His father was executed. He, his siblings and their mother knew the state could decide to harm them, too. Then, when the regime fell, they endured years of rejection and silence from the rest of society. But, despite this unimaginably traumatic start to his life, Christoph von Dohnányi went on to become a musician and one of the world’s finest conductors. Now von Dohnányi has died, aged 96. Thus ends a life that spanned nearly a century of suffering and turbulence – but also of enormous musical joy.

‘You know or discern how much I love your mother, and now some of this love must emanate from you.’ This is from a letter received by von Dohnányi and his two older siblings. Their father, Hans, a German government lawyer, was in a Gestapo prison for alleged currency offences. What the Gestapo didn’t know when they arrested Hans von Dohnányi was that he was also a key participant in the military resistance against Hitler, which culminated in the assassination attempt on the Führer on 20 July 1944. They also didn’t know that von Dohnányi had been painstakingly gathering evidence of Nazi atrocities, often together with his brother-in-law, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or that he had audaciously managed to arrange to smuggle Jews to safe countries by passing them off as German intelligence agents. When the 20 July coup failed, the Gestapo discovered von Dohnányi’s role in the early planning; being imprisoned from 1943, he’d not been able to participate in the later stages. Von Dohnányi was executed in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in April 1945, leaving behind his wife Christine and their children Hans, Barbara and Christoph.

It was the worst possible start to the children’s lives: living in Nazi Germany, in the middle of a war, with a parent arrested and executed by the regime. And the trauma affecting the families of the 20 July members didn’t end there: until the war, and for years after, they were shunned by the rest of society. But the young von Dohnányi defeated the odds, graduating from secondary school ahead of his peers and going off to study law, as his father had done, before switching to music, his grandfather’s métier. That grandfather was Ernst von Dohnányi, a Hungarian composer and conductor. (Hans and Christine von Dohnányi didn’t use the accent in the family name; as an adult, Christoph began using it.)

At 27, von Dohnányi was appointed music director in Lübeck; the country’s youngest. A marvellous career followed, one that saw him appointed music director in Kassel, then Frankfurt, followed by Hamburg. His success in Germany led to his appointment as music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, one of America’s ‘big five’, which he steered to new heights during his two decades at the helm. After Cleveland, he returned to Hamburg and its exquisite NDR Symphony Orchestra (now the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra).

Conductors are known for their longevity, though few manage to conduct for quite as long as von Dohnányi. (Watch him conduct the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, aged 90, here.) He died on 6 September, two days before his 96th birthday. He leaves behind not just his family but a wonderful collection of recordings; he was particularly known for his masterful interpretations of Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss. (Watch him perform Strauss’s Don Juan with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra here.)

He also leaves the world to study, and admire, a life that began four years before the Nazis came to power in Germany, a life that included hardship, extreme suffering, strife, success, enormous diligence and a not insignificant amount of joy. Von Dohnányi’s life, in fact, encapsulates the story of Germany – and perhaps large parts of Europe – from the late 1920s to now. Such have been the changes he lived through that it’s hard to believe that he had to face the Nazis’ horrors from the beginning to the end, which arrived just a few weeks after they executed his father. It was a century in which his family played a crucial, and wide-ranging, role. What would Germany be today without the sacrifice of Hans von Dohnanyi and Dietrich von Bonhoeffer (and that of Dietrich’s brother Klaus, another lawyer and member of the resistance), without the von Dohnányi and Bonhoeffer families’ contributions to culture, medicine and science, and without Christof von Dohnányi’s music-making?

Von Dohnányi’s life also ran parallel to that of another great German musician who died recently: the pianist Menahem Pressler, born in Magdeburg in 1923. He, too, had clear memories of the Nazis’ wickedness and brutality, which the Pressler family escaped by fleeing to Palestine in 1939. (Here is Pressler, aged nearly 99, playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 23 here.)

Pressler’s funeral, at the West London Synagogue, was a celebration of music and culture at its best, featuring a host of the world’s most notable musicians, who had travelled to London for the occasion. His life, which had such a heartbreaking beginning, received a joyful farewell. I venture to guess that a host of esteemed musicians are waiting for the opportunity to bid farewell to Dohnányi, too.