Jürgen Kesting
Music Critic & Author
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Jürgen Kesting was born in Duisburg in 1940 and studied German, English language and literature in Cologne and Vienna. After four years as head of publicity for the Cologne’s EMI Electrola and Munich’s Eurodisc he joined Stern magazine in 1973 as editor, head of department, managing editor and author before joining the Die Woche newspaper when it first appeared in 1993 as an author. He has been developing the specialist music magazine Amadeo since the autumn of 1997 and made many radio programmes for the Westdeutsche Rundfunk, Südwestfunk, Süddeutsche Rundfunk and Bayerische Rundfunk. His three volume 2000 page long study of Die großen Sänger/Great Singers was published in 1986 and were followed by his 1990 monograph about Maria Callas, which has been translated into English, Russian and Japanese, and a book-essay about Luciano Pavarotti in 1991, which is also available in English. For ten years he was responsible for programmes about great singers for the NDR and a 26-part series about Maria Callas for the RBB and other ARD radio waves. Jürgen Kesting has been working freelance for the Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung (newspaper) for thirty years.