Kurt Masur obituary

There was a time when the German term kapellmeister (literally, the music director of a chapel, and so a total all-rounder) stood for the conducting virtues of good preparation and solid hard work. Then it took on pejorative overtones: to be kapellmeisterish was to show a lack of imagination and fire.

In today’s musical climate the notion has become virtually obsolete: the chief conductors of the great orchestras have to be charismatic personalities, good publicists and keen educators. Kurt Masur, who has died aged 88, began his career as a kapellmeister in the first sense of the word, and proved himself able to adapt to the changing musical climate nearly half a century later. From the closed musical scene of East Germany after the second world war, he rose to become an international figure on both human and musical levels, ready to identify with the wide-ranging new policies of two of the world’s leading orchestras.

Masur had a thorough and conservative training in piano, composition and conducting at the music college in Leipzig, close to his native town of Brieg in Silesia, then part of Germany, now Brzeg, in Poland. His father, an engineer, encouraged him to take up a career as an electrician, but musical training ran alongside the more pragmatic option. Kurt studied the piano, organ, cello and percussion, but when he was 14 inoperable tendon damage turned him in the direction of conducting, albeit batonless because of the injury. As with many German conductors able to learn their trade through working in the country’s numerous small theatres, he began as orchestral coach at the Halle County theatre in 1948, before progressing to kapellmeister posts at opera houses in Erfurt and Leipzig.

After a brief spell as conductor of the Dresden Philharmonic from 1955, he returned to the theatre in 1958 as general music director of the Mecklenburg State theatre in Schwerin. Even in this operatic sphere, not one for which he was destined to be remembered, Masur had his maverick side; from 1960 to 1964 he worked in tandem with Germany’s most energetic and challenging opera director at that time, Walter Felsenstein, in the lively environment of Berlin’s Komische Oper.

The concert hall scene on which he was to make his mark was steeped in a far less flexible tradition. As the oldest ensemble of its kind in the world, based in the city of Bach and Mendelssohn, the Leipzig Gewandhaus upheld the core classic and romantic symphonic repertoire more rigidly than any other.

Masur’s job as chief conductor from 1970 to 1996, when he became the orchestra’s first conductor laureate, was to consolidate this role. Under him, the orchestra rarely stepped out of its translucent, slightly wiry character as it was later to do for Rafael Kubelík; and Masur’s insistence, in more recent interviews, on the right kind of sound for the composer in question seldom worked in practice. His infinitely cultured association with the Gewandhaus brought light, buoyant Mendelssohn and Schubert; interpretations of other key figures in the tradition such as Beethoven, Mahler and Strauss could sound undernourished.

Accusations of power-brokering with the East German regime, an assumption often made because of his strong position at the head of a figurehead institution, were forcefully brushed aside. “I was respected,” he told Gramophone, “but as a musician, as an artist. Humanism means that you shouldn’t be a member of any political party.” Nevertheless he brought pressure to bear on Erich Honecker, the East German leader, to get a new concert hall built in Leipzig in 1981 – the old one had been destroyed in allied bombing – supervised in every aspect by himself.

Masur’s humanistic credentials were certainly strengthened by his show of solidarity with demonstrations for reforms at the time of German reunification. Actions spoke louder than vague support, and he was one of five distinguished east Germans who are reckoned to have stopped bloodshed with urgent canvassing. Honours accrued, among them the German order of merit in 1995 and commander of the Legion of Honour from the French government two years later.

His stance brought good publicity and a broad welcome at the time of his surprising appointment in 1991 as principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic, an orchestra with a reputation for a toughness and brashness not in Masur’s interpretative armoury. The orchestra had also been in decline under the showman Zubin Mehta after the Leonard Bernstein years. Here Masur was able to maintain the canny balance between old and new that was a hallmark of his late, “grandmaster” phase. New Yorkers expected old-mastery alone, but the inaugural concert was a sign of good faith: Masur inaugurated the partnership with a performance of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony alongside Copland and John Adams.

He began the 2000 season with a three-week Mendelssohn festival; but he also took charge of many commissions and first performances, including the American premiere of Hans Werner Henze’s Ninth Symphony and works by John Corigliano and Sofia Gubaidulina. A performance of Shostakovich’s Thirteenth, “Babi Yar”, Symphony was twinned with Bright Sheng’s commemoration of the victims of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, H’un: In Memoriam (1966-76).

The same was true of his tenure from 2000 with the London Philharmonic, where surprise collaborations with composers such as Thomas Adès and a willingness to feature music from other cultures in the same concert programme sat easily alongside the symphonic interpretations he had always seen as the core of any conductor’s repertoire, and yet which are proving increasingly difficult to sell to wider, younger audiences. Within the orchestra, similar accusations were heard to those of New York Philharmonic musicians – not least that Masur always wanted things his way, and was not open to discussion – but the end results were always polished, if not headily spontaneous. A whole new era at the LPO was ushered in by his successor, Vladimir Jurowski, in 2007, though Jurowski was both respectful and careful in steering clear of Masur’s repertoire for the first few seasons.

Masur’s humanitarian support at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, when he had conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, came to the fore again when he swung into action after 9/11 with a performance of Brahms’s German Requiem on 20 September 2001 that was televised nationally. NYPO players gave free chamber concerts around Ground Zero, and Masur inaugurated an Annual Free Memorial Day concert.

None of this prevented his unwilling departure at the end of the 2001-02 season after much-publicised clashes with the orchestral board and the executive director, Deborah Borda. There were still great moments ahead with the LPO – including a surprisingly visceral Shostakovich Fifth Symphony – and the Orchestre National de France, where he was music director from 2002 to 2008. The two orchestras came together to mark his 80th birthday with a performance of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony at the Proms in 2007.

Despite the New York clashes, Masur was an orchestral management’s dream of what the principal conductor should be: a hard worker with a genuine concern for broadening horizons. It was a daunting experience, for example, to suddenly see his face among the audience of those preconcert talk events vital to an orchestra’s funding. He took the educational aspect – an essential brief of any orchestra operating today – very seriously indeed, and regularly appeared with the London Philharmonic Youth Orchestra. For a solid mix of the old and the new, there was no conductor of his generation to match him.

He is survived by his third wife, the Japanese-born soprano Tomoko Sakurai, their son Ken-David, and his children Angelika, Carolin, Michael and Matthias from his previous marriages.