I was a serious piano student of 16 or so when I decided the time had come to discover what German lieder were all about. The first recording I bought was Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert’s “Schöne Müllerin” with the pianist Gerald Moore. This was not Mr. Fischer-Dieskau’s first recording of the cycle, from 1951, but the one he made 10 years later, though I knew nothing of this at the time.


I was immediately hooked. It is a tribute to Mr. Fischer-Dieskau’s artistic greatness and incomparable legacy that I am just one of countless music lovers who had him as their first guide to the art of the song.


Mr. Fischer-Dieskau died on Friday, just shy of his 87th birthday. The music world knew this day would come. But his death reminds me of the way I felt in 1971, when, then a student at Yale, I went to the music building for a piano lesson and saw a note posted on the door with a message of just four words: “Igor Stravinsky died today.” The death of Mr. Fischer-Dieskau feels comparably monumental.


What captivated me in that first experience of his Schubert was the seemingly effortless mix of vocal beauty and verbal directness. Even when not really following the English translation of the German poems, I hung on every word. His technique was superb. In the manner of the great musical theater performers, Mr. Fischer-Dieskau sang as if he were speaking. And there was nothing quite like his voice: a rich, warm, textured baritone. He could dip into his low range and project phrases with chesty emphasis, and soar high, sounding mellifluous and lyrical with almost tenorish colorings.


My collection of Fischer-Dieskau recordings grew steadily, not just songs of Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, Beethoven, Mahler and more, but also his operatic roles. Alas, my experience of his artistry comes mostly from recordings, and in this I am also not alone, at least among Americans. I heard him only in recital. But he sang opera mainly in Berlin, Munich and elsewhere in Europe, and never performed at the Metropolitan Opera.


His voice was probably light for some of the operatic roles he took on, though I remember from his recitals how penetrating and vibrant his sound was. In the theater, as critics and opera buffs consistently reported, he drew listeners in, never forcing his sound, making a virtue of subtlety.


My favorite Fischer-Dieskau opera recording — even more than his distinguished portrayal of Hans Sachs for the conductor Eugen Jochum’s classic account of Wagner’s “Meistersinger” (unrivaled for me) — is Berg’s “Wozzeck,” with Karl Böhm conducting the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin, recorded in 1965. Mr. Fischer-Dieskau utterly inhabits the title role, an oppressed, delusional soldier who is forced to do menial tasks for his captain and subjected to medical experiments by a quack doctor in order to earn some money to support his common-law wife (the great Evelyn Lear) and little boy.


Yet touches of refinement and elegance in his singing lend humanity, even tragic stature, to this lowly character. While conveying the sharp contours and modernism of Berg’s atonal musical language, Mr. Fischer-Dieskau reveals the plaintive lyricism of the vocal writing.


How fitting, and a little eerie, that his death comes 12 days before the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Britten’s “War Requiem,” an enormous work for three vocal soloists, chorus, boys’ choir, organ and two orchestras. It was commissioned for the reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral in England, which had been bombed during World War II.


Britten, a pacifist, incorporated antiwar poems by Wilfred Owen into a setting of the Latin Requiem Mass text. For the premiere performance, as a gesture of reconciliation, Britten wanted as soloists the tenor Peter Pears (an Englishman), the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya (a Russian) and Mr. Fischer-Dieskau (a German), but the Soviets kept Ms. Vishnevskaya from taking part. Britten conducted this shattering work with those soloists for a 1963 recording with the London Symphony Orchestra. Talk about a classic.


Though the statistics are hard to pin down, Mr. Fischer-Dieskau may be the most recorded artist in classical music history. But the stunning range of his recordings of older repertory, which include a survey of the entire catalog of Schubert songs appropriate for the male voice with his faithful collaborator Gerald Moore at the piano, tended to obscure his considerable involvement with contemporary music. He performed operas, concert works and songs by, among others, Hans Werner Henze, Aribert Reimann, Gottfried von Einem and Witold Lutoslawski.


There may have been a slight downside to Mr. Fischer-Dieskau’s reputation as a paragon among lieder singers, a tendency for listeners to take him for granted and search out fresher approaches. But on recording after recording he emerges as a searching and adventurous artist. When he returned to songs he had recorded years and decades earlier, to work with pianists like Sviatoslav Richter, Alfred Brendel and Christoph Eschenbach, he did not simply give his old performances with new partners but threw himself into rethought interpretations.


I get such a kick from a New Yorker cartoon by William Hamilton that appeared in 1975. A Manhattan couple, obviously divorcing, are packing up things and sorting through recordings. In the caption the glowering wife says: “Just a minute! You don’t get three years of my life and the Dietrich Fischer-Dieskaus!”


How poignant that seems today. What could be more central to a person’s well-being than Fischer-Dieskau recordings?