Contributions from people overseas who are sharing the message of Hiroshima

(2)Flowers of Hiroshima bloom in Germanyby Chihoko Nakata

Guten Tag !

Hannover, Germany, a sister city of Hiroshima, supports international youth exchange in order to spread the message of Hiroshima and promote a more peaceful world.

In 1980, the Hannover Girls Choir came to Hiroshima and held a concert. During their visit, they went to Peace Memorial Museum to learn about the atomic bombing. In 1996, they returned to Japan and sang "Hiroshima Requiem" at Suntory Hall in Tokyo, a composition by Toshio Hosokawa, a native of Hiroshima. It is a moving piece that expresses the horror of the bombing and offers a mass for the dead.

The Hannover Girls Choir singing songs created by the Hiroshima-born composer, Mr. Hoshikawa.(©Möbus Udo)

Chihoko Nakata

Born in Hiroshima, she is a singer and music critic. In 1974, she moved to Berlin to study music, where she now lives. At the same time she takes part in performances, she writes about the world of German music.

In 2005, for the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing, she read poems by Sadako Kurihara in her concert in Berlin.

Mr. Hosokawa frequently composes for major orchestras and international music festivals and his compositions are often played in Europe. On January 21, 2007 at the Opera House in Hannover, the Hannover Girls Choir performed his latest piece in their New Year Concert.

The theme was flowers and the lyrics were taken from poems by the great German writer, Herman Hesse. The conductor, Gudrun Schloefel, read the poems aloud, then 82 members of the choir, girls from 12 to 20 in red jackets, sang two songs "a cappella."

The first song, "Bellflowers," was sung at a slow tempo, with gentle background sounds of breathing and humming, and expressed reverence for nature. And the second song, "Flowers After the Storm," featured the girls' voices falling, then rising, the choir filling the hall with their beautiful singing.

I felt as though the lovely flowers that had given hope to people in Hiroshima after the bombing were now blooming in Germany, too.

After the performance, there was a short silence and then enormous applause for Mr. Hosokawa, the conductor, and the choir. I asked a member of the choir to share her feelings with me and she replied with a smile, "When we practiced these pieces, I found them wonderful and fitting expressions of the poems."