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AguidetoBerndAloisZimmermann'smusic|Music|TheGuardian

A guide to Bernd Alois Zimmermann's

music
His work required orchestra and conductor to perform star-jumps while shouting out the darkest
parts of the Bible and Dostoevsky, and it converted me to contemporary classical music
Tom Service
Tuesday 26 June 2012 12.41BST

Something a bit different this week, the first composer in this series who isn't around
any more. In fact, Bernd Alois Zimmerman died more than four decades ago, and he is
someone whose music ought to be more celebrated than it is today.
Here's the thing: a piece by German composer Zimmermann was the probably the single
most powerful moment of conversion to the power of contemporary music I have ever
experienced. I was in Vienna at the end of the 1993, studying German, and the few
weeks I was there overlapped with that year's edition of Wien Modern, then as now
one of the most important and exciting festivals of new music. That year, among the
featured composers were Toru Takemitsu, Krzysztof Penderecki and Zimmermann. I
had no idea who Zimmermann was, and the fact that he had already been dead for more
than 20 years (born in 1918, he died in 1970) seemed to suggest his music was already
part of a distant past rather than an essential present. I went along to a concert that Hans
Zender (composer and friend of Zimmermann's) conducted at the Vienna Konzerthaus,
and nothing was ever quite the same again.
The piece that was the climax of the programme was Zimmermann's last work, his
Ekklesiastische Aktion for two speakers, bass soloist, and large orchestra, subtitled with
some of the words that the Preacher writes in the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes,
"Ich wandte mich und sah an alles Unrecht das geschah unter der Sonne" ("I turned and
saw all the injustice there was under the sun"). To describe the fundamentals of what
happened in that performance risks making the Ecclesiastical Action seem a weird
hybrid of acrobatics, narration, meditation, single-minded pessimism and a lateflowering of German expressionism which it is, all of that, but much more, too. It's a
work in which the two speakers, the soloist, and the conductor are required to take part
in a gestural, physical "action", to stamp their feet and perform star-jumps, to assume
the lotus position while reciting passages from Ecclesiastes and the Grand Inquisitor's
monologue from Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.
The work's huge orchestra only plays together for a single short passage in the whole 35minute piece, and it ends with the single blackest gesture of any piece of music ever
written. Or that I've ever heard, at least. Consider this: commissioned by the city of Kiel
for the Olympic Games in 1972 (Kiel hosted the sailing events of the Munich Olympics
that year), Zimmermann completed the fair copy of the manuscript of the Ecclesiastical
Action just before he killed himself. But even without that knowledge, the end of the
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piece is a musical suicide note of the most devastating emotional power. In the final few
seconds of the work, Zimmermann quotes the same Johann Sebastian Bach chorale, Es
ist genug (It is enough) that Alban Berg used at the end of his last piece, the Violin
Concerto. The difference is that while Berg's version is a plangent, quiescent rumination
on leave-taking as the melody becomes the basis of a set of variations, in Zimmermann's
version, the chorale is hammered out by trumpets and trombones including three
trombones placed in and around the audience and played fortissimo, and in an
ironically consonant harmony (ironic, in the context of the dissonance and
fragmentation of the rest of the piece).
Berg didn't know he was to die when he composed the Violin Concerto, but
Zimmermann did. It's hard to imagine a more confronting, shocking and hopeless
gesture of mortality in music.
There are possibly elements of morbid fascination in the story of the composition of the
Ecclesiastical Action, but none of that would mean anything were it not for the desolate,
unflinching power of the rest of the piece. I mean for crying out loud the piece was
commissioned, presumably, as a hoped-for celebration of the Olympic ideal (imagine the
2012 celebrations commissioning something similar!) but Zimmermann's language of
actions for his soloists, the futile star-jumps and squats he requires of them as they shout
out the blackest, most doubt-ridden passages of the Bible and of Dostoevsky are the
most pessimistic possible distillation of physicality into a work of art. Seeing it at the
time, a handful of the phrases that the speakers shouted are imprinted into my brain,
including: "Und seine Augen werden Reichtums night satt" (essentially, meaning that
one's life will never be enriched, fulfilled), as well as the moment when Zender crouched
into a perfect lotus position on the podium while a maelstrom of Dostoevsky and
Ecclasiastes raged around him, and I remember a strange solo for electric guitar, just one
of the surreal sounds Zimmermann makes from his orchestra.
So what does it all mean? For Zimmermann, the fragmentary nature of his musical
language was an expression of the essential pointlessness of art, the inability for a
musical language to express the truth of humanity's post-war condition. But in the rest
of his music, it's precisely the non-ideological mixture of languages he uses for
example, in the searing, seething drama of his opera, Die Soldaten, the collage of found
material in his Requiem for a Young Poet, the jazz inspiration of his trumpet concerto,
Nobody Knows de Trouble I See, or the surreal scatology of his Musique pour les soupers
du Roi Ubu that makes Zimmermann an essential and prophetic voice in the history of
20th-century music.
Unlike his slightly younger colleagues, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, or Luigi
Nono, Zimmermann never subscribed to the idea that a single musical or political
approach was the solution to the world's creative problems. Instead, in his acceptance of
the diversity of musical possibility, his postmodern experiments in stylistic and
intertextual fusion, Zimmermann looks forward to the generation after him, and to the
creative world of today's composers, for whom all of music history is available as
material to be worked with.
Zimmermann's tragedy was that this multiplicity meant, he thought, artistic failure and
redundancy. But the reality was, in the very single-mindedness of his pessimism and his
supposedly hopeless plurality, he found a voice that composers still need to learn from
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and audiences need to hear if, that is, you can look with the composer into some of the
blackest places of the human imagination.

Five key links

Reading this on mobile? Click here to view video
Die Soldaten
Zimmermann's magnum opus, his opera here in a complete performance from Stuttgart
Ekklesiastische Aktion
A desperate, despairing revelation
Nobody Knows de Trouble I See
Zimmermann's trumpet concerto
Requiem for a Young Poet
A collage, fugues of voices, another gigantic, unclassifiable sonic canvas
Musique pour les soupers du Roi Ubu
Zimmermann at his most darkly playful and surreal
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