With Margot Friedländer, we have lost a person who meant a great deal to me personally. She accompanied me throughout my entire tenure as artistic director of the Deutsche Oper Berlin and attended almost every one of our premieres over the past thirteen years. Margot was a passionate opera lover – she loved to tell the story of how she and her husband literally saved every penny in the early years of their emigration to New York so that they could buy tickets for the MET. And just two days before her death, when I had the pleasure of seeing her at the Rotes Rathaus (Berlin's town hall) for a concert by the choir of the Berlin Beethoven Gymnasium, she asked the pupils to sing the Prisoners' Chorus from Verdi's NABUCCO. In Margot Friedländer's case, however, this deep love of opera and culture in general was more than just a personal passion. The better I got to know her, the more I realised that culture was the basis for a better humanity for her, the breeding ground for the humanity in our dealings with one another that she tirelessly evoked. For me, as for many others, the memory remains of a person who believed until the very end that human beings can be guided towards good and that the best way to achieve this is through the communication and experience of culture.

We will miss her.