On the evening of May 8th, became something else entirely. The air thick with history, voices from across generations converged in a quiet, insistent act of remembrance and possibility. Marking the 80th anniversary of Austria’s liberation from the Nazi regime – and of VE Day itself – the Festival of Joy drew thousands to the square that once echoed with Hitler’s 1938 announcement of the Anschluss; a space long shadowed by its role in history. Here, amidst speeches from survivors, activists and a recorded address by Austrian President , ‘Requiem A’ by German composer did something rare: it turned grief into gravity and memory into momentum.

There is perhaps no one better suited than Helbig – a composer, director and music composer whose work moves deftly between classical tradition, electronics and far beyond – to undertake this. Born and based in Dresden, a city still shaped by the scars of war and renewal, Helbig brings not just artistic range but lived resonance to the piece. His ability to hold the sacred and the synthetic, the intimate and the monumental, in the same frame has long marked him out as a singular voice. With ‘Requiem A’, that shape-shifting mastery becomes something else: a deeply personal reckoning rendered universal.

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‘Requiem A’, performed by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra (Wiener Symphoniker), the boys’ choir of the Kreuzkirche in Dresden (Dresdner Kreuzchor) and Vienna youth choir, Neue Wiener Stimmen, isn’t merely a choral work: it’s an act of sonic archaeology, sifting through inherited trauma to excavate a future still worth striving toward. “On Heldenplatz, one can feel the breath of history,” Helbig tells me. “We were all deeply moved on stage. It’s indescribable how a solitary moment becomes so much more powerful when 170 musicians feel the same.” His voice carries the weight of someone who knows this isn’t just performance. It’s participation.

Premiered in Dresden’s Kreuzkirche earlier this year, the piece is built on shifting terrain: Latin liturgy, his own texts, spectral electronics and tolling bells, all stitched together with an acute awareness of where it’s being staged. “Our actions today take place against a historical backdrop and move toward an uncertain future,” he says. “The electronics represent that ambient presence of memory and possibility.” The result is a soundworld that feels simultaneously ancient and weightless, where filtered ambience wraps around sublime motifs and glacial pulses like breath returning to stone.

The visuals, created by Icelandic artist , lent a layer of sublime metamorphosis to the work; a sequence of shifting imagery that mirrored the music’s sweeping emotional arc. Their intricacy and symbolism captured the industrial and historical weight of the piece, while subtly affirming the supremacy of nature over all. It was another vital element in this vast collective act; reflective, too, of the breathlike pillar at the heart of the work’s title.

The composer’s choice of the title ‘Requiem A’ is no accident. “A” can stand for Anfang (beginning), Asche (ashes) and Atmen (breath). The piece moves through all three. “We must never stop searching for a way out, and for a new beginning,” Helbig explains. That idea was suggested to him by his daughter, Ida, during early conversations about the work. “She was 15 at the time,” he adds. “A choir made up of young people must believe in a future.”

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The weight of that belief was felt touchable on the night. With conductor Martin Lehmann drawing out restrained intensity from the orchestra and choirs, the performance felt like a slow exhale – grief rendered devotional. At its heart stood René Pape, one of the world’s most singular voices in opera, whose timbre carried both gravitas and emotional fragility. His presence was no mere guest role: it felt as vital, as integrated, as the youth of the Kreuzchor or the steadfast brilliance of the local symphony. In Pape’s bass, the past spoke plainly and with unflinching clarity. In the choirs’ harmonies, the future pushed gently through. The sheer collective weight of that – generations, geographies and legacies converging in a single work – ensured it was a truly singular occasion. His was not the only lineage present on stage. Helbig’s own roots, formed in postwar Dresden and shaped by conversations with his now-elderly grandfather and his teenage daughter, pulsed through each arc and every movement.

Helbig composed Pape’s part with almost spiritual precision. “A choir and an orchestra express broad, often abstract emotions,” he explains. “But in ‘Requiem A’, I wanted to create two moments that feel deeply personal, where individual experience is at the centre.” In the context of war, where the dead are so often counted in thousands, Helbig sought to carve space for the grief of one. “Behind every number is the loss of a single person – an individual, eternal grief,” he says. “In his arias, the eternal meets the fleeting. René was the perfect voice for this. I heard his tone in every word as I was writing.”

These arias are placed with intention: the first appears at position three, a plea for strength; it returns at six as an Agnus Dei, and resolves at position nine with Atem (German for Breath) – a sonic reply to that original call. This triadic structure follows the Tesla-attributed 3/6/9 sequence and is guided by Helbig’s interest in numerology and the teachings of the Pythagoreans. “The many fourths, fifths, and octaves found throughout the work are a direct reference to their worldview – in which these intervals held the key to understanding the harmony of the cosmos.” In this way, Pape’s role becomes not only a singular emotional centre, but the spine of a metaphysical architecture – one built to hold absence, presence, and the breath between.

Throughout, Helbig guides things with the quiet precision of someone whose compositional voice extends far beyond the page. “The compositional process is only completed in the concert itself,” he tells me. “Each performance sounds different. I respond to the ensemble, the audience, the occasion. You feel how long the audience can hold a drone, how much intensity is needed without tipping the balance.”

The balance, here, is almost everything. Between ages, between disciplines, between the colossal and the close. Even the electronic textures, sourced entirely from the choir’s own processed recordings, feel tethered to the human breath. “I wanted a close relationship between electronic sounds and acoustic instruments,” he says. “Melodies and texts become like foam on the surface of an ocean of time.”

At Heldenplatz, time itself seemed momentarily suspended. Not just in the music, but in the silences between it: in the presence of Auschwitz survivors, in the careful reverence of those watching, in the eventual swell of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ closing out the evening. It wasn’t a triumphalist ending. It was a signal; a collective decision to look forward, even if just for a moment, together.

“I would most like to walk alone through the city for a few hours, lost in thought,” Helbig says, when I ask how he feels after performing the piece. He describes a memory of his grandfather, of feathers floating behind a paddle boat, and in it, a metaphor for the fragile drift of memory. “Every moment in life is like one of those feathers, gradually floating away. The fading of time is both a chance for new happiness and a possibility for new harm. We must stay alert.”

In ‘Requiem A’, Helbig doesn’t just memorialise. He architects an alertness, one that holds the past, acknowledges the present and dares to imagine something better. The piece is out now on Deutsche Grammophon. Its resonance, like its author’s standing as a master of contemporary composition, is deeply assured.

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‘Requiem A’ by Sven Helbig is out now via Deutsche Grammophon. He performs ‘Requiem A’ at Westminster Central Hall in London on October 4th.

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