Some context: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien,  (; 3 January 1892 - 2 September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor who is best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. He served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1945 and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, from 1945 to 1959. He was at one time a close friend of C. S. Lewis--they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings. Tolkien was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.
A weak and emaciated Tolkien spent the remainder of the war alternating between hospitals and garrison duties, being deemed medically unfit for general service.  During his recovery in a cottage in Little Haywood, Staffordshire, he began to work on what he called The Book of Lost Tales, beginning with The Fall of Gondolin. Lost Tales represented Tolkien's attempt to create a mythology for England, a project he would abandon without ever completing. Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, but he had recovered enough to do home service at various camps. It was at this time that Edith bore their first child, John Francis Reuel Tolkien. In a 1941 letter, Tolkien described his son John as "(conceived and carried during the starvation-year of 1917 and the great U-Boat campaign) round about the Battle of Cambrai, when then end of the war seemed as far off as it does now".  Tolkien was promoted to the temporary rank of lieutenant on 6 January 1918. When he was stationed at Kingston upon Hull, he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and Edith began to dance for him in a clearing among the flowering hemlock. After his wife's death in 1971, Tolkien remembered,  I never called Edith Luthien--but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while). In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing--and dance. But the story has gone crooked, & I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.  This incident inspired the account of the meeting of Beren and Luthien.
Did he get married?
A: After his wife's death in 1971,
Some context: The Alexandrov Ensemble (Russian: Ansambl' Aleksandrova, tr. Ansambl' Aleksandrova; commonly known as the Red Army Choir in the West) is an official army choir of the Russian armed forces. Founded during the Soviet era, the ensemble consists of a male choir, an orchestra, and a dance ensemble.
In 1948 much of Berlin was still ruined after World War II, and the city was divided into four occupation zones, controlled by the USSR, France, the UK and the United States. This was before the Berlin Wall was built, and it was still possible to travel between zones. An American officer suggested a concert in the Gendarmenmarkt (in the Soviet zone at the time), and the French zone commander supported the suggestion. The musicians were to be provided by the USSR, and the Alexandrov Ensemble was chosen. A temporary stage was set up in the square, with flowers all along the front. 30,000 people came to stand and watch for three hours. In 1994, towards the end of his life, Boris Alexandrov said:  "The visit to Germany was unforgettable. It is dominant in the history of the ensemble. It was necessary to make a new creative leap - from wartime military music to postwar relaxing harmony. It was important, and the transition had to be managed on many fronts, including getting the Ensemble back into its original pre-war role, performing the classics and singing folk songs. Before the war the Ensemble had 200 professional singers; following the war it was down to 60."  A previous tour to East Germany had been cancelled due to the sudden death of Alexander Alexandrov in 1946 in Potsdam, when in his bed was found an annotated copy of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, showing that A. Alexandrov had been preparing the final chorus for a performance. Now Boris, his son, was ready to follow his father's plan. The 1948 peace concert was to consist of German opera extracts and Russian folk songs (Nightingales, Zemlyanka and Roads); and after an intervention by the tenor Victor Nikitin, some German folk songs were also included. The people joined in, singing Heidenroslein, and Nikitin sang Kalinka three times in a row. The concert was very successful, and very moving.   A sound recording of the concert was made, and pressed in 1985 under the Radio DDR 1 label. This is listed on the Alexandrov Ensemble discography page.  However the Berlin Peace Concert did not happen in isolation. It was part of a series of punishing yearly tours to war-torn areas. The main tour season during and just after World War II appears to have run from June to October - perhaps because the large troupe usually had to perform outdoors, to accommodate large audiences. The August 1948 Berlin concert occurred two-thirds of the way through a tour to (20 June to 18 July) Prague, Most, Brno, Devin, Bratislava, Moravska Ostrava, Zilina and Kosice in Czechoslovakia; then apparently without a break (18 July to 10 October) Dresden, Weimar, Magdeburg, Stendal, Schwerin, Potsdam, Berlin, Rathenow, Leipzig, Halle, Lane, Erfurt, Chemnitz, Frankfurt an der Oder and Schwarzenberg in Germany.  In 1990, the ensemble participated in Roger Waters' The Wall concert celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall. They performed an anti-war song, Bring the Boys Back Home.
how many people attended the concert?
A:
30,000 people came to stand and watch for three hours.