Thomas Quasthoff

What do you remember of the event [the 1988 Munich singing competition]?

It was a very funny year. I mean, it was not my first competition, it was my fourth. And I never came out of a competition without any award. So to be honest, I think my inner expectation was maybe higher than I said to other people outside. But … the whole experience was very wonderful. For the last two rounds my par I invited my parents to come to Munich, which was of course very moving because my father was a singer too.

How were you first looked after [as a child]?

Well the p the thing was that the real small childhood didn't didn't exist because my foot were standing backwards when I was born, so I was laying in a permanent cast for one and a half year when I was nine month old. And I remember that my mother was telling me once that a nurse came to her, saying, Oh, you have a very musical little son. And my mother looked at her and said, 'What are you talking about? He's not even able to talk.' Yes, but he's singing all the melodies, imitating the words, on the right pitch. And so that started very early.

How young would you have been [at boarding school], and how long did it last?

Well, the problem was at that time nobody really knew how to handle these kind of disabilities. So of course my parents tried to put me on a normal, regular school. But every school said, no, no, no, no, no, no, not possible. We cannot do this to the little boy, we cannot do this to the teachers. So I went to this boarding school then and um I was five years old. The problem was that they didn't separate mental, physical, uh psyche uh disabilities from each other. So I slept the first, I think, two years, I was in a bedroom, which was really very, very difficult because there were even a lot of children who were screaming in the night and … it wasn't very easy.