By Ariane Todes

Published: Friday, 17 November 2023 at 16:34 PM


I wasn’t expecting to laugh as hard as I did when I interviewed Anne-Sophie Mutter about turning 60.

But as she describes the tortoise roaming the living room of her formative violin teacher Erna Honigberger (‘She was like Dr Doolittle’) or waiting all day to play for Henryk Szeryng while his hairdresser attended him (‘It was very vanity-ish’), or being coached on legato by Herbert von Karajan ten minutes to curtain-up (‘I hardly had time to hop into my dress, tune the fiddle and go on stage’), all delivered in a cheery Black Forest sing-song, with plenty of ‘Jeeesus Christ’ and ‘Oh Gooddd’ thrown in, I spend a lot of our phone call belly laughing. Her poise and authority on stage and the intensity of her sound world belie a wicked sense of humour.