Speaking at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music today, 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 is
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-renown
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 will return to give a master class at the
school.

Janos Gereben/SF
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