Thomas Quasthoff

Thomas Quasthoff (born November 9, 1959, Hildesheim, Germany) is a German singer whose powerful bass-baritone voice placed him among the preeminent classical vocalists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Quasthoff was born with severe disabilities, the result of his mother’s having taken the drug thalidomide during her early pregnancy as a treatment for morning sickness. The long bones of Quasthoff’s arms failed to develop, and his right foot faced backward. He spent his first year in a cast to correct his foot and was then confined for the next six years in a residential institution for children with severe disabilities.

Quasthoff began his vocal training in 1972 with Charlotte Lehmann in Hannover, Germany. Refused entry into a music conservatory because his disabilities precluded playing an instrument, he studied law for three years and spent his spare time singing with jazz bands. He became a great admirer of Frank Sinatra. Quasthoff’s classical music career got its start in 1988 when he won first prize in the ARD International Music Competition in Munich. Two years later he ended his studies with Lehmann and took a day job as a radio announcer in Hannover.

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In 1996 Quasthoff began to move into the musical spotlight when he won the Shostakovich Prize (awarded to outstanding artists—especially musicians—of international distinction) in Moscow as well as a major award at the Edinburgh International Festival. The next year he made his concert debut with Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, performing Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Creation. Success began to build upon success, leading to his first engagement with the New York Philharmonic, singing Gustav Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn, in 1998.

The acclaim that attended Quasthoff’s performances yielded a recording contract with the Deutsche Grammophon label in 1999, and he proved to be an immediate sensation. His initial recording, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, with Anne Sofie von Otter and the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Claudio Abbado, won a Grammy Award in 2000. The following year, his recording of lieder by Johannes Brahms and Franz Liszt won a Cannes Classical Award. (The Cannes Classical Awards, established in 1995, are given to several categories of recordings and are awarded annually in Cannes, France, by an international jury made up of critics from Hungary, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the United States.)

In 2003 Quasthoff made his opera debut, singing the role of Don Fernando in a production of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio with Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic in Salzburg, Austria. He made his Vienna State Opera debut in 2004 as Amfortas in Richard Wagner’s Parsifal. Over the following years, Quasthoff became one of the world’s most highly acclaimed classical vocalists, touring the United States and Europe, performing with major orchestras and conductors, and appearing at summer music festivals. He also enjoyed success in the realm of jazz, notably with his award-winning release Watch What Happens: The Jazz Album in 2007 and as an R&B stylist on the album Tell It Like It Is (2010).

Quasthoff retired from classical singing in 2012, two years after the death of his brother from lung cancer. He claimed that the psychological trauma of that event diminished his singing abilities. Nonetheless, he remained active in music, teaching and occasionally conducting and performing. In 2021 he made appearances at the Edinburgh International Festival singing jazz with his quartet and playing the spoken role of the majordomo in Richard Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos.

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Quasthoff released an autobiography, The Voice, in 2008.