Bernd Zimmermann
Bernd Alois Zimmermann was a German composer and musicologist, born on March 20, 1918, in Bischheim, Prussia, Germany. He grew up in a rural Catholic community in western Germany, attended a church school, and developed an early interest in the organ.
In 1938, Zimmermann entered the music college in Cologne. He completed his musical studies in 1947, and from 1946 worked as a composer, arranger, and music editor for radio. From 1948 to 1950, he attended the Darmstadt Courses for New Music, where he studied with René Leibowitz and Wolfgang Fortner. He held fellowships at the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome in 1957 and 1963, and began teaching at the Cologne University of Music in 1960.
Zimmermann’s music drew on neoclassicism in Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith, as well as the later work of Anton Webern. He incorporated jazz rhythms, popular-music elements, folk songs, children’s counting rhymes, and quotations from music ranging from the Franco-Flemish school to Gustav Mahler. Examples include the cantata Praise of Folly (1948) and the Violin Concerto (1950). He also built entire works around collage, notably the ballet Music for the Suppers of King Ubu (1966).
Zimmermann became widely known after the 1965 premiere of his opera The Soldiers, composed from 1958 to 1960 and based on the play by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. The opera uses serial technique to realize Zimmermann’s concept of “spherical time.” His Requiem for a Young Poet (1968), which sets texts by twentieth-century poets who died by suicide, also drew public attention. His other works include Alagoana (Brazilian Caprices), the cello cantata Song of Hope, Photoptosis, and the cello concerto in the form of a pas de trois.
The complexity and tragic character of Zimmermann’s musical language alienated some postwar listeners and critics. He was deeply troubled by what he experienced as a lack of recognition, and his mental health worsened as his vision problems became more acute. A few days after completing a biblical work based on Ecclesiastes, he died by suicide on August 10, 1970. He received the Berlin Art Prize in 1969.