Bernd Alois Zimmermann: Requiem für Einen Jungen Dichter (Wergo)
Purchased from Amazon
I don't usually advertise my age and birthday, I can be cranky about such things. I have however sent out notice that I'm having a concert on my sixtieth birthday, April 14 of this year.
It's a time in my life I've been reflecting more than usual, and have questioned some of the choices I've made. I was never very good with psychological-education-philosophical theories as an undergraduate. There's one idea that stuck with me though; I want to say it's from Piaget, but that is probably not correct. The theory goes that in different periods of our lives, we are faced with essential conflicts that we seek to resolve. These are opposed forces, such as: dependence or independence from one's parents, influence of peer groups over that of our parents, considering our independence vs. how we fit into society, ideas like that. I feel very much like I'm considering past vs. future, assessing my life and wondering about my purpose moving forward.
In many respects I've had a great life and have little reason to complain. I get to play music! So many people should be so lucky as to do something they love as much as I do. Yet I also look back, and sometimes I feel like I've been a little bit of a dilettante, someone who just tinkers with things for his own amusement. Perhaps I'm being unfair to myself in writing that; part of me would get too bored doing the same thing all the time.
All of this is my long-winded way to describing how sometimes I wonder what I might have done if I had more vigorously pursued a serious academic track. I have a master's degree, but I never chose to apply myself towards a doctorate for two reasons: it didn't serve a particular purpose later in life, and I don't feel like I've specialized in anything enough to study it at a post-graduate level. If I had done so, I think one of the things I might have chosen to study is the music of Bernd Alois Zimmermann.
Why Zimmermann? In part because he's a mystery to me. There's little written about him in English, and not even a great deal in his native German. He was a post-war avant gardist, but not as thoroughly formulaic as early Boulez or Stockhausen. Collage is an important element of his music; in certain works, quotes from Bach, Debussy, Haydn, or Messiaen may turn up, sometimes simultaneously. The description of this piece tells you something about his varied interests: Requiem for a Young Poet: Lingual for Speaker, Soprano and Baritone Solos, Three Choirs, Electronic Sounds, Orchestra, Jazz Combo, and Organ After Texts by Various Poets, Reports, and Reportage*. Whew! His opera Die Soldaten (The Soldiers)** is considered one of the most ambitious and difficult works written for the musical stage. Zimmermann was Catholic I understand, though that didn't stop him from committing suicide at age 50.
This particular work moves back and forth between different textures and ideas: multiple speakers over a developing tone cluster, some free jazz (with the Manfred Schoof Quintet), snippets of "Hey Jude", some Darmstadt-like orchestral, operatic, and choral atonalism, and do I hear accordion in there? In certain moments it's an easy comparison to Ligeti's Requiem (another highly dramatic post-war work), but once it does sound similar to that work, it's probably off pretty quickly onto another texture.
An easy complaint about the post-war avant garde is its disconnection from its audience, its sometimes alienation, its coldness. This isn't cold music. It's meant to have an impact, an effect. It's powerful stuff just listening to it at a moderate volume on my home stereo system. I can only imagine the effect if I was in the room seeing it performed, something I seriously doubt I will have the opportunity to do.
There's an LP I recommend if you find it: one side includes Manfred Schoof and Co. again playing on Zimmermann, and the second is a particularly great work for purely electronic sounds. It's been reissued several times so it's not too hard to locate: https://www.discogs.com/master/310495-Bernd-Alois-Zimmermann-Die-Befristeten-Improvisationen-%C3%9Cber-Die-Oper-Die-Soldaten-Tratto
I'll come back to this disc again, Maybe some night when it's dark, undistracted.
*Google Translate. I don't know the difference between berichten and reportagen.
** My best find from the bins at Jerry's Records of the Duquesne University collection has been a $3 copy of this.
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