A Singer's Full 'Voice'

THE VOICE

A Memoir

By Thomas Quasthoff

Pantheon. 241 pp. $24.95

Since Thomas Quasthoff is a concert baritone by profession, the appropriate metaphor to describe this invigorating memoir might be to say that he strikes one clear note, and then holds it. The note is at once jaunty and pedantic (he is a teacher as much as a singer). Quasthoff -- who is almost 50 -- is an extremely successful interpreter of German lieder. He's been in a few operas, won three Grammys and has been awarded the German Federal Cross of Merit. He also was born a thalidomide baby.

This narrative could have moved in a dozen different ways. But it is, as I said, jaunty. Its first and last chapters refer to wonderful German restaurant-bars. In the first, Quasthoff and his brother Michael discuss whether it's worth it for Thomas to write his autobiography as they down rounds of pilsner like thirsty anacondas. Why not, Michael jests, ironically. "Thalidomide victim who was denied admission to the Music Academy sings his way from body cast to Grammy. What a story! It has everything: intense childhood, battle against the monster bureaucracy, drama, love, insanity. Finally, triumph in America, the land of limitless possibility! The republic can always use success stories."

All this is laid out for us in the first two pages, and it tells the reader several things. First, we won't have our hearts broken -- far from it. Second, we won't have to sit around and be inspired. Third, after what must have been some trying times, these brothers are still close friends. And fourth, we're going to find out, from the inside, what it's like to live the life of a concert singer.

The next chapter begins, not with the "intense childhood," but the night before Quasthoff's debut, in 1998, with the New York Philharmonic. Thomas, Michael and Michael's girlfriend took on the town. They stayed up half the night in their hotel, drinking and joking, and the next morning ate pastrami sandwiches for breakfast at the Carnegie Deli because Woody Allen goes there. Thomas was already well enough known that people asked him for his autograph. He's not hard to recognize. Here's how he describes himself as he stood that morning on a footstool at the hotel bathroom sink: "A four-foot three-inch concert singer without knee joints, arms, or upper thighs, with only four fingers on the right hand and three on the left. He has a receding hairline, a blond pig head, and a few too many pounds around his hips, and he is in a superb mood. All he needs now is a shave."

Then came the concert, which was a tremendous success. He needed a particular podium, a couple of steps and a chair. "Well do I recall," he remembers, "the many nights I had to focus on maintaining my balance atop a stack of fruit crates while trying not to wake the cultural official snoring blissfully in the first row." This night was different. His singing colleague, Inger Dam-Jensen, was superb; the musicians and their conductor were marvelous. And Quasthoff was terrific. There were seven curtain calls. Then he endured the physical drudgery of shaking hands with hundreds of patrons of the arts. And then the original three -- Thomas, his brother and that girlfriend -- escaped, first to a Chinese restaurant, ending the evening at the Tavern on the Green. Triumph, indeed.

So later in the book, Quasthoff's recollections of a childhood trapped in a body cast are not so killingly sad. Nor is learning how his mother taught him to walk by offering him chocolate. Nor how his father taught him to fall in such a way that he wouldn't hurt himself. Nor the years in a special school for the disabled, where a sadistic matron dealt with unruly children by strapping them to their beds and leaving them in freezing hallways -- until one of them died. Nor when his entire high school glee club sneaked off on a field trip without him. Nor when his fellow law school students left him to fend for himself in the cafeteria when he couldn't reach the silverware. Nor when the head of the music academy wouldn't admit him because the school required students to be proficient in two instruments, and Quasthoff's voice was his one and only instrument.

Yes, he was disabled, but he had this great voice and great learning and great strength. "The Voice" is filled with concert-tour stories, explications of lieder-texts and guarded accounts of several of his girlfriends. He frames his disability in his own terms. The author refuses to give value to suffering. He saves his attention for art and fun and work, which makes this book a joy to read.

Sunday in Book World

· "The Dark Side," according to Jane Mayer.