Requiems for the Firestorm - Dresden's Musical Aftermath

80 years ago, on a beautiful February night, Allied bombers transformed Dresden into fiery ruins, killing some 25,000 people, levelling a jewel of European Baroque and a cradle of so much beautiful music making. Among the survivors of the firestorm was Rudolf Mauersberger, Kantor of the legendary Kreuzchor. 11 of his choristers were killed that night. For three days he walked home to his tiny village of Mauersberg in the Ore mountains. Within months he had finished the motet, Wie liegt die Stadt so wüst (How desolate lies the city). Gathering surviving choristers amid the ruins of the Kreuzkirche they performed to a hushed audience on August 4th 1945. Offering hope and continuity, the motet drew, ironically, on the Lamentations of Jeremiah and the destruction of Jerusalem. Compelled, Mauersberger would soon craft a Requiem marking the city's fate. More music flowed.

Summoned to Dresden to score a propaganda film, Shostakovich wrote his 8th Quartet instead - a piece for his own tormented soul. For 80 years, every February 13th, after bells ring out their lamentations, people have gathered to hear requiems, motets and berceuses. But today how do you mark the destruction of a city, greatly restored, where few living remember the event? This year, Sven Helbig's Requiem A had its first performance in Dresden on February 13th and then in London in October - a Requiem for the living in a time of renewed war.

Historian Katja Hoyer explores 80 years of sounding Dresden's destruction and musical resurrection, and wonders how the music has interacted with the complex memory politics of state Socialism, fascism and attempts at erasure brought by Reunification.

Readers: Wolf Kahler and Anton Lesser

Producer: Mark Burman

A Far Shoreline Production for BBC Radio 3