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Horst Wende made music through seven decades of the 20th century, recording over 100 easy listening albums as producer, bandleader, conductor, arranger, and musician. Today many of his records, released under his own name or his longtime alias of Roberto Delgado, are sought and coveted by collectors of the German big band movement of the '70s. Horst Wende was born into a musical family in Saxony, Germany, in 1919, and was skilled enough that by six years old he as able to regularly guest on accordion in his grandfather's band at a local restaurant. Young Wende played and studied music constantly; by his fifteenth birthday he was already accomplished at playing piano, accordion, and xylophone, and he was accepted into the prestigious Leipzig Conservatory of Music. His music studies there were interrupted by World War II; conscripted into the Germany army, he was captured by British troops and incarcerated in a POW camp in Denmark in 1942. There he met a young trumpet player, Ladi Geis...