Bernd Alois Zimmermann

Bernd Alois Zimmermann was a lone wolf of the avant-garde, belonging to a type of intermediate generation. Born in Cologne in 1918, Zimmermann was cut off from developments in contemporary music as a young man in Germany under the Nazi dictatorship. After World War II as an over 30-year-old, he was also not able to become integrated in the circle of younger composers associated with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono whose structural concepts dominated discussions within the sphere of contemporary music. Zimmermann himself also took the constructive aspect of music very seriously and yet somehow remained true to expressive concepts in his own individual manner. This delayed his decisive breakthrough as a composer to 1965, the year of the premiere of his opera “Die Soldaten” based on a drama by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz.

Zimmermann attended a Catholic convent school and received a humanist education. His musical studies were interrupted at an early stage with his conscription into the German Wehrmacht in 1940, and he was not able to resume his studies until after the end of the war. Zimmermann became a freelance composer in 1947 before being appointed as professor in Cologne in 1957. As a freelancer, he chiefly earned his living through a large volume of occasional music primarily composed for radio broadcasts and subsequently for the stage and television alongside the creation of his serious works. Even though he did not view these occasional works as at all significant, they did enable him to hone his skills in dramatic effects which also became a distinguishing feature of his independent compositions.

The perhaps most essential aspect of Zimmermann’s music is his collage compositional technique involving a variety of stylistic levels and quotations which was absolutely incompatible with the concept of notes as pure ahistorical material propagated by the majority of the avant-garde. Zimmermann did however not merely string along musical and stylistic quotations together at random, instead working with consummate originality and high differentiation with overlapping, inter-penetrating and frequently semantically charged layering techniques. This lends an utterly original, almost surreal quality to many of his most impressive compositions such as the “Requiem für einen jungen Dichter” and “Photoptosis” for orchestra, making them open to free association. The process found its culmination in the opera “Die Soldaten” in which Lenz’s stage drama dating from the era of Goethe is transported into modern times. The theatrical reality of the composition, irrevocably steering towards an ultimate catastrophe, comes ever closer to a nightmare in which the limits of time and space are suspended. Although Zimmermann finally found justified recognition with this opera, he was plagued by severe health issues and depression. His condition became so severe that the composer decided to take his own life at the age of only 52 on 10 August 1970, directly after completion of the cantata “Ich wandte mich und sah an alles Unrecht, das da geschah unter der Sonne” [literal translation: “I turned round and saw injustice in everything which took place under the sun”].