Music: Busy Baritone

To help quiet his preperformance jitters and tune up his musical perception, German Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau packs his luggage with a few tested literary tranquilizers: some volumes of poetry, selected detective stories, classics such as Crime and Punishment. As he wound up his third U.S. tour last week on the West Coast, nobody thought to ask him whether he was stoking his emotional fires on Donne or Dostoevsky or Dashiell Hammett. What mattered was that he was in top vocal form, and that meant that he was giving his audiences the most moving...