Boston ? German bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff’s third Grammy nomination in as many years is for an album that includes the Franz Schubert song cycle “Winterreise,” about a heartbroken man who seeks solace in death and goes mad.

It is ripe with rage an emotion that Quasthoff says has inspired his own art.

Recalling a time in his life when he felt consumed by anger, the 42-year-old singer says: “I had a very good friend who said, ‘Put it in your music your joy and also your anger!’ From that moment on, my way of making music was different.”

Quasthoff, who was born with a physical disability because of the drug thalidomide, doesn’t like to discuss that, lest it overshadow his artistry. At the same time, he said his anger at the limitations he faced helped him rise above them and become a better singer.

Quasthoff is considered an artistic heir to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, whose interpretations of German art songs few singers could rival.

“This is a real voice, classically trained and responsive to most everything its owner asks it to do,” Peter Davis, music critic for New York Magazine, has written. He praised Quasthoff’s range, “from sonorous bass tones to easy, spinning top notes a tenor might envy.”

This season in New York, Quasthoff was the featured soloist on Carnegie Hall’s opening night, singing Mahler’s song series “Des Knaben Wunderhorn” with the Berlin Philharmonic a performance for which he won his one Grammy, in 1999. His nomination this year is for an album of Brahms and Schubert songs.

Remaining positive

Quasthoff started singing at age 14, with daily lessons. But he was not accepted at the conservatory in Hannover, Germany, because he couldn’t physically fulfill the requirement to play the piano.

He kept up private voice lessons through his teens, studied law when he reached university and worked for six years as a banker.

“I hated it, with every kind of microcosm in my body I hated it!” he said with a laugh during a recent interview in a hotel in Boston, where he sang with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Quasthoff later worked as a radio announcer while singing in jazz clubs and cabarets. By his early 30s, despite a budding singing career, he was in turmoil.

“What can I do to get rid of this anger?” he asked a friend.

“Does it surprise you that you are angry?” he says the friend told him. “If you walk out of your apartment and you go shopping, how many bad looks do you get because of how you look, how you walk?”

The anger, the man told him, “goes into your psyche, into your insides.”

That’s when Quasthoff began releasing his emotion into his art.

His voice blossomed, and in 1988 he won first prize at Munich’s prestigious ARD competition. He has since sung with leading orchestras and in recital throughout the world.

Quasthoff once described his body in a television documentary: “1.34 meters tall (about 4 feet), short arms, seven fingers four right, three left large, relatively well-formed head, brown eyes, pronounced lips.”

His pregnant mother had taken thalidomide in the 1950s as an antidote to morning sickness.

“Of course, as a disabled person, you have to suffer from many things that are not very easy,” he says now. “But to realize that there are much harder things to suffer from, and to turn them into positive energy that was a learned process which was amazing for me.”

‘There is a reason’

These days, Quasthoff sings pretty much what he wants. His presentation is low-key black suit with black silk shirt and he avoids music-industry marketing gimmicks. He’s lucky, he says, if one of his recordings registers sales of 30,000.

“But do you really think that I’m thinking about money if I’m doing the Bach B minor Mass? I don’t care,” he says. “It’s enough that I can finance my life. I’m here for making music.”

When he’s home in Hannover, he teaches at the music academy in nearby Detmold, and replenishes his energy by taking long walks in the forest, swimming and playing table tennis. He seeks inspiration, he says, in friends and family parents and a brother and in books, movies, theater and art.

He is now plunging into a new adventure: singing opera on stage in a full production for the first time. With conductor Simon Rattle, whom he calls his “musical angel,” Quasthoff will take on Beethoven’s “Fidelio” in 2003 in Salzburg, followed a year later by Wagner’s “Parsifal” in Vienna.

After all, he concludes in German, “Ich bin immer ein Suchender” “I am always a seeker.”

“Every kind of life experience should happen,” he says. “And for everything that happens, there is a reason.”