Musical maestro Masur dies at 88 – A great conductor from Iron Curtain to 9/11
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NEW YORK, Dec 20, (Agencies): Kurt Masur, the conductor who seized on music’s power to ease Germany’s reunification and comfort New York after September 11, died Saturday. He was 88.
The New York Philharmonic announced the death of Masur, one of its longest-serving music directors who led the orchestra from 1991 to 2002 and was credited with enhancing its global reputation.
A German born in what is today Poland, Masur was an unlikely choice to lead one of the New World’s pre-eminent orchestras as he had spent his career — both musically and politically — within the confines of communist East Germany and was closely focused on the classical canon.
But Masur won wide praise for polishing the musical bona fides of the New York Philharmonic and raising its profile with 17 tours around the world including a first trip to mainland China, now key to the orchestra’s overseas activities.
“Masur’s years at the New York Philharmonic represent one of its golden eras, in which music-making was infused with commitment and devotion — with the belief in the power of music to bring humanity closer together,” Alan Gilbert, the outgoing music director, said in a statement.
“The ethical and moral dimensions that he brought to his conducting are still palpable in the musicians’ playing, and I, along with the Philharmonic’s audiences, have much to thank him for,” he said.
Masur faced the currents of history when he was conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and demonstrations were building across East Germany.
An accoladed East German who had been friendly with authorities despite his Christian faith, Masur went on the radio in October 1989 and appealed for calm.
Performance
The troops heeded the call and did not open fire. Masur was able to lead a performance without bloodshed, helping set the graceful, non-violent tone of German reunification with the Berlin Wall falling weeks later.
“We have lost a great conductor and extraordinary man,” German President Joachim Gauck said in a statement.
“Many people will never forget how he campaigned in the autumn of 1989 for structural change in the German Democratic Republic, for people’s freedom and for democracy,” said Gauck, himself a former pastor and anti-communist activist in the east.
Masur’s former orchestra in Leipzig changed its Internet home page to a picture of the conductor.
“Leipzig without the world citizen Kurt Masur is barely imaginable,” Mayor Burkhard Jung said.
“We have lost a musical genius, a fascinating conductor of top world rank, and a great humanist,” he said.
Support
Yet after East German leader Erich Honecker stepped down, Masur wrote a letter to thank him for his support to the orchestra, drawing criticism from regime opponents.
Years later, Masur described the mood as the Iron Curtain fell as “Heaven on Earth” but was circumspect when asked about the lasting impact.
“The spirit of those days has pretty much been exhausted, and things haven’t turned out well for everyone,” he told Der Spiegel in 2010.
“In fact, for many people, reunification has meant more suffering than gain. And many are quite desperate.”
Masur was again hailed for mastering the moment after the September 11, 2001 attacks scarred New York. He led the Philharmonic in Brahms’ “German Requiem” in a nationally televised memorial service.
The conductor requested that the audience refrain from applause, turning the concert into a moment for contemplation.
Annie Bergen, a host on New York’s classical music radio station WQXR, later said of the “German Requiem” performance that “the effect was so profound it was as if it had been composed that day.”
Masur initially took the baton at the New York Philharmonic in 1990 to fill in for Leonard Bernstein, one of his most famous predecessors as music director, who died suddenly as he prepared to conduct Mendelssohn’s “Elijah.”
Despite his musical background as a classical pianist and conductor, Masur initiated the Philharmonic’s collaboration with jazz great Wynton Marsalis who heads the Jazz at Lincoln Center program a short walk from the orchestra’s hall.
Yet Masur’s strict style did not always win him friends among musicians and administration, and he later said that his departure from the New York Philharmonic was not voluntary.
He was given the title of music director emeritus and took two prominent positions in the European classical world — music director of the Orchestre National de France and principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
Masur kept conducting late in life but suffered Parkinson’s disease.
By 1989, Leipzig had become the focal point for the demonstrations that would culminate in the opening of the Berlin Wall and the end of communist rule. As tensions rose on Oct. 9 and with the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown in China still fresh on people’s minds Masur and five others a satirist, a cleric and three party officials issued a public statement calling for calm and promising dialogue.
With security forces massing in the streets and young people saying goodbye to their families as if heading to war, a recording read by Masur was broadcast on speakers throughout the city. Without it, he later said “blood would have flowed.”
A month later, the embattled East German authorities gave in to popular pressure and opened the country’s border with the West. When Germany was reunited on Oct 3, 1990, Masur directed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the official celebrations.
Tribute
Germany’s minister of culture, Monika Gruetters, paid tribute Saturday to Masur’s musical legacy and his role in the peaceful revolution “when he used his high authority to compel the power of the state to react without violence to the mass demonstrations in Leipzig and begin a dialogue with the citizens.”
After German reunification, Masur took charge of the London Philharmonic and the Orchestre National de France, among a slew of engagements that spanned three continents, but spurned the political role that some suggested for him. When his name surfaced during the search for a new German president in the early 1990s, Masur said he wasn’t interested.
Born on July 18, 1927, in what was then the German town of Brieg now Brzeg, Poland Masur studied piano, composition and conducting at the Music College of Leipzig. He was appointed in 1955 as conductor of the Dresden Philharmonic in East Germany.
Masur subsequently spent 26 years in charge of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig, where he successfully petitioned East Germany’s Communist leader Erich Honecker for a new concert hall.
“The orchestra had been playing in a congress hall at the zoo since the end of the war,” he recalled. “During quiet sections you could hear the lions roar.”
He inaugurated the orchestra’s new home in 1981 with the Latin words: “res severa verum gaudium (true joy is a serious thing).”
Masur made his US debut in 1974 with the Cleveland Orchestra and took the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig on its first American tour that year. After being chosen as music director of the New York Philharmonic, some critics worried that his intense work ethic and conservative German musical style weren’t suited to the US orchestra.
He defied them by taming the Philharmonic, an orchestra seen as an unmanageable ensemble of egos when he took over from Zubin Mehta in 1991.
Masur “managed to get everybody to focus on the product of what we are doing,” concertmaster Glenn Dicterow said before the conductor’s departure in 2002. He said the orchestra was “not the bad boy of music anymore.”
“What we remember most vividly is Masur’s profound belief in music as an expression of humanism,” Philharmonic President Matthew VanBesien said in a statement Saturday announcing the conductor’s death. “We felt this powerfully in the wake of 9/11, when he led the Philharmonic in a moving performance of Brahms’s ‘Ein Deutsches Requiem,’ and musicians from the Orchestra gave free chamber concerts around Ground Zero.”
“Today, New Yorkers still experience this humanist mark through the popular Annual Free Memorial Day Concert, which he introduced,” he added.
The Philharmonic’s current music director, Alan Gilbert, said Masur’s tenure “represent one of its golden eras, in which music-making was infused with commitment and devotion with the belief in the power of music to bring humanity closer together.”
The conductor was named the Philharmonic’s music director emeritus, an honorary title previously held only by Leonard Bernstein.
“The world of music has lost a very high witness to German symphonic tradition as well as a high-level interpreter of composers like Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bruckner and Richard Strauss,” Milan’s La Scala said in a statement. Masur made his La Scala debut in the theater’s 1986 symphony season.
He is survived by his third wife, Tomoko, a soprano from Japan; and five children, including Ken-David Masur, the San Diego Symphony’s associate conductor. A private funeral will be held and a public memorial is also planned, the New York Philharmonic said.
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