  of his Lieder singing, if not at all to the scope of his repertoire (as the wonderfully professional and splendidly-voiced Christian Gerhaher recently displayed  in his Vancouver recital) – there is nobody out there who can come close to the staggering King Lear he created after personally commissioning the work from Aribert Reimann.  Though there are excerpts on DVD of this  shattering performance in Das Bayrische  Nationaltheater, you really had to be there to experience it.  And it may well be that  for that reason there will probably never be another performer like him, as he had experienced the deep depths and the splendid triumphs of  modern life  first-hand  and had found a way to bring it across unforgettably to a vast audience for more than half a century.