Generous is the word that keeps coming to mind as you talk to Bryn Terfel. The Welsh bass-baritone who has had such spectacular international success greets you in the most boyish way, talking eagerly about what he is doing, generous of frame as he is of voice and personality. Not that he lacks the toughness and sense of purpose which any budding superstar needs in today's high-powered musical world. He is just readier than most to give others the credit for success, for his breathtaking progress after winning the Lieder prize in the 1989 Cardiff Singer of the World contest. 

That was the year when the Siberian baritone, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, won first prize, and I was surprised when Terfel told me he had never spoken to his rival, only stood next to him when receiving his prize. Over the days of the competition it seems that Hvorostovsky was constantly surrounded by well-wishers demanding his attention, and there was no chance to speak. On the day I saw him, Terfel was eagerly looking forward to meeting his fellow baritone for the first real time that very afternoon. 

Terfel's eagerness for new experience and new enjoyment is reflected in his whole approach to his art. As the most successful Welsh singer for a generation and more, it is apt that he should in his background and upbringing reflect the very best in traditional Welsh music-making. He was born in the village of Pantglas in North Wales, by Snowdonia, the son of a sheep and cattle farmer. Not just his father but his mother too still sing in local choirs, and for Bryn singing 'was just something that brings young people together, and you enjoy yourself, part of village life. I was brought up to enjoy music, and work hard at it. It was very natural.' When I put the point that he obviously still does enjoy his music, he warmly agrees. He remains part of the Pantglas community, for wherever he goes in the world, he makes sure of sending a postcard addressed to the Post Office. Everyone can then see for themselves how he is. 

For all his early enjoyment of singing, he counts himself as a late developer musically. That statement, I suspect, has to be taken with a pinch of salt. What he means is that initially, like most members of traditional Welsh choirs, he simply sang along with his colleagues, listening to them and following rather than reading music for himself. Even so he studied the piano when still a boy, and learnt to read music. He also tried the trumpet, later the clarinet, but felt no attraction to either instrument. 

The guitar was rather different, but at the time he favoured the electric guitar, and only later wished he could play the acoustic instrument. To my suggestion that he might nowadays accompany himself in folk-songs on the guitar, his reply is immediate and brisk. 'No way! I'll leave that to Eric Clapton.' Even so, he rather fancies the idea, when he sings Don Giovanni for performances of the opera with Sir Georg Solti, of himself playing the mandolin in the Serenade. 'But I think my fingers are too big,' he admits. 

There is nothing, Terfel says, that he would want to change in the musical training he had, with one possible exception. He wishes he could sightread more easily. 'I have to read things slowly first time,' he explains – usually at the piano. 'The second time it gets better, and the third time I more or less know it.' As he says, now he is still young, he is a quick learner. He has been studying the baritone role in Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony, which he is due to record with Sinopoli and the VPO for DG, and there he was at first worried, for 'once the orchestra starts playing, there is a total clash against the voice', with hardly a tune to help him. 

Two other recordings for DG Richard Strauss's Arabella with Sinopoli and Berlioz's Damnation de Faust with Myung-Whun Chung – he recently had to cancel at a late stage. He now looks forward to doing both works when an opportunity comes in the calendar. What happened was that after an intensive series of performances at Covent Garden, as Jokanaan in Salome and Captain Balstrode in Peter Grimes, he developed a cold. As he says, he can 'usually sing through it, but not this time'. He felt his body was trying to tell him something, and instead of doing the recordings he went on holiday, which was just what he needed. 

It is striking that, young as Terfel is, and rightly ambitious, he is very level-headed in his judgments about his career and the development of his voice. He still regards himself as in his Mozart stage, and though he sings shorter roles in heavier operas, he is still reluctant to press on too quickly to the full Verdi repertory. So far he has only done Ford in Falstaff with Welsh National Opera, as produced by Peter Stein, whom he much enjoyed working with. As Terfel says, singing Verdi involves different muscles. Soon after his Cardiff success he went to audition for Riccardo Muti at La Scala. There was talk of Macbeth, but he knew he was not then ready. He hopes that Muti's search for a Lady Macbeth will succeed just about the time when he does feel ready for the role. In an aside he explains that 'of course' he already sings the Macbeth arias, but that is different. 

By the time he takes on the full range of Verdi roles open to him, Terfel hopes he will have achieved his ambition of singing and recording all the major Mozart bass-baritone roles, including both Don Giovanni and Leporello, as well as Figaro. His Milan audition with Muti led to his great success as Figaro in Vienna, and that is the role with which he likes to make his debut in any major city. Figaro at English National Opera in Graham Vick's brilliant production of Figaro's Wedding was his first major engagement in London, and he cherishes the way that over six or seven weeks he worked intensively in what became a superbly coordinated team. He liked working with Vick so much, that 'I began to enjoy myself on stage. I found I could use my height, which I used to try to hide.' It was his big breakthrough. 

Another came when he made his debut, also as Figaro, at the Met in New York. His success was so great it made news on the front page of the New York Times, the first time that that had happened, so it was said, since Kirsten Flagstad sang at the Met. The way was prepared by a series of pictures of the Figaro rehearsals that the paper had already published in its magazine section, and Terfel's actual appearance more than lived up to the promise. He was promptly dubbed 'Taffyrotti'. Terfel shrugs when I mention that, saying how much he admires Pavarotti. The encore which Pavarotti took in Tosca – the first at the Met in many years – was another operatic story in New York at the time, and Terfel went backstage to see the great man after one of the performances. There were mutual congratulations, but Pavarotti gave a warning to his younger colleague. 'Watch out next time: it won't be the same!' 

Terfel's success was so great that in a way typical of New York there were the beginnings of a critical backlash, when between two of his Figaro performances he made his recital debut at the small Carnegie Hall. That too was a triumph, but a commentator in Newsday complained that 'his voice shows marked signs of wear...I'm afraid Terfel is already having to be careful.' Terfel is cheerfully unmoved by that criticism, which seemed to rest on two facts – that he sang Figaro performances on either side of the recital and that he used a wide dynamic range, as he does in all his song-recitals both live and on disc. What Terfel knew very clearly was that on the day of the recital his voice was in 100 per cent condition, which inevitably it cannot always be. 'I could have sung all night,' he reports. 

Happily Terfel has so far had very little adverse criticism to face, but he seems untroubled by the prospect, not quite dismissing it but seeing it very much as one person's reaction. The important point, as he sees it, is that 'I have looked after myself', avoiding roles that might tax him in the wrong way. Yet he sees that he does now need to test himself, and that is why he has agreed to do his first Wozzeck, as a role weighty but relatively short. That is in 1997 at the Salzburg Festival, when Claudio Abbado will be conducting in a production by Peter Stein, whom he so enjoyed working with in Cardiff at WNO. 

Terfel has regularly appeared at the Salzburg Festival ever since Gerard Mortier took over as Artistic Director four years ago. I remember myself, when I met Mortier for the first time, that he specially mentioned his admiration for Terfel, and that he had engaged him as Jokanaan in Salome. Already then Mortier had heard Terfel as the Speaker in the Brussels production of Die Zauberflöte, and over the years Terfel's Salzburg engagements have included such high-profile events as singing in the Brahms Requiem under Claudio Abbado in the Karajan memorial concert – something he found deeply moving when at the end in tribute to Karajan no one applauded – and last August giving a complete Liederabend of Schubert and Schumann in the Mozarteum. 

As I witnessed myself, that was another triumph for Terfel, the more remarkable before a German-speaking audience. Those with long memories likened it to the Salzburg debut of FischerDieskau, and shrewdly DG managed to issue just in time Terfel's Schubert disc, 'An die Musik'. As in all great Lieder recitals the encores crowned the occasion, not least when for the one time in the whole evening Terrel turned from German and sang in Welsh, the folk-song, David of the white rock. There one registered a communal gulp-in-throat, and when Terfel made his recital debut in Vienna too he found the audience responding instantly and movingly to Welsh folk-songs, where in the Vaughan Williams Songs of Travel, which he included in the main recital, many in the audience were plainly nonplussed by music they did not know. 

Those are the songs which open Terfel's latest disc, 'The Vagabond', devoted entirely to English song. Why, I asked him, had he not done a disc of Welsh songs first? Yes, he said, he could 'at the drop of a hat' record a whole range of them, but devising a satisfying programme will require careful thought, when it would be easy to have too many songs that sound similar. The other reason is that he loves the English song repertory so intensely, having studied for his first two years at the Guildhall School of Music with the veteran, Arthur Reckless, a devotee of the genre. Through him he learnt a wide range of songs, from which for the disc he has chosen his favourites. 

Making the disc was a special delight too. Terfel seems entirely unfazed by the idea of recording. As he says, 'It totally depends on how you feel on the day'. When he was doing the English songs at Henry Wood Hall with his favourite accompanist, Malcolm Martineau, everything went so well he enjoyed every moment, not just over the way his voice was working but in the whole atmosphere, including the excellent food they ate at the hall in the breaks. Martineau, Terfel says, has been a key influence on him and his singing of songs and Lieder, ever since they first met and collaborated as students together at the Guildhall School. As Terfel reports, Martineau sometimes expresses surprise that a particular song suits him, adding, 'But you do it differently from everyone else'. 

That is one reason Terfel feels he still has something to contribute even when he thinks of the career of the singer he admires most of all, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Terfel catalogues the great German baritone's many achievements even in addition to his singing – writing books, conducting and so on – and knows that he will never compete there. Yet from his earliest days in Pantglas performing on stage before an audience has for Terfel been a natural and enjoyable experience. Communication is the vital factor. When he listens on record to other singers he more often than not chooses tenors, particularly on cassette in the car. He finds himself singing along with Pavarotti , so enthusiastically, he admits, that 'sometimes I lose my voice!' Happily, not for long. 

Future recording plans include a Beethoven Ninth with Abbado in Berlin, Leporello for Abbado and Don Giovanni for Solti, and recital discs of Schumann as well as of Beethoven and Brahms, he hopes. Then there is Wagner, but not just yet either on disc or on stage. Wotan will come 'one day', and maybe he will tackle Hans Sachs in Meistersinger sooner. Terfel does not underestimate the problems, but already he sings Sachs's two monologues, and gives me a demonstration of the Fliedermonolog, claiming happily that 'it sings itself'. He loves Meistersinger too because the concept of the Bards and the Welsh Eisteddfod is so close to the tradition of the Masters that inspired Wagner, an extension of his own background. One has the feeling that Bryn Terfel will never stop finding excitement in new discovery.

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