Jürgen Kesting (German journalist and music critic) Add a review

Jürgen Kesting (26 July 1940 – 5 June 2026) was a German journalist, music critic and author who focused on great voices. After working for record companies, he became a journalist for magazines and newspapers, writing for decades as an influential critic, for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 1997. He authored series for radio stations about great singers and wrote a book in three volumes about the topic in 1986, later expanded to four volumes. He wrote a monograph about Maria Callas in 1990. Both books became standard works, translated into several languages. He used his knowledge of voices as a member of the jury of the singing competition Neue Stimmen from 2005 to 2019. In 2006 Kesting initiated, together with the historian Hannes Heer and the designer Peter Schmidt, a project Verstummte Stimmen (Silenced Voices), a project of exhibitions about victims of Nazi racism against Jews working in opera houses.