​One career ends, another begins

By Michael Church

When Thomas Quasthoff makes his conducting debut at the Verbier Festival next month, it will mark an unexpected switch in this celebrated German baritone’s extraordinary career. As the world’s most famous Thalidomide victim, he has spent his life surmounting seemingly impossible obstacles, including a period as an inmate at a 20th-century version of Dotheboys Hall where temporary starvation was a routine punishment. Self-mockery has been his salvation – likening himself to the Hunchback of Notre Dame, or drawing this brutally candid self-portrait: “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 never accepted pity, demanding to be judged simply as an artist among artists.