GET A LIFE NOW: 'People said I was cursed by a witch'

'People said I was cursed by a witch'

Watching Haydn's Creation on local cable I heard a voice that reminded me of Fritz Wunderlich...... I looked up to see a man deformed by thalidomide standing next to beautiful soprano Annette Dasch... it was a shocking image.

Thomas Quasthoff: 'People said I was cursed by a witch'

Bass-baritone singer Thomas Quasthoff has overcome obstacles and adversity to become a globally popular figure. On the eve of a series of concerts at the Barbican, he talks to John Whitley.

Video VIDEO EMBED: Thomas Quasthoff http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraphtv/article4173891.ece#ooid=d0aGUxMTrN5oeyBpy9oedxXeiFVVqZtX

Link to this video 02 Jan 2009

To say that Thomas Quasthoff has a lively personality would be an understatement. The German bass-baritone positively fizzes with charisma: people stand to see him come into a crowded restaurant, students queue for his lessons and, at 49, he has spent years packing the world's grandest concert halls, from Vienna's Musikverein to the Hollywood Bowl.

"Yes," he says, with no pretence at false modesty, "at the present time I'm probably the most successful musician in the classical music world in Germany." So he can rest easy about filling all 2,000 seats at the Barbican in London for his five concerts as the Artist in Focus there, which begin with Haydn's Creation.

What makes Quasthoff's popular success so remarkable is that he has achieved it mainly in the rarefied and intimate world of devotional music and recital – traditionally far less glamorous than the high-profile opera stage and the antics of the Three Tenors.

In particular, he has transformed the art of lieder – originally domestic entertainment for friends around the piano – so that it appeals to big audiences at mainstream concerts in vast spaces. He is the first singer to do so since the great German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the Sixties – and, he suggests with a chuckle, he makes it rather more fun.

But the most astonishing thing about Quasthoff's career is that it's a triumph over adversity: he was one of thousands of Thalidomide babies who were born severely deformed in the Fifties and Sixties after their mothers had innocently taken the drug during pregnancy.

Young Thomas was parted from his parents at nine months, spent 18 months in quarantine and almost four years in a sort of plaster shell. Today he stands only four feet four inches tall and has three-fingered flippers where his arms should be. When performing he needs a high chair and a lectern for the score.

It's an achievement, however, that he is fed up with being praised for. "I am not here as some sort of role model. Of course, maybe at first people would come to see a freak. But they come a second time so then I know it's for my singing."

However forcefully he dismisses it, though, Quasthoff shares with other Thalidomide sufferers an aura of danger, of seeking out impossible challenges. The drug's effects are still an unknown quantity – no one can predict what may happen next week or next year, and this seems to push sufferers to live on the edge.

He acknowledges that he has sublimated into his performances this sense of risky improvisation and the rage he still feels at the barbaric way he has been treated.

"When I was little and waiting for my mother outside a shop, sometimes passers-by would say I was cursed by a witch. And that stays with you. But now I use that in my singing, so it's actually a plus."

Somehow the adolescent Thomas was sustained throughout all these rebuffs by an innate musicality, fostered by the swing and pop records his brother collected, and the development of an exceptional voice. "Of course there were setbacks – some pretty harsh ones. But you must never capitulate."

All great artists have that steely determination and Quasthoff's velvet-rich, penetrating baritone would have ensured him stardom in any generation. But what makes him revolutionary is the way he creates a performance of operatic depth and power within the intimacy of a recital.

"You know, the extraordinary thing about the lied is that each song can be really a whole opera in itself, a story in miniature. So a lied singer must be a true musician – the voice is not enough on its own, thank God. I've heard in my life so many singers with incredible voices but who were dying on stage because they had nothing to present with that voice.

"What we as artists, if we're really good, have to do is to create a space not only for the acting but where the sound can almost be seen. So you have to provide a focus, give the audience something to concentrate on. You can create this imaginary space on stage just by the angles at which you look or stand – not making a lot of movement but doing more than simply standing straight up. Immediately the audience is held."

This relaxed interpretation is the antithesis of the old stand-and-deliver technique favoured by stars such as Fischer-Dieskau and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.

"Let's be honest, Fischer-Dieskau put lieder singing on a platform that's really like an intellectual monument. I never, never, ever, ever liked it. What I do is to have a conversation with the audience. And if there are people coughing, of course I ask them to stop, as I would in any conversation.

"That's what you get if you go to listen to jazz or swing – it's normal to have a conversation with the audience. In classical music there is this tradition that is saying to the audience, stay there, don't talk, look at your programmes."

To show how to jettison such fusty formality, Quasthoff has made a CD called The Jazz Album: Watch What Happens in which he swings from Ellington to Gershwin without a trace of recital-room orotundity. "When I sing jazz, it sounds like jazz," he says in his fluent mid-Atlantic English. "It's time for us to get rid of this idea that everything has to be solemn."

He applies the same sense of joyousness to the lied: "Alongside all the hard work of understanding the lyrics, the music, there is the truth that lied singing is fun, is joy. And it may be that the amazing success of these songs is because they are so close to everyone's own feelings.

"I prefer to bring the podium a little bit down and to say to people, look, this lied singing is also a part of your life, it's not some separated art form which is only for the intellectuals. That's stupid – the lied is the best way of communicating very directly with an audience."

And since Quasthoff admits to being "a compulsive communicator", he has no regrets that his disability has handicapped any operatic career or that related ailments now oblige him to reduce his concerts, even cancel a few: "The body changes, naturally, and the voice changes, too. I used to do 90 concerts a year , and always in different places – that's a hell [of a lot] of concerts!"

So, now approaching 50, it's a relief for him to cut back on the peripatetic life of the superstar. "I don't know of any book that begins, 'We had a good time at the airport,' " he says.

What he savours much more is life with his new family in his specially designed house – he married two years ago – and his classes at the Hanns Eisler Academy in Berlin, where his magnetic personality attracts droves of would-be students.

"Well, I am very, very good in spontaneous talking and I really enjoy teaching. I take it very seriously."

And the first lesson is the one that has sustained his own life – stay true to yourself: "Don't be an imitation of someone else. You may not like what I'm doing, but this is me. I have to make my own footsteps in the snow."

Concerts begin on Jan 10 at the Barbican, London EC2 (020 7638 8891).

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English:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Q...

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