In Full Voice

Thomas Quasthoff sings the last note of Brahms’ “German” Requiem, and the audience stumbles to its feet. Wails of “bravo!” echo from the balcony of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Hall. There are stricken faces and tears. Quasthoff smiles broadly and bows his head graciously, walks off stage and back on again several times. People in the audience clap and shout, with a desperation that defies mere compliment. There is a knowing look on Quasthoff’s handsome face that says he is used to this.

For one thing, at 39, the German bass-baritone is among the most critically acclaimed voices of his generation, praised for his clear, resonant tone, impeccable diction, interpretive intelligence and emotional range. In Europe, Quasthoff has been a sought-after soloist for the last decade, since winning first prize at an international music competition in Munich sponsored by German broadcasting. He made his U.S. debut in 1995 at the Oregon Bach Festival with Helmuth Rilling and has since gone on to perform with Colin Davis and the New York Philharmonic, Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony and this night with Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony. (Quasthoff will make his California debut at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo tonight and will perform with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra on Friday and Saturday.)

Then there is the more poignant fact that Quasthoff has scaled these musical heights despite being born a thalidomide baby, after his mother took the pill for morning sickness. Quasthoff’s voice and presence are gigantic, magnificent, yet he is 4 feet tall, with underdeveloped hands and arms. That his masculine head and face can register and communicate any emotion only serves to dramatize the contrast of cheated limbs and compromised frame.

Out of respect for his artistic merit, and surely a dutiful sense of political correctness, critics have struggled to find the right tone when reviewing him. Some have chosen to avoid the subject of his disability altogether or made it an awkward preamble or footnote. Quasthoff knows that his story lies somewhere in between, in the inseparable tangle of talent and perseverance, of circumstance and the triumph of will.

“I think one of the main facts is that they admire very much that a disabled person is able to sing on a very high level,” he will say later of his audiences, who usually send him off with effusive standing ovations.

“I’m now old enough to know that they don’t give me applause because of my disability,” he says in his fluent if slightly stilted English. “But I would be completely stupid if I said, ‘Well, yes, it’s my artistship, it’s my voice, yes.’ It is the mixture of both. I cannot cut out my disability.”

In fact, he says he knows that his disability gives him insight his colleagues will never have, and that who he is lends a mysterious power to his music. On this winter night in Chicago, Quasthoff seems not merely to have captured the hearts and minds of every member of the audience, but to have gobbled them whole.

The next morning, while the wind blows and the snow swirls outside on Michigan Avenue, the lobby of the Chicago Hilton and Towers is mobbed. Quasthoff arrives at the appointed 8:55, showered but Sunday-morning weary in crisp jeans, tennis shoes and a nubby off-white sweater. Accompanied by a stranger--a persistent fan, it will turn out--he makes vague introductions. Then he takes off briskly down the crowded corridor toward the breakfast room, his head bent as if averting a windstorm. Walking next to him, it seems natural to do the same and avoid the double takes of the oncoming human traffic.

*

While we join a cacophonous breakfast line, it becomes clear that the aggressive fan has invited himself along on the interview, may even want to make his own tape of it. When Quasthoff is told that this wasn’t part of the deal, he says with a snort: “Well, if we can’t all sit down together, then there won’t be an interview!” When he’s informed that the breakfast room will be too noisy to talk, he rolls his eyes and turns up the volume, his bass-baritone booming above the din: “But I haven’t had my breakfast! I need coffee!” Members of the breakfast line turn, startled, to identify the source of the scene.

Quasthoff doesn’t notice. He barks at the nearest hotel employee to provide a quiet table. Leading the way to a far corner of the lobby, he warns that the clock is ticking and a car will pick him up at 10 a.m. sharp. After some quick, hard negotiations, the fan is persuaded to leave.

If Quasthoff wants everyone to know that he has been dragged into this interview kicking and screaming, then it’s astonishing how fast he throws off the temper tantrum and turns on the charm. He leans forward, looks the reporter in the eyes and says in a melting voice, which has dipped to pianissimo: “If it’s more than an hour, don’t worry.”

This is the Quasthoff that is present for the next 75 minutes--warm, high-spirited and quick to make a joke at his own expense. The temper, he admits later, is something he’s working on. “Every musician, especially singers because the instrument is inside, is in a big danger to be an egomaniac,” he says. But Quasthoff says he wants to be known, especially among his colleagues, as “a nice guy.”

To be fair, it’s been a tough few days. The first night of his long-awaited Chicago engagement opened to good reviews. But inflamed vocal cords, which he blames on dry American hotel air, meant that night two was canceled, and he was ordered not to talk.

“My reaction was not ‘Oh, God, my voice! I’m ill!’ ” Quasthoff says, raising his voice an octave in the tone he uses to caricature opera divas. “My reaction was I cannot do with my voice--I mean colors and things--what I normally can do.”

It is the attention that he pays to those colors and nuances that sets Quasthoff apart. “There is no room in his experience of life and his insight into art for self-pity, dramatization or exaggeration of interpretation,” wrote Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe in a review of Quasthoff last fall. “This is characterful storytelling, precise picture painting, and pure feeling, distilled.”

Says Quasthoff: “I don’t care primarily of the beauty of my voice. I’m much more interested in what I sing and how my expression is. I’m not in love with my own voice. I like my voice, and I think I have something to say.”

Quasthoff maintains that he was educated to remember his place in the musical hierarchy: Compared “to composers like Schumann, Brahms, Bach, Mozart, we are very small little fools! I’m not so much important.” Before a concert, he says, “I never go out and say, ‘I want to be perfect!’ It’s not possible.”

It is hard not to have an emotional response to Quasthoff, both on and off the stage. Hard to take your eyes off his handsome face, and not just to avoid the embarrassment of examining his seven fingers, which seem to spring directly from his shoulders; or the self-consciousness of watching him deftly transfer his double espresso from a paper cup to the mug he has charmed from the waitress, add the steamed milk, and drink it without spilling a drop.

He knows his value as a human interest story. “I know that I would not give so many interviews without my handicap,” he says. Quasthoff was the subject of a “60 Minutes” story in 1997. “Why, for example, did ’60 Minutes’ [want to make] this portrait? Because of my brown eyes?” he jokes. “I don’t think so. I know this, and it’s OK. I can’t make my arms longer, or my legs. I am like I am. It’s not a problem for me, it’s a fact. And if this kind of disability interests people, together with my musical talent, I think that’s OK.”

The most important validation, he says, comes from colleagues like Barenboim. “He said to me, ‘You are one of the last guys who has something to say in the music, through the words.’ If 2,000 people in the audience give me more applause because of my disability, and a great genius artist like Barenboim said this to me, this is the most important thing.

“You know, for me at the moment is the period in my life where dreams are coming true,” Quasthoff says. “If somebody would tell me 12 years ago you will make music with Daniel Barenboim, with Zubin Mehta, with Laurie Mazel, with Simon Rattle, with Claudio Abbado, I would say, ‘Ah, ha-ha-ha!’ And now all these things are real.”

*

The recent concerts with Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra have been in the works for four years, when Quasthoff first auditioned for the conductor. “I think his talent is without limitations,” says Barenboim in his dressing room after the concert. “There are very few people like this. There’s no limitations of style with him, there’s no limitation of volume, and there’s no limitation of expression.”

It has been a long journey to the stages of some of the world’s most prestigious concert halls. As a boy, Quasthoff spent a few painful years institutionalized--Germany’s early answer to the thalidomide crisis. While it was an obvious hardship for the bright, young Quasthoff to live among children who were for the most part mentally disabled, he says that it gave him a sense of perspective on his own fortune and taught him how to live independently.

Eventually, it became clear that Quasthoff should go to mainstream schools. He went home to a close-knit family--parents and a brother, now a journalist--in a small town outside of Hanover. His mom and dad encouraged him to start singing at 14--as a hobby, he says, not a career plan. It wasn’t long before his talent was obvious. He applied to a music academy but was rejected from music school on a technicality: Without fully formed hands, he couldn’t play an instrument, an admission requirement.

While he admits he felt “very bad at the time,” he began to study intensively with a private singing coach, Charlotte Lehmann. He learned music theory from her husband. The relationship lasted 17 years. It was this slow, steady, relaxed growth, Quasthoff says now, that allowed him to maintain his love for music and to develop his voice. His parents, he stresses, never pushed him to be successful. “They said if you like to sing, sing. If you don’t like to sing, don’t. I think this is why I stayed in this profession.”

Wanting to make his own money and live on his own, which Quasthoff has done for many years, he sang with American jazz musicians at 19--which is where, it turns out, he picked up his barely accented English. Believing he’d never have a singing career, he studied law briefly and later became a popular Hanover radio announcer, a job he gave up only seven years ago.

Quasthoff says he was “lazy” about music until his early 20s, when he stepped up his lessons to every day and began entering competitions. After the German broadcasting competition win in 1988, his schedule swelled to as many as 90 concerts a year. Quasthoff downplays the courage it might have taken to put himself out on stage. He says that the positive reactions he got encouraged him to continue.

Has he ever had stage fright?

“Never,” he says.

While Quasthoff often sings arias in performance--which, he says, even in a concert setting require as much acting as they do singing--so far he has avoided staged opera. A few years ago, Barenboim offered him the title role in “Rigoletto”--the hunchbacked jester. He turned him down, apparently without taking offense. His voice hadn’t developed enough for the part, he says. Barenboim, who is the music director of Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden as well as leading the Chicago Symphony, hasn’t given up.

“I can see him doing ‘Don Giovanni,’ ” Barenboim says. “The fascination Don Giovanni has for every woman on Earth is not just looks--it’s precisely that expression in the face, and those eyes. I think you need intelligent directors and staging,” he says, to make it work. “Whatever he wants to sing in the opera house, I will do with him. I would do anything he wants.”

Quasthoff laughs when told that Barenboim would make him Don Giovanni. He has said in the past that his disability would be too much in the foreground on an opera stage. But he admits that he thinks about it. “If you have a good director, if you have a good conductor, if you have nice colleagues, I think then it can work,” he says, somewhat apprehensively.

What he does relish is the possibility of developing his love for acting.

“My brother said, ‘You are a stage pork,’ ” he says, roughly translating. “It means when you have an audience in front of you, you feel happy, you are at home. I hate to make recordings in a studio. I need an audience.”

But Quasthoff says he is booked for the next 2 1/2 years anyway. “It needs the right moment, and at the moment I’m so busy with teaching and singing.”

He spends a lot of time on the road, performing throughout Europe and Japan and, increasingly, the U.S., which he visited for the first time in 1995.

“If I would have my family, my brother and my close friends in the States, I would live here,” he says. “People are more open. Especially if you have a disability, people in the States have more respect for good work. And they are not jealous if you earn a lot of money. Germany is a very jealous country. And they are not proud of their artists.”

He devotes time to charity, doing benefits for AIDS and various children’s causes. In 1996, he was made a professor for life at the music academy in Detmold, Germany, a 90-minute train ride from his apartment in Hanover. Teaching, he says, is both a passion and a priority.

“I love to realize that that which you think by yourself about music, about writers, about poems, is getting into the brain and into the heart of young people,” he says.

He concentrates a great deal of time on recording as well, with 20 CDs released (a preponderance are devoted to Bach, whose Cantata No. 82, “Ich habe genug” he will perform in Los Angeles, along with Mozart opera and concert arias). He’s flirted with making a crossover album, and he hopes to make some live recordings.

But he’s also wary of doing too much and says he’d like to cut back his concert schedule to about 40 or 50 appearances a year. “I love music, and I’m addicted to music, but I never want to be a slave of my profession,” he says. “I’m very interested in theater, films, philosophy, spending time with friends. If you focus too much, put too much energy on one thing and [your] career is not going like you expect, that could have very bad influences.”

Quasthoff presents a brave face to the world, but he admits that life can be cruel. “To really feel every day that you are disabled, to be looked at by other people, is sometimes not easy,” he says. “Sometimes it is like a champagne bottle; if you shake it too much, it makes boom. It’s the same with me. I’m a person with many mistakes, like every human being in the world. You have to be able to see also your own mistakes. If you stay in good health, you have the whole life to work on your mistakes. Every day is a new chance.”

Mostly, he says, life is kind. “If you try to be a professional singer, and if you fight for it and you [are] successful, and if you have a beautiful family and friends--I mean, what else shall I say? OK, I would love to have more private time, maybe a relationship. But at the moment I am a very lucky person.”

*

Thomas Quasthoff performs with Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra on Friday, 8 p.m., Royce Hall, UCLA, and Saturday, 8 p.m., Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale. $13-$45 at Royce Hall; $13-$48 at the Alex Theatre. (213) 622-7001.