[5] Quoted music includes fragments from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Milhaud's La création du monde, Messiaen's L'Ascension and The Beatles' "Hey Jude".
[5] In the section Dona nobis pacem (Grant us peace), excerpts from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony are contrasted with texts by Joachim von Ribbentrop, Stalin, Goebbels, Churchill and Bayer.
[9][10] The second recording was made on September 23 and 24, 1986, with the choir and orchestra of the WDR, conducted by Gary Bertini, with singers Phyllis Bryn-Julson and Roland Hermann, speakers Lutz Lansemann and Hans Franzen, and the Manfred-Schoof-Quintett.
A reviewer of this recording notes that the work "is a humbling polyphony of twentieth-century misdeeds – riveting, provocative, uncompromising and as essential to our understanding of 1960s 'serious' music as The Beatles are to an informed perception of that decade's pop culture.
"[5] Requiem für einen jungen Dichter was recorded a fourth time in 2008 by Cybele Records, with soloists Claudia Barainsky and David Pittman-Jennings [de], speakers Michael Rotschopf [de] and Lutz Lansemann, the Czech Philharmonic Choir Brno, the Slovak Philharmonic Choir, EuropaChorAkademie, Eric Vloeimans Quintet, Holland Symfonia, conducted by Bernhard Kontarsky.
[7] A reviewer notes: "Freedom, ideology, liberation, human dignity, struggle and death – all of these issues dealt with in a vast dramatic canvas".