by Paul Moor
On November 12, in New York, the 39-year-old German baritone Thomas Quasthoff will make his Lincoln Center debut in excerpts from Gustav Mahler's song cycle "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" with the Philharmonic and Sir Colin Davis, following up with a "Winterreise" recital there, with Charles Spencer at the piano, on January 31. Since Quasthoff - who during the past few years has developed into a singer I regard as one of today's greatest - himself unflinchingly deals with his singular physical disability head-on, I suggest we do the same right here and get it out of the way. Other disabled musicians - the violinist Itzhak Perlman, for instance, or the English conductor Jeffrey Tate - have long since established themselves internationally, but their disabilities differ from that of Thomas Quasthoff.
On the one hand: Quasthoff as a student deliberately avoided going to the unique Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau for lessons ("Of course I greatly admire him - I just didn't want to risk becoming a carbon copy of anyone"), but it speaks for Quasthoff's own artistic status that he enjoys that master's manifest esteem: when Cologne's cultural authorities engaged Fischer-Dieskau to plan that affluent city's multifaceted overall program to celebrate last year's Schubert bicentennial, Fischer-Dieskau personally allotted Quasthoff one of the juiciest plums, especially closely associated with himself: the big "Winterreise" cycle - which Quasthoff performed with not just any pianist, but with Portugal's distinguished soloist Maria Joao Pires. I will treasure forever the videocassette of that superlative performance I recorded when Cologne's Westdeutscher Rundfunk's television service broadcast it.
On the other hand: Quasthoff's pregnant mother took an insufficiently tested drug, known in Germany as Kontergan (generically thalidomide: the more cautious USA never permitted its sale), and that sleeping medication resulted in an unprecedented mass tragedy when pregnancies such as hers brought some 5,000 babies into the world with physical disfigurements, none of them less than heart-rending, some of them appalling. Quasthoff has a massive, handsome head that shows nature intended him to become physically as rugged as his amazingly powerful voice, but he stands about at ee-level with the average restaurant table. His wrists seem almost attached to his shoulders, with incompletely formed hands - but when he opens that big, expressive, generously capacious mouth and sings... !
Outside New York he already has a downright passionate following in the USA - especially at Oregon's annual Bach Festival, where the audience virtually worships him - and he has appeared with such leading U.S. orchestras as the Philadelphia and the National, but within the overcentralized structure of American musical life, New York unfairly sets the standard for the entire country. After Thomas Quasthoff's two scheduled introductory New York appearances, it will greatly surprise me if he doesn't soon take the entire country by storm. A tip to those who like to get in at the ground floor: at least some of his fairly numerous recordings have already become available.
One frequently repeated courageous parental admonition - "Tommy, you can do that! Do it!" - played a unique part during Quasthoff's childhood in Hildesheim (pop. 106,500), near Hannover. Quasthoff talks with compassionate understanding of his mother's long struggle, for years, with the guilt she unjustifiably felt, but it speaks for his extraordinary parents themselves that he has emerged from an unavoidably torturing childhood and adolescence with no noticeable serious psychological problems. As for psychotherapy, he says with an open, convincing smile: "You may think me crazy, but I never felt any need of it. And of course, you know, music always helped. It was always for me, well, a release for aggression, both positively and negatively - always. I really believe I was born on the sunny side, so to speak, and even as a little child I was already very cheerful and actually very" - he hesitates for precisely the right word - "content. That's also true today. I regard myself as so . . . well, so privileged in life, in spite of my handicap, that I simply have absolutely no grounds for complaining."
Quasthoff first attracted widespread musical attention in 1988, when the annual Munich competition sponsored by Germany's regional radio/television centers awarded a first prize in only one category: to Thomas Quasthoff, then 29. (That same competition had launched the international career of another great singer, Jessye Norman.) Archive television footage of his Lieder interpretations even then showed a formidable talent, including an unforgettable Schubert "Erlkoenig": with only his voice and face as means of expressive gesture, he turns that minidrama into every much as powerful a three-character tragedy as Fischer-Dieskau in his own world-famous portrayal of that desperate father's fight to save his son from Death. Since that auspicious debut (Karl Schumann, probably Munich's leading critic, wrote that "not since Jessye Norman has there been a comparable discovery among singers"), Quasthoff swiftly moved on to build a career that places him already on the topmost vocal echelon.
But even with such a launching, building a career, especially an international one, follows its own stately pace - particularly with an artist burdened with the completely extra-musical problem Quasthoff's appearance presents to at least some audience members. From the beginning, first-rank conductors have snapped him up: Colin Davis chose him for the role of Don Fernando in his recording (on RCA/BMG) of Beethoven's "Fidelio"; Daniel Barenboim has sounded him out about singing "Rigoletto" at the Staatsoper in Berlin. (Characteristically, Quasthoff chooses to bide his time on that one. He does not shy away from opera as such - in fact he harbors a wish to tackle Wagner's Alberich at some point in the future - but he feels his voice as yet sounds too youthful for a man Rigoletto's age.) As of now, conductors who have engaged him include Claudio Abbado, Gerd Albrecht, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Seiji Ozawa, Simon Rattle, Helmuth Rilling, Mstislav Rostropovich, and others.
Rilling, a major conducting name in Germany for his Stuttgart choral and instrumental groups, and best known in the USA as an annual pillar of the Oregon Bach Festival, has personally blazed a trail for Quasthoff in the USA, including such topflight dates as a St. John Passion with The Philadelphia Orchestra. A television feature on the CBS "60 Minutes", which Ed Bradley flew to London to film, has introduced him to his biggest U.S. audience yet. Quasthoff's and Charles Spencer's *Winterreise* for RCA/BMG should become available this fall, and Deutsche Grammophon has a Mahler recording with the Berlin Philharmonic and Claudio Abbado already in the can, due out sometime next year.
Quasthoff's father had had an exceptional voice, and yearned to become a professional singer, but the end of World War II found him at the critical age of 18; with almost all Germany's scores of opera houses in ruins, singing seemed such an impractical career that he eventually became a personnel chief in the German civil service. Not only young Tommy's exceptional natural voice but his rock-solid musicianship as well manifest themselves already in childhood; he also longed for a singing career, but after completing secondary school he collided headlong with the stupidest kind of inflexible bureaucracy.
From the beginning, his schooling had subjected him to almost unimaginably painful indignities. Germany's public school authorities at that time - reeling under the impact of all those kids mutilated to one degree or another - solved the emergency by starting young Tommy's school days with him surrounded by cerebral palsy cases. That meant he found himself, with his exceptionally quick and bright mind, surrounded by contemporaries forced to do everything, without exception, in low gear. Not until several years passed, and he had managed to get into an ordinary regular school, did his daily classes cease being something he dreaded and hated to face. The crowning indignity of his later schooling came when the Musikhochschule in Hannover - one of Germany's best - declined to admit him on the grounds that he failed to meet one inflexible precondition: he could not learn to play the piano.
Quasthoff today concedes: "That was legally correct. Morally ... well, that gives rise to a great big question-mark." That crushingly humiliating disappointment eventually proved a blessing in disguise. When his parents sought private instruction for him, a lucky recommendation sent them to Charlotte Lehmann, who had previously enjoyed a substantial international career as a concert singer. "As a conservatory student," Quasthoff recalls, "I would have had a single ninety-minute voice lesson a week - but for more than six years Frau Lehmann gave me a lesson every single day. Today, one hears that - I simply know how to use my voice." Altogether, Quasthoff studied with Charlotte Lehmann, exclusively, for a total of seventeen years, and got solid supplementary musical instruction from her husband. He also subsequently had the belated satisfaction of an invitation to teach at that same Hannover conservatory that had turned him away as an aspiring young student. In Germany few titles traditionally carry greater prestige than the magic word Professor, and today, at the first-rate conservatory in Detmold, Thomas Quasthoff holds a regular professorship - for life.
Fairly early he settled in Hannover, which remains his home as well as the location of his management. He acquired a big local following as an announcer there for the Westdeutscher Rundfunk - a job he thoroughly enjoyed and prudently hung onto for six years after his Munich competition breakthrough, until his singing career developed to the point where it sufficed as a dependable income. His enunciation in both speech and song could serve as a model for most of his colleagues. In Hannover he acquired a peripheral following through after-hours indulgence in his musical hobby: singing with a jazz combo. In the same way he also has enlivened informal extracurricular events at Oregon's Bach Festival; this summer he also concluded a musically demanding recital by bringing his shouting audience to their feet with a final unaccompanied, by all accounts unforgettably powerful "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."
I discovered Quasthoff several years ago thanks to a powerful television portrait made for the Sender Freies Berlin by Barrie Gavin, the British specialist in such musical documentaries. A mention of Quasthoff's name in print had caught my attention, so I tuned in with no idea of what to expect. The film opened with Quasthoff coming onto a stage to start a recital - and as soon as I saw him, journalistic reflex impelled me to flip a cassette into my VCR. My reward came in my discovery of the most exciting singer to come to my attention in years.
Meanwhile I have heard him repeatedly, not only on most of his recordings but also repeatedly in live performance, and also under relaxed, informal circumstances during a summer master class he conducted with young singers in the Bavarian city of Passau. A born teacher, he comes especially alive when imparting his art to younger colleagues, and those assembled in Passau, a number of them repeaters, clearly adored him.
One hardly exaggerates in saying his Wigmore Hall debut took musical London by storm. Even the most discriminating critics there seemed to grope for superlatives. The Times review included this: "It takes a brave man to start with Schubert's big three heavyweights, 'Ganymed', 'Grenzen der Menschheit', and 'Prometheus', and then to end with 'Der Tod und das Mädchen' as his final encore. But Quasthoff is clearly a man of determination, and both his temperament and his voice, a sturdy oak of a bass-baritone, seemed ideally suited to these songs..." An Edinburgh Festival recital brought this in the leading daily paper The Scotsman: "Probably we should talk about love, because Thomas Quasthoff clearly knows a great deal about it - love of life, proper, enhancing love of self, and a well of compassion for everything which lives and breathes. For no one could sing such texts, in music by Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf, all material we know (or thought we knew), with such extraordinary sensitivity without a personal profundity. Quasthoff has a deep and beautiful voice, one devoid of mannerism, which communicates like an embrace. . . ."
From Edinburgh's Herald: " . . . Thomas Quasthoff is one of the most remarkable singers of the day; or, more specifically, he has one of the most remarkable and distinctive voices on the scene today. . . . The voice that emerges from his diminutive frame is surprising for its sheer size: he can wield enormous vocal power - though he keeps it strictly in check. The most striking feature of the Quasthoff voice is its beauty, as he demonstrated consistently yesterday throughout a highly sensitive account of Schumann's song cycle 'Dichterliebe.' Every note - even in impassioned or ardent songs, where many vocalists resort to declamation - is sung, with a rich, warm, honey-like tone; there is not a rough edge in sight. All of it amounted to a highly expressive and moving version of Schumann's masterpiece..."
A Brahms Requiem in Austria engendered this Austrian Radio critique: "Thomas Quasthoff sent up and down my spine the thrilling shudder indispensable to Brahms: hardly another baritone voice combines seemingly incompatible opposites in such completeness. Quasthoff's voice simultaneously sounds steely and powerful as well as lyrically elegant and soulfully enlivened. It in fact required three voices to sing this way. One listened breathlessly to every tone."
If American readers who have yet to discover Quasthoff find my own enthusiasm suspect, I hope that nosegay of encomia above will overcome that skepticism. Incidentally, particularly in a day when so many singers, including leading ones, have turned unforgivably mushmouth, Quasthoff's crystalline enunciation falls upon the ear like balm, doing full justice to the texts he sings - many of them by the greatest of German poets.
Today Quasthoff's flourishing international career keeps him almost constantly on the go, ranging from Oregon at one end via Europe to Japan, but those immense distances present no insurmountable problem: "The three pianists I work with have become very close friends, so I have no inhibitions about asking them for help if I ever need it - but I need practically no help. I shave myself - I do really everything myself. I enjoy travelling with company, but I can travel very well alone. I'm someone who also enjoys travelling alone." Sometimes, but far from always, he takes his mother along, but primarily as an ordinary tourist, treating her to new places and sights. His brother plans to accompany him to his New York Philharmonic debut. "I have really terrific parents, and also a really terrific brother."
Every singer's repertoire includes many a sung reference to suffering of one kind or another, and so of course does that of Thomas Quasthoff, who has himself risen above considerably more suffering than his fair share. Onstage he customarily sits motionless on a raised platform that brings his head up approximately to conventional level, wearing a sort of turtleneck adaptation of customary male full dress, and one can hardly describe the ambient audience reaction when those great, expressive eyes engulf the audience and that warm and generous voice surges forth in one of his favorite valedictory encores, Schubert's setting of Franz Schober's apostrophe to music itself, "An die Musik":
Thou fair, lovely art, in how many grey hours...
hast thou ignited my heart into tender love,
transported me into a better world... !
Often has a sigh from thy lyre,
one sweet, holy chord from thee,
opened up to me the heaven of better times,
and for that, thou fair, lovely art, I thank thee !