Friedensappell from Hiroshima: « Bring peace through your music to the world »
« You can feel hope and confidence everywhere instead of pain and grief, » says 18-year-old David, who, like his colleagues from Luxembourg, is very touched by the former place of horror and the peace wind that blows in Hiroshima. In the context of the commemorative celebrations on the 80th anniversary of the first nuclear explosion, when the Japanese city of Hiroshima was put into ruins on August 6, 1945, the boys’ choir « Pueri Cantores » of the Conservatory of the City of Luxembourg recently guested in the so -called world peace church. The musical design of a memorial service in the Hiroshima Bishopskirche, the construction of which was started 75 years ago, was only one stage on an emotional journey on the traces of the world -historical tragedy. In addition to encounters with the bishop of Hiroshima, the mayor of the 2 million inhabitants and a 94-year contemporary witness that survived the disaster, it was also an encounter with a piece of Luxembourg history and songs for the around 50 boys and young people.
In the Hiroshima Friedenpark is the peace bell donated in 1964, which the young guests from Luxembourg were also allowed to do. Photo: David Jeck
« It was particularly emotional that during the meeting we sang the song, spanned in Huet with a very sprightly survivor who was 14 years old at the time. Yes, that was really very moving after what the woman knew how to tell us. Darnated, ”says David from Hiroshima.
Organ pipes and octave sounds from Luxembourg
As Pierre Nimax jr. At the beginning of the memorial service into the keys of the third largest pipe organ in Japan, many « Pueri » already know that the « Manufacture d’Orpfacture luxembourgeoise », which was once based in Lintgen, significantly converted and enlarged the Klais organ in Hiroshimas Bischofskirche 50 years ago (from 25 to 45 registers): the orgel builder Westenfelder and his Japanese employee Yamano Masatoshi had traveled to Hiroshima in 1973 to carry out the conversion and intonation.
On the roof of the World Peace Church in Hiroshima, a phoenix is sitting as a sign of new life and reconstruction Photo: David Jeck
With the singing « O Mamm Léif Mamm », the singers of the boy choir founded in 1993 brought a piece of Oktav to Hiroshima under the direction of Pit Heyart. After the service, both the bishop and the mayor of Hiroshima encouraged the young group of singers from the Grand Duchy: « Bring peace through your music! ». The « Pueri Cantores » laid out flowers on the stone kenotaph for the victims of the atomic bomb in the Peace Spark and bowed there after they had operated the peace bell and could be touched by the origami cranes, who made the girls Sadako Sasaki, who died at 12 years.
The world peace cathedral in Hiroshima, built between 1950 and 1954, harbors organ pipes from Luxembourg inside. Photo: David Jeck
And so the young singers left Hiroshima as musical peace ambassadors. Like the Japanese bishop Aloysius Ogihara, who had to experience the fall of his bishop’s city through the atomic bomb and pulled through the world as a peace apostle. The first stop of the classmate and friend of the Luxembourg Jesuit Father Francis R. Muller, who lived in Japan for several years, led to Luxembourg in Japan in early September 1951, where the high guest from Hiroshima attended the “Luxembourg word”.
