Kurt Masur: Conducting With Unmeasured Passion

“It is very rewarding to be able to tour our own country,” says a current New York Philharmonic press release, though since 1990 the orchestra has done no such thing, performing only in New York and abroad. This week, however, it repairs that omission, launching a short American tour that arrives at Costa Mesa tonight and at Royce Hall on Saturday. When Kurt Masur, the Philharmonic’s embattled music director, talks about this West Coast visit, he sounds genuinely happy.

He’s sitting in his corner office--more cozy than lavish, with two views of busy street life on Broadway, four stories below--at Lincoln Center. You could say he’s wearing Southwestern garb, since around his neck is a racy string tie. But at the same time, he’s every inch the classic German maestro, 71 years old, vigorous and hearty, always courteous but with steel beneath.

Masur nourished that steel in the former East Germany, where he made his career, serving as music director of the legendary Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, one of the world’s oldest symphonic ensembles. Late in the ‘80s, with reform sweeping the communist world, he became a leader in the fight for freedom.

In 1991, he joined the New York Philharmonic, where his work hasn’t always been easy. The Philharmonic is well known as an orchestra that eats conductors alive, full of strong-willed musicians who’ll go their own way unless they’re vigorously motivated. Last year, Masur’s contract was renewed through the 2001-2002 season. But it was openly reported that neither the Philharmonic’s musicians nor its management cared for him, and that he’d been kept on, in effect, as a compromise candidate, since no one could agree on who’d take his place.

Despite that, it’s clear Masur has had an impact in New York. He followed Zubin Mehta--whose years as music director at the New York Philharmonic are mostly recalled as a low ebb in the city’s musical life--and gave critics a reason to take the orchestra seriously again. He might not always be praised for his work with American music (he’s been cited for making Copland’s down-home style far too heavy, for instance), but at his best, he brings both depth and authority to the core classical works that made his German reputation.

Certainly that was true for his Beethoven symphony cycle, which opened the Philharmonic’s 1998-99 season. Some people damned it as routine programming, but Masur, rising to meet the challenge of the music he most deeply loves, showed that Beethoven is not routine, no matter how often his symphonies are played.

And it’s that side of him that shows as he speaks in easy, German-tinged English about the Philharmonic’s tour. He’s clearly a committed artist, passionate about music, and eager to evoke its deeper meaning.

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Question: You gave Beethoven’s life and music an exhaustive look at the start of this season. What made you pick the Fifth to conduct in Los Angeles?

Answer: It was the first Beethoven symphony that was prepared in a new edition, and there were significant things discovered. Number one, the older editions [used for almost all performances in the 19th and 20th centuries] had eliminated a repeat of the scherzo in the third movement.

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Q: So the Los Angeles audience may be in for a surprise. How does the work change when the repeat is restored?

A: The dimension of the piece grows immensely. Suddenly you discover that Beethoven has not written the Fifth Symphony as the very short piece it seems to be. The third movement now has another kind of greatness, another kind of importance. For the first time, Beethoven wrote a scherzo with enormous conflicts. We are able to understand much better that in Beethoven’s time, this was a kind of revolution.

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Q: Do you think of Beethoven as a revolutionary composer?

A: Beethoven always surprised his audience. It was strange that at the same time, his music was understood immediately. And there are some connections we should never forget. Beethoven took a lot of his themes from composers of the French Revolution. For instance, the composer Mehul lived in that time and [wrote] a G-minor symphony, and the last movement is very similar to Beethoven’s first movement of the Fifth Symphony. [He pauses.] When I say the word “understood” I wouldn’t say that we understand him better now. I think the danger with Beethoven is that we take him for granted.

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Q: The context of the cycle itself created new insights. Beethoven added piccolo and trombone to the last movement of the Fifth Symphony--instruments new to an orchestra at that time. After hearing the more conventional orchestration of the first four symphonies, they were almost the sound of the Industrial Revolution.

A: Exactly, exactly. I want musicians and conductors and also audiences to avoid saying that they know Beethoven. I believe that our Beethoven cycle showed that even this orchestra was unprepared to be able to follow Beethoven’s life from beginning to end in just two weeks. A lot of musicians came to me and said, “I never experienced this [before].” I was insisting that they play it fresh. [With the new edition], they feel instantly that the Fifth has a new meaning.

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Q: Along with Beethoven, you’ll be performing Shostakovich on tour. In Germany, didn’t you conduct a cycle of Shostakovich and Beethoven symphonies together?

A: I spoke with Shostakovich half a year before he died [in 1975] about this cycle, and he was very excited about it. Because he agreed that he reacted to the Russian Revolution much as Beethoven reacted to the French Revolution. Although [unlike Shostakovich], Beethoven always to the end had an optimistic outlook, even in the Ninth Symphony, when he was totally deaf and he was ill.

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Q: It was easier to be optimistic in the 1820s, when Beethoven wrote his Ninth Symphony, than it has been in the 20th century.

A: Absolutely. The end of the Beethoven Fifth Symphony is triumphant, but the end of the Fifth Shostakovich symphony is full of desperation, is full of protest, is full of unsatisfied desires.

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Q: Shostakovich’s memoirs were published after his death by his friend Solomon Volkov. If we believe Volkov, Shostakovich wrote the end of his Fifth Symphony to express rejoicing forced on the Russian people by the Communist Party.

A: [Yes,] but I’m a little bit worried that in America, people like to go down only a one-way street. What Volkov has written is absolutely clear, absolutely believable, but this is only one part of the meaning. I spoke to Kurt Sanderling [conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic from 1941 to 1960], who was also a close friend of Shostakovich. He asked Shostakovich about the ending of the Fifth Symphony. And Shostakovich told him, “Look, the publisher made a misprint, they have printed the tempo much more slowly than I wanted.” In the Shostakovich tempo, this ending is not even forced optimism! It’s pain. You feel that someone is running against a wall trying to be free.

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Q: Shostakovich is a complex, contradictory composer with a great vein of bitterness. That certainly makes sense, for someone who lived under the Communist regime.

A: Russian people are normally bound to their country in a very strong way. Shostakovich found out he wouldn’t have survived outside the country. So he stayed there. It was no compromise. It was what he had to do. And maybe he wouldn’t have composed so much if he had come to America. The tensions in Russia were also productive. The people had to be creative.

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Q: Let me ask you about Los Angeles. Do you have any feelings about the city?

A: I have not so much experience in Los Angeles, but I like so much the West Coast. It’s another world. [He laughs.] I feel that the West Coast people are tending much more to enjoy life. I found the West Coast orchestras very ambitious.

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Q: How would you compare the Los Angeles Philharmonic with the New York Philharmonic?

A: I wouldn’t do it. I think this wouldn’t be so useful, because it’s a different kind of city. Always I say the New York Philharmonic is an orchestra without limits. It’s a collection of fantastic soloists, and if you’re able to bring them together, that brings you to highlights that you cannot foresee.

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Q: One last question: What about reports of tension between you and the Philharmonic?

A: What I have to say is that I love the New York Philharmonic, and that I have no plans to leave. About another conductor, I will say that it is not easy to know who this would be. The names of qualified conductors are all known. There are no surprises. But if in two years there is a conductor who is capable, and willing--then who can tell?

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The New York Philharmonic, tonight at 8, Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, $30-$85, (949) 553-2422; Saturday at 8 p.m., Royce Hall, UCLA. $19-$75, (310) 825-2101.