Dresden, February 13, 1945

Please see Bob Shingleton's superb On An Overgrown Path site for his moving and thoughtful posts on this anniversary of the fire bombing of Dresden, Germany, 61 years ago:

http://theovergrownpath.blogspot.com/

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Last night upon my return to Washington, I commemorated the Dresden bombing by listening to the recording of Dresden-born composer/conductor Udo Zimmerman's 1982 oratorio, recently released, entitled Pax Questuosa (The Lamenting Peace), which sets Saint Francis of Assisi, Czeslaw Milosc, Nelly Sachs, and five other German language poets. The col legno recording features Edith Wiens, Mechtild Gessendorf, William Cochran, Roland Hermann, Siegmund Nimsgern, and the Bavarian Radio Chorus and Symphony Orchestra under Udo Zimmermann. The work was commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic in commemoration of the orchestra's one hundred anniversary, in 1982 (the year that Ronald Reagan pushed NATO and West Germany to accept more nuclear- tipped tactical weapons on it soil west of Dresden.) The final exhortation of the oratorio prefigures the J.S. Bach tricentennial celebrations of 1985.

Professor Zimmerman's anti-Nazi Weisse Rose (White Rose) chamber opera, with Gabriele Fontana and Lutz Harder, should also still be available on Orfeo. Zimmerman has been a leading figure in contemporary humanist music and experimental music theater in Dresden, Leipzig, and Berlin since 1970.












Altar in der Dreikönigskirche (Hauptstraße Dresden- Neustadt) vor 1945, (jetzt Fragement). Hauptwerk von Benjamin Thomas

Please see http://www.neumarkt-dresden.de/Neustaedter-Markt/thomae.html

Image credit: Deutsche Fotothek Dresden, Dieter Krull.