Bernd Alois Zimmermann

* 20 March 1918 in Bliesheim near Cologne, died on 10 August 1970; German composer; from 1929 he attended the boarding school of Steinfeld Monastery and in 1937 took his school-leaving examination at a Catholic grammar school in Cologne, after the private schools had been closed in 1936. From the winter semester of 1938/39 he studied music education at the Hochschule für Musik Köln with Heinrich Lemacher, from 1943 with composition as an elective subject; in 1940 he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht and in 1942 discharged because of a severe skin disease; delayed by the end of the war, he completed his studies in 1947. From 1946 he worked as a freelance composer, mainly for radio; from 1949 he attended the Darmstadt summer courses for new music, among others with René Leibowitz and Wolfgang Fortner. In 1957 he held a scholarship at the Villa Massimo in Rome and took up a professorship of composition and of film and radio music in Cologne; in 1965 he became a member of the Berliner Akademie der Künste. His output comprises orchestral works, ballet music and solo concertos, the opera “Die Soldaten” (1958–1965), vocal works, chamber music, solo repertoire and electronic music. In the Cybele catalogue his music is represented on three albums. In 2008 “Requiem für einen jungen Dichter” (1967/69) appeared in the live recording of 23 June 2005 from the Concertgebouw Haarlem, with Claudia Barainsky, David Pittman-Jennings, the speakers Michael Rotschopf and Lutz Lansemann, three choirs and Holland Symfonia under Bernhard Kontarsky. The conversation album Bernd Alois Zimmermann and the Late Symphonic Works (2017) from the Edition Künstler im Gespräch places recordings by the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR under Bernhard Kontarsky beside historic recordings of Zimmermann’s own voice. On Campanula (1995) Michael Denhoff plays music by Zimmermann alongside works by Johann Sebastian Bach, György Kurtag, Volker Blumenthaler and pieces of his own.