Schlager Music's Cinderella: Helene Fischer

Helene Fischer is the Cinderella story of the schlager music scene with one of the most interesting personal narratives of the current schlager/volksmusik luminaries.

Additionally she has to count among the most positively gorgeous performers that you will ever see on any stage -- anywhere.

She was born in 1984 in to an ethnic German family in the bleak Siberian Russian town of Krasnoyarsk. Due to President Ronald Reagan's victory over the Soviets in the Cold War, her family managed to make it to resettlement in the Rhineland-Palitinate region of Germany.

There she grew up and studied drama and due to the exertions of a determined "stage mother" she was signed to a record contract and skyrocketed to the top of the European schlager music charts.

Since her 2006 debut, she has released 6 wildly successful CDs and has toured the German speaking world annually, playing to packed houses most everywhere. She has won Germany's highest musical honor, The ECHO Award, four times for best vocalist in the schlager music category, most recently in 2012.

This past Christmas, she had a prime-time ARD Television special 2 hour show and has recently completed filming for a guest appearance on the popular German TV series Das Traumschiff.

For a more detailed and very interesting account of her exodus from Communist Russia go here.

Following is a video performance of her biggest schlager hit. It is one of the increasingly rare videos of her purely schlager performances, since her record label, EMI, is trying to block Fischer's earlier performances from American internet.

They apparently seem embarassed by her more simple past and want to delude Americans into thinking that her recently adopted, glitzy Las Vegas showgirl style is the way she's always been. This is quite possibly an attempt by EMI and her handlers to revamp her image for an entry into the US market.

Here is a video of Und Morgen Fruh Kuss Ich Dich Wach (A Morning Kiss) as she performed it in her purely schlager era:



Here is a medley of Helene Fischer's greatest hits performed circa 2008:



And here from a 2009 open air concert in Stuttgart, she performs one of her earlier hits, Mal Ganz Ehrlich(At all times honest):