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FEATURE A Teenage Wehrmacht Soldier's War Requiem October 29, 2002
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By Janos Gereben
Speaking at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music last Friday morning, Kurt Masur was reciting from Wilfred Owen's poetry when he mentioned a company of teenage
soldiers. So understated and subtle was the shift from the commentary on
Britten's War Requiem to his own life that by the time the audience
understood the reference, Masur went on to speak of the "revenge bombing" of
Dresden long after "Mr. Hitler destroyed Coventry without reason, just to
show that he can do it."
The company of teenagers Masur mentioned briefly was his own. To illuminate
the message of the War Requiem and its "fearful, desperate" opening, "the
chorus unable to sing," stammering with "hopelessness," Masur spoke of being
forced into the German army at age 17, there to spend the last three months
of World War II. "I was in a company of 17-year-olds boys. We started out 130, we came back 27. This is not to describe my own fate — I am grateful because I survived — but to describe how deeply I am moved by the War Requiem," Masur said.
The recently retired music director of the New York Philharmonic was leading
the San Francisco Symphony in War Requiem performances Thursday through
Sunday in Davies Hall.
He spoke of sensing a special atmosphere in San Francisco, "perhaps because the West Coast is looking at this from a distance." In most wars, "there are no winners, only losers," said the conductor, whose other — more famous — encounter with history came during the final days of communism in East Germany, when he used his status as a world-renowned artist to help prevent violence before the Wall came down. In this, a Peter F. Ostwald Lecture, Masur placed the Britten Requiem in the context of large-scale, great works through several centuries, telling about his plan to perform all of them in a series of concerts in his new position as music director of the Orchestre National de France. Beginning with Bach's St. Matthew Passion ("not really church music, too exciting for those wanting to relax in church"), to Beethoven's Missa Solemnis ("demanding peace from God, not in devotion, but in protest"), on to Mendelssohn's Walpurgisnacht (about "the nonsense of religious wars"), and to the "desperation" of Janacek's Glagolitic Mass, and Shostakovich's Babi Yar Symphony, the 1962 contemporary of Britten's "most touching, perhaps greatest" work, the War Requiem, there is a common thread, Masur said, of protest and the depiction of conflict-caused agony, different from works such as the Brahms Requiem, which is more about acceptance and healing."
Adding to Owen's and Britten's anti-war statements, Masur added his own plea for eliminating "what makes wars happen . . . the regard for other peoples, other religions, other races as second-rate, inferior." He quoted Janacek's inscription on From the House of the Dead as a motto in the quest for peace: "In every creature, there is a spark of God." In his illustrated lecture on the Requiem, Masur used his own recent recording, with the New York Philharmonic, Carol Vaness, Jerry Hadley and Thomas Hampson, soloists. He didn't mention it, but those three singers have preceded Masur in frequent Conservatory appearances, Vaness also participated in the Merola Program in 1976, Hampson in 1980. In a private conversation after today's lecture, Masur promised Conservatory president Colin Murdoch that he will return to give a master class at the school.
(Janos Gereben, a regular contributor to www.sfcv.org, is arts editor of the
Post Newspaper Group. His e-mail address is janos451@earthlink.net.)
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Kurt Masur at age 16
Kurt Masur, Leipzig 1989,