Helene Fischer, schlager superstar: the richest singer you’ve never heard of

Fans of low-grade pop beef may be titillated by the potential implications of Katy Perry pipping Taylor Swift to be named Forbes’s highest-paid woman in music for 2018. But the real intrigue – and a potential challenger to their status – lies further down Forbes’s top 10. At No 8, just below Rihanna and ahead of both Celine Dion and Britney Spears, sits Helene Fischer. Who?

Well, a tight-lipped German-Russian superstar evidently keen to retain her everywoman appeal, for one thing. Reading extensive interviews reveals only that she loves artisanal butter and was surprised when her boyfriend, a German TV personality, had her face tattooed on his arm.

In bland biographical terms, Fischer, 34, is a superstar of Germany’s schlager scene, a sound that tends to two directions. The first is a kind of bierhalle bop that oompahs through matters concerning booze, babes and the Bundesrepublik. Fischer embodies its foil: the faithful woman whose heart skips and breath stops when she thinks of her devoted man, playing up her feminine feebleness to inspire his protective instincts.

Schlager came to its traditional themes as the antidote to the licentious western pop that infiltrated Germany after the war. It endures thanks to its popularity with baby boomers and beyond, who are well served by infinite schlager TV specials – Fischer presents one every Christmas, a cloying all-star revue that makes Jools’ Annual Hootenanny look like Channel 4’s Club X.

In its down-home sensibilities, schlager is country music’s spiritual twin, and Fischer has given it an aggressive synth-pop update, as if she were the German Taylor Swift. But where Swift’s pop evolution made her cool, it is hard to overstate how little critical love there is for Fischer’s frankly awful music.

Still, we all know critics no longer wield any clout, and Fischer’s hundreds of thousands of fans have made her filthy rich – a net worth of US $32m (£25m), according to Forbes. The industry body Pollstar says Fischer’s recent tour of Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands was this year’s seventh most lucrative.

The 69-date extravaganza was a collaboration with Cirque du Soleil and was inspired by Fischer’s love of Vegas, featuring 12 dancers, 120 costumes and 33 trucks. Watching clips on YouTube, it is hard to be as affected by her ritzy performance as her evidently adoring crowd were, but one number in which she wears a hi-tech skirt apparently made from a waterfall is hard to watch without needing a wee, so it’s not not moving.

Perhaps Fischer’s whopping pop success will spur Swift and Perry to bury the hatchet for good and join forces against this powerful European challenger before she rises any further up the rich list. Or maybe not. “I have no ambition to conquer the English market,” she told the tabloid TZ last year. Thank Gott.