Rolf Reuter

His numerous guest performances and master classes have taken him around the world, including Paris, London, Tokyo, Beijing, Houston and Buenos Aires, as well as Israel, Italy, France, Spain, the former Soviet Union, Bulgaria, etc.

His conducting, partly in collaboration with Harry Kupfer, for example the Mozart cycle, Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Boris Godunov, and the world premiere of Siegfried Matthus' opera Judith, significantly shaped the artistic profile of the Komische Oper Berlin.

World-famous conductors emerged from his teaching, for example Vladimir Jurowski, Walter Taieb, Thomaskantor Georg Christoph Biller, Claus Peter Flor as well as Shi-Yeon Sung.

Shortly before his death the conductor got into public criticism, because he opened on 13 May 2006 together with Lisbeth Grolitsch [de] a "Singleiterkurs" of the Freundeskreis Ulrich von Hutten [de] and held on this occasion two lectures with the titles Das deutsche Volkslied als Mutterboden der Hochkultur (The German folk song as the breeding ground of high culture) and Anton Bruckner und die deutsche Volksseele (Anton Bruckner and the German People's Soul) in front of the neo-fascist organization.

[2] The Bundespräsidialamt did not grant a demand by the member of the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin, the SPD politician Tom Schreiber, to deprive the conductor of the Federal Cross of Merit awarded in 2000.