pop star
Peter Kraus says goodbye – “I promised my wife”
Pop star Peter Kraus was once considered the German “Elvis” – now he stops touring. photo
© Tom Weller/dpa
When Peter Kraus made his first public appearance in 1956, Elvis Presley was just being discovered as a young talent. At the age of 83, Kraus now wants to say goodbye – this time really.
Singer Peter Kraus wants to say goodbye to touring life – and this time he seems to mean it really seriously.
“This is the last tour, after that it’s over. But we’ll do it this one time,” says the 83-year-old before the start of his sixth farewell tour this Saturday (7:30 p.m.) in Stuttgart. “I promised my wife that too.” Tour life on the go is becoming more and more exhausting, Kraus told the German Press Agency. It’s less about the performances, but about the in-between, the trappings, the travel, the talk shows and the promotion. “It’s all the small-scale work in the background for two hours that I get live on stage as a reward. And in the end, reason has to prevail.”
Still small gigs
He doesn’t associate melancholy with the thought of the last tour, Kraus said: “No, then I say: It’s good too. And I still have a lot of fun every two months at the small gigs that we continue to do .” Under no circumstances will he say goodbye with tears and full of emotion. “We want to have fun, we want to talk, but we don’t want to press our tears,” said Kraus. “Besides, I wouldn’t have a voice. No, saying goodbye, I can’t do that.”
The German “Elvis”
The rock’n’roll and hit star became known as “the German Elvis” 60 years ago. On his last tour, the Viennese come full circle: the singer (“Sugar Baby”) wants to perform “Meine Hits – Meine Idole” in 24 cities in Austria and Germany and present his CD, which takes him to his musical roots before the rock ‘n’ roll era. Kraus recorded the songs with co-stars such as Helge Schneider, Till Brönner, Annett Louisan and Götz Alsmann. In German, he interprets standards by Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Junior, among others. “I grew up with music, it inspired my profession,” says Kraus.
Born in Munich, Kraus lives alternately in a small village on Lake Lugano in Switzerland and on a farm with a vineyard in Styria in Austria. He started his career as a musician in the 1960s. According to the organizer Semmel Concerts, the tour begins on February 4th in Stuttgart and ends on April 23rd in Heilbronn. On his 84th birthday, March 18, Kraus wants to take a break.