the year he became fatally ill, dying in Stockholm, Sweden just a few weeks short of his eightieth birthday. Legacy Fiedler made several commercial recordings, all of music by Brahms, apart from two overtures by Weber. He recorded the Academic Festival Overture'', Symphony No. 2, two movements from the Piano Concerto No. 2 and the Symphony No. 4 with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. In addition a number of his later radio performances have been preserved: these include accounts of Brahms' Violin Concerto and Schumann's Symphony No. 1 from Berlin. Because of his contemporary stature as an interpreter of Brahms and his direct contact with the composer, it is easy to consider Fiedler's performances of Brahms as being in some way 'authentic'. However, the English writer Christopher Dyment has written that, while Fielder was a conductor who ‘... most fully explored every facet of Brahms’s emotional world’, nevertheless his performances, because of their constant shifts of tempo and mannered phrasing—for instance the frequent introduction of unwritten luftpausen—reflected an interpretative model that owed far more to von Bülow than to Brahms. Dyment concluded that in Fiedler's recording of the Symphony No. 4, for instance, ‘…Brahms’s demands for flexibility are here supplied in over-abundance.’ On the other hand, it is known that Brahms conducted his music with occasional unwritten tempo changes. Nonetheless, even if Fiedler's recordings do represent a highly individualised interpretative approach, they still allow a fascinating glimpse into a world of musical performance only imperfectly chronicled, for historical reasons, by the gramophone. Fiedler's own compositions include a symphony, overture, piano quintet, string quartet, and piano pieces and songs. Fiedler had a son named Max George Fiedler (1898–1977). The younger Fiedler came to the US in about 1925. From 1930 on, he was engaged in advanced diesel engine research in the hopes of building a cleaner, quieter, and lighter automotive diesel engine. He gave a paper entitled, "A New Theory of Diesel Combustion" in 1939, the year his father died, at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pa. A paper discussing Fiedler's work and putting it into a modern context by Baxter and Hiltner was published by ASME in 2001. Notes 5. Personal interviews conducted by John M. Baxter in 1973. 6. Journal of the Franklin Institute, January 1942 P. 17 and February, 1942 P. P. 143 7. ASME Paper No. 2001-ICE-418 External links 1859 births 1939 deaths German composers German conductors (music)