Aging & Wisdom Quote by Kurt Masur

Masur’s sentence flatters you with “grow” and then quietly moves the goalposts: growth is conditional, and the condition is strength. Not talent, not charisma, not even “musicality” in the romantic sense. Strength. Coming from a conductor who spent decades in the pressure-cooker institutions of Leipzig, New York, and beyond, that word reads less like gym talk and more like a job description for emotional endurance.

The intent is pedagogical but unsentimental. Masur is talking to young conductors who imagine the podium as a place to express themselves. He’s pointing to the opposite: the podium is where you absorb everyone else’s expectations, egos, and anxieties and still have to make a coherent, living performance. Strength here is the capacity to stay porous without being penetrated-to remain open to the orchestra’s intelligence, to the composer’s demands, to the hall’s reality, and to your own failures, without collapsing into defensiveness or performance-of-authority.

The subtext is that conducting is less about domination than about withstanding. You can’t “grow” by chasing control; you grow by surviving the grind of rehearsal politics, by hearing criticism without shrinking, by insisting on standards without turning cruel. Masur, whose career intersected with East German cultural power and later Western institutional prestige, knew how easily conductors become either tyrants or mascots. His line sketches a third model: leadership as stamina, patience, and self-command-strong enough to keep changing.