I don’t think I was quite able to keep the childish glee off my face as I was shown around the backstage area of the Semperoper, Dresden’s famous opera house and home to Saxony’s State Opera and Orchestra. Giant pieces of stage design were being moved around, ready for the evening show. It smelled of saw dust. Men and women in black t-shirts bustled about with tools in their hands. A screen showed the live image of the stage on the other side. I couldn’t wait to get out there.
A few weeks earlier, I had found an email in my inbox from Peter Theiler, the director of the Saxon State Opera. He wanted to know if I would like to join a panel. The Saxon State Orchestra celebrated its 475th anniversary this year, making it one of the oldest in the world. The panel would focus on the East German chapter of its long and illustrious history and we would do so on the big stage of the Semperoper itself. Of course I couldn’t say no to that.
The Semperoper, like so much of Dresden, was almost completely destroyed in the Second World War. At the end of February 1945, only the outer shell of the Neo-Baroque building remained standing. But unlike the Frauenkirche, the Semperoper was high on the East German authorities’ list of priorities for rebuilding. The remaining structures were stabilised almost immediately after the war and the orchestra, opera, ballet and theatre staff maintained elsewhere to ensure continuity of the institutions.

On 13 February 1985, exactly 40 years after its destruction, the Semperoper reopened with Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz (The Marksman) – the last piece performed before the bombing. It is remarkable how much money was poured into the fairly faithful reconstruction given that building materials were permanently in short supply in East Germany. The only significant change was a modern extension at the back, which houses administrative offices and is connected to the main building via two bridges.

I grew up with stories of Cold War Dresden as part of the family lore. When the Semperoper was reopened in 1985, my mother was a student at Dresden university, pregnant with her first child. Little Katja was soon to join her life in the Saxon capital. Like most Dresden residents, Mutti enjoyed the rich cultural scene which offered state-subsidised entertainment that ranged all the way from high culture to student clubs. Like most Dresden residents, she was excited to watch the Semperoper reopen but didn’t think it would be possible to get tickets anytime soon, given the high demand. But she has since enjoyed many performances there with tickets that are now more expensive but easier to get. Last year, I too finally had an opportunity to see the splendid interior, watching Johann Strauss II’s operetta Die Fledermaus.
So the prospect of sitting on that stage was quite something. My anticipation was mounting as I and the other panellists met at the stage entrance. There was the historian Friedemann Pestel, preeminent expert on the history of the Saxon State Orchestra, Friedwart Dittmann, cellist and member of the orchestra since 1985 and Frank Richter, now an MP in Saxony’s parliament and previously a Catholic priest and dissident in Dresden during the time of the Peaceful Revolution in 1989. This combination of historians and eyewitnesses turned out to be a brilliant one to explore what the orchestra got up to between the Second World War and German reunification.
To me, one of the most fascinating aspects was the immediate postwar situation. Despite the destruction of its home, the orchestra itself survived. The musicians had been evacuated to a spa town in the very south of Saxony and most had survived. The area was first taken by the Americans and then handed over to the Soviets. The orchestra played for both and gave the first postwar concert in Dresden as early as 16 July 1945 when the city was still a pile of rubble and its citizens battled starvation, homelessness and disease. Historian Friedemann Pestel pointed out the astonishing fact that the breaks of play forced upon the orchestra by war, bombing and defeat were shorter than those of the Covid lockdowns.
But there was one problem: Nearly half of the orchestra’s musicians had been Nazi Party members.
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