Creativity Quote by Kurt Masur

Masur isn’t offering a genteel reminder to “feel the music.” He’s laying down a moral requirement for interpretation: permission comes after knowledge. The double insistence - “He must know. He must know” - is the sound of a conductor pushing back against a modern temptation to treat masterpieces like neutral content, infinitely customizable to the performer’s brand. For Masur, Beethoven is not a mood board; he’s a lived human situation with stakes.

The key phrase is “in which spirit.” That’s not mysticism so much as discipline: the interpreter has to reconstruct a work’s inner weather - its anger, defiance, grief, comedy, or radical hope - and resist the lazy shortcut of importing their own. Masur’s language also betrays an old-world musician’s suspicion of virtuosity unmoored from context. You can play the notes and still miss the point.

Then comes the almost awkward, beautiful detail: “in which station of life of Beethoven.” He’s insisting on biography not as gossip, but as a map of necessity. Beethoven writing as a young firebrand is different from Beethoven writing while increasingly deaf, politically disillusioned, or spiritually cornered. Masur implies that tempo, articulation, even the size of a crescendo should be answers to questions about circumstance: what did Beethoven need this music to do at that moment?

Subtext: fidelity is creative. The performer’s freedom isn’t erased; it’s earned by doing the hard work of empathy, scholarship, and historical imagination. Masur makes interpretation sound like an ethical encounter with another mind, not a solo sport.