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.