There's an extraordinary story told in Alexander Kluge's book about his love of opera, "Temple of the Scapegoat", concerning an attempt by the Nazis to broadcast and record Götterdämmerung in Vienna in March of 1945. Soviet shock troops surrounded the metropolis, bombarding it with artillery, whilst the US airforce carried out bombing raids. In order to achieve the final recording, the Gauleiter and Reich Defense Commissar Baldur von Schirach arranged for an orchestra to be split between air raid shelters, using five groups in the cellars of Ringstrasse, and four more in the cellars of Kärntnerstrasse. The singers were divided between the orchestra groups and each group was in contact with the others via hastily erected wireless, in an attempt to keep in time. The conductor sat in a wine cellar, cut off from the orchestra but connected to them all by a series of field telephones. Apparently, allied bombs can be heard detonating in the distance on the final recording and a rough film production was captured of the fractured performance on 9,800 feet of Agfa colour film; all the film stock that remained in the city.
Kluge is a writer renowned for combining fact with fiction, so I'd be fascinated, from an historical perspective, to find out if this artefact truly exists and, if it does, to then hear and see it for myself.
