As she turns 60, the celebrated German violinist looks back with Ariane Todes over a long and distinguished career… and demonstrates a wicked sense of humour along the way
I wasn’t expecting to laugh as hard as I did when interviewing 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 conductor 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
