Bernd Alois Zimmermann

Bernd Alois Zimmermann (20 March 1918 – 10 August 1970) was a German composer.

He is perhaps best known for his opera Die Soldaten, which is regarded as one of the most important German operas of the 20th century, after those of Berg.

His eclectic music, which employs a wide range of techniques including dodecaphony and musical quotation, encompasses the styles of the avant-garde, serial, and postmodern.

Zimmermann was born in Bliesheim (now part of Erftstadt), near Cologne.

He grew up in a rural Catholic community in western Germany.

His father worked for the German Reichsbahn and was also a farmer.

In 1929, Zimmermann began attending a private Catholic school, where he had his first real encounter with music.

After the NSDAP closed all private schools, he switched to a public Catholic school in Cologne where, in 1937, he received his Abitur.

That same year he fulfilled his duty for the Reichsarbeitsdienst and spent late 1937–early 1938 studying pedagogy at the Hochschule für Lehrerausbildung (lit. University for Teacher Training) in Bonn.

He began studying music education, musicology, and composition in early 1938 at the University for Music in Cologne.

In 1940, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht, but was released in 1942 due to a severe skin illness.

By then he had already become a free-lance composer in 1946, mainly for radio.

He returned to his studies, but did not obtain a degree until 1947 due to the ending of the war.

During 1948–1950, he was a participant in the Kranichsteiner/Darmstädter Ferienkursen für Neue Musik where he studied under René Leibowitz and Wolfgang Fortner, among others.

At the end of the 1950s, he developed his own personal compositional style, the pluralistic "Klangkomposition" (German word referring to the compositional style that focuses on planes – or areas – of sound and tone-colors).

The combination and overlapping of layers of musical material from various time periods (from Medieval to Baroque and Classical to Jazz and Pop music) using advanced musical techniques is characteristic of Klangkomposition.

Zimmermann's use of this technique ranged from the embedding of individual musical quotes (seen somewhat in his orchestral work Photoptosis) to pieces that are built entirely as a collage (the ballet Musique pour les soupers du Roi Ubu).

In his vocal works, especially his Requiem for a Young Poet, the text is used to progress the piece by overlapping texts from various sources.

He created his own musical stance using the metaphor "the spherical form of time".

He began writing works in the neoclassical style, continued with free atonality and twelve-tone music and eventually arrived at serialism (in 1956).

His affection for jazz can sometimes be heard in some of his compositions (more so in his Violin Concerto or Trumpet Concerto).

In contrast to the so-called Darmstadt School (Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, etc.), Zimmermann did not make a radical break with tradition.

In 1957, he received a scholarship to spend time at the German Academy at Villa Massimo in Rome.

He also assumed the position of Professor of Composition (from Frank Martin) as well as Film and Broadcast Music at the Cologne Music University.

In the 1960s, he earned more success as a composer, including a second scholarship to the Villa Massimo in 1963, and a fellowship in the Academy of Arts, Berlin); especially after his opera Die Soldaten premiered in 1965. The opera had previously not been performed due to the enormous number of performers required and its difficulty. The Cologne Opera had deemed it "unplayable". The composer's depression led to an emotional crisis, which was compounded by a quickly deteriorating eye problem. On 10 August 1970, Zimmermann committed suicide at his home in Königsdorf near Cologne, five days after completing the score of his last composition, Ich wandte mich und sah an alles Unrecht das geschah unter der Sonne. At the time, he had been preparing another opera, Medea, after Hans Henny Jahnn.

Among Zimmermann's notable students was Clarence Barlow.

In his own compositional growth, he took his place in the progression of new music, from which the German composers were mostly separated during the Nazi regime.