Bruno Maderna’s Requiem was long considered lost and was indeed only premiered in the Teatro la Fenice in Venice in November 2009 – about 36 years after his death.

In 1943, Maderna was called up for military service and fought as a partisan against Italy’s erstwhile allies, the Germans. He was taken prisoner by the SS, who interrogated him in Dachau and released him shortly afterwards. ‘At that moment, it was the only possibility to write a requiem and then to die’, Maderna said later.

The Requiem suggests an intensive study of the models in the genre, eg those by Giuseppe Verdi and Hector Berlioz. At the same time, as a ‘War Requiem’ the work is a pacifist manifesto.