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The Week in Germany: Culture July 20, 2007 Conductor Kurt Masur, a Hero of German Unification, Turns 80
Kurt Masur, the great German orchestral conductor, says that with his 80th birthday coming up on Wednesday he has no plans to retire. On the day, the much-traveled musician will be conducting a joint concert by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and his Paris-based Orchestre National de France in the Royal Albert Hall in London. An audience of 8,000 will be in London to honor the former conductor of Leipzig's Gewandhaus orchestra and the 1991-2002 music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Masur, who described himself in an interview as a shy person, said he would have much preferred to have a quiet birthday with his Japanese-born singer wife Tomoko and his children. "Home for me is where Tomoko is," he said. "I spend six weeks a year in my Leipzig house, six weeks in New York and nine months on the road." He has orchestral engagements across the world. Masur was a pillar of the music establishment in communist East Germany, but rallied on a popular revolt in late 1989 that brought the communists down. He was born in what is now the Polish town of Brzeg, the son of an engineer. After a brief stint in the Army during World War II, Masur studied piano. He eventually switched to conducting after doctors predicted that a stiffening of several fingers would grow worse. In 1970 he was appointed Kapellmeister or conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in the eastern city of Leipzig, which had been conducted in the 19th century by the great Felix Mendelssohn. During his 26 years at the helm, the Orchestra's growing acclaim earned it the privelege to tour on the other side of the iron curtain. Memorably, at Carnegie Hall in New York in 1984, it performed all the Beethoven symphonies in the order of their composition. Orchestra chairman Heiner Stolle recalls Masur was just as determined to give the best possible performance on tours of provincial East Germany, playing in town halls and gymnasiums. When popular protests swelled up against the regime in autumn 1989, Masur relectantly emerged as an activist. On October 9 of that year, as more than 70,000 East Germans demonstrated for liberty, he put his signature on a call by community leaders for both sides to avoid violence. "We heard that security forces were drawing up around the city. Many parents were bidding farewell to their teenagers as though they were going off to war," Masur recalled in his interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa. "It was a miracle that the revolution happened peacefully." Masur invited civic groups to hold debates in the Gewandhaus and was one of the heroes of Germany's 1990 reunification. Some suggested he be made president, but Masur stayed with the music business. US audiences venerated him after his appointment to head the New York Philharmonic in 1991, while musicians reportedly found him a tough and exacting boss. Today he conducts the Orchestre National de France and is president of the International Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Foundation established in 2003 to run a Mendelssohn museum in Leipzig. Masur acclaims that "genius of composition," who he says "felt responsible for all the people placed in his charge and who fought injustice with combative spirit." Those are words that many say would equally apply to Masur himself. (dpa)
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