Biography
Carlo Cazals was born Udo Klein in Hamburg on April 11, 1948. Both his father and grandfather were seamen. He initially attended elementary school in Jan-Valkenburg-Straße and later secondary school.
“But I didn’t want to learn and I couldn’t learn either. I didn’t go to school with just boys, as it used to be. There were always girls in our class, so it was a mixed school. I always sat in the back row and slept a lot because I was already working back then, I had guitar lessons and other hobbies and I made things like a madman. So I slept because I was always tired. I never did any schoolwork. I only ever had these girls in front of me. They were already wearing silk stockings and open-toed shoes and they sat there in front of me. I sat at the back and just stared at them. They were particularly pretty too, those girls. That was actually the reason why I didn’t study well. It was all terrible.”
Udo Klein is extremely shy, but always dreams of being a real cowboy.
He had a particularly close relationship with his uncle, Otto Hell, who was very cultivated and had a beautiful mind. This uncle encouraged him to sing and regularly took him with him on his tours when he brought food parcels to impoverished Hamburg residents. In this way, Udo got to know the different social classes and the red-light district of the port city at an early age.
My uncle Otto was the son of a Saarland landowner who had to take meat out early on because they had a butcher’s shop with a hotel and a huge farm. He had an old radio and made supper for me and then said: “Now let’s listen to Benjamino Gigli. I particularly liked him. He was an older man. And then I tried to imitate him with all my might. Although, of course, as a boy I didn’t have the voice for it. But even in Paulinenstraße, people were plastered on the walls saying “My God, how he sang again…” And then my uncle showed me the music hall. I was about 4 years old… there were only the cleaners there. And he said: You’re going to stand there and sing when you grow up. I believed that too. There was an inn next door that belonged to Aunt Henny (Henriette G.), who was the most beautiful woman in Hamburg. It actually belonged to her parents. Her parents then died. An officer seduced Henriette and took everything she owned. Then she moved to Valentinskamp. There used to be a brothel there, which I also experienced. She must have lived there. Whether she was a beautiful woman there too… I assume she took over that existence. And my uncle always brought her fat packages. And I witnessed how she cried and was broken, with her little lice-ridden dog Axel.”
One year after the death of her uncle Otto, Gertrud Pirsch comes to the school in St. Pauli, where she works as a teacher for social reasons. She is actually a dramaturge, journalist and art observer. One day she hears Udo playing the guitar.
“So I rehearsed Freddie’s stuff and sang Freddie at school. And my teacher came in and I stopped and then she said: Keep singing. And I asked: Anything else? And she let me sing the whole lesson. The other pupils were all completely high, including the boys. And the girls anyway, of course.
After school, she came to me and asked, don’t you want to be an opera singer? I said, I’m not insane. How am I supposed to manage that? She said I should come to her for lessons. And that’s how it all happened. She accompanied me like no other companion.”
Udo Klein studied singing with Gertrud Pirsch and later painting. Professor Grimm from the Hamburg Art Academy and Eduard Bargheer, a member of the Hamburg Secession, who came and went with Gertrud Pirsch, also looked at and corrected his works.
Udo Klein undertakes various study trips to Italy and France with Gertrud Pirsch.
He is released from military service due to his talent and commitment.
“That was after vocational school. I was discharged early and then I was also released from the Bundeswehr, because I had really great references, e.g. from Leopold Ludwig (conductor, 1908-1979, 1951-1971 general music director of the Hamburg State Opera, see Wikipedia), Karajan was still a pipsqueak compared to him. He gave me a testimonial. And Sebastian Peschko, the greatest song accompanist in the world (1909-1987, pianist, accompanist to Erna Berger, Hermann Prey etc., see Wikipedia – author’s note), they gave me a certificate that this artistic work must not be interrupted. And then the officers got together and said “God, testimonials like that! Nobody wants you here. And when you come back from Italy, we’ll put you back another six years. It doesn’t matter at all.”
From 1984 to 1994, Udo Klein cared for Gertrud Pirsch until her death. During the day, he looked after his terminally ill wife, at night he drove through Hamburg’s city center as a money carrier and in every hour of free time he had, he painted obsessively. When there is bulky garbage on his route, he drives to the Thalia Theater and looks for discarded backdrop walls. He then loads them into his van and takes them to Gertrud Pirsch’s apartment – perfect painting surfaces!
After the death of his teacher, mentor and patron, he appeared as a tenor on various stages, including the Hamburg Alleetheater and the Hamburg Chamber Opera.
In 1992, he married Inge Karin, with whom he moved to the small Mecklenburg town of Parchim in 2002. He lived with her and a very large dog in the old, unrenovated town house, surrounded by tiled stoves and antiques. First with a Rottweiler, then with a Cane Corso and finally he shares his bed with a playful Great Dane. His living room is a carefully arranged composition. When visitors come, Udo Klein, who has since adopted his stage name Carlo Cazals, wears a monk’s habit and the stove is fired up – otherwise not. He scowls at the jackets and bags of his – very rare – visitors in his living room, as they disturb his aesthetic sensibilities.
He still paints obsessively, or rather: it paints him. Does painting relieve him? Is it an outlet for his inner life?
” Am I relieved after painting…? No, because then the critic comes and says, what have you done now? If it was reasonably good, that’s fine. But then the changes went on for years. Even on one sheet of paper, there’s always a struggle, because you realize what great works of art there are in the world, I’ve been shown that.
And then I think: it doesn’t come close. But not every one of your paintings is looked at by a stranger, it’s also your own claim, so to speak, that you are basically never satisfied and therefore never have this relief. If you were to paint and it was immediately perfect in your eyes, that would be something else. But that probably doesn’t happen. It has to do with intelligence. And you can’t explain this artistic intelligence to anyone because no one cares about you.
But it is perhaps a relief to say that yes, you have made progress somehow. But getting ahead is… getting there, but not arriving.”
From 2015 to 2020, Carlo Cazals once again slipped into the role of carer, bringing his bedridden mother into his home and nursing her until she died. “Great art is only created through self-experienced suffering.” His self-sacrificing work is also a source of inspiration; a care service is out of the question for him.
“Yes, when it came down to it, I was there for her. Every day! If you had experienced it. She just… it just came out the back. I’m a top expert… You can’t imagine. I only got the butt… So that it wouldn’t sag. Then I ate a lot again because I needed the strength to move it. Now I don’t need the strength any more, I’m worse now. I would have nursed her to a hundred.
But now I’m weak, almost falling over. I can’t speak properly anymore. But well, that’s the way it is.”
After the death of his mother, Carlo Cazals loses his will to live and continues to deteriorate mentally and physically.
On May 24, 2022, Carlo Cazals died at his home in Parchim, where his wife Inge lovingly cared for and nursed him until the end.
