Zimmermann would have turned 100 in 2018, a fitting occasion for Musikfest Berlin to celebrate the life and work of a composer whose opera THE SOLDIERS is one of the few repertory works written in the second half of the 20th century but whose orchestral works are still neglected – even though they represent the diversity of Zimmermann’s creative universe better than most other aspects of his back catalogue. He developed an eclectic musical language, ever evolving, which served the complex artist as a means of expression, always reflecting the experiences of everyday existence through the lens of philosophical, theological and artistic awareness.

With “Stille und Umkehr” and “Photoptosis” the orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin presents two works that are closely linked to Zimmermann’s interest in the philosophy of time as explored by scholars ranging from Augustinus to Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. In his “Spherical Shape of Time” Zimmermann explored the phenomenon of a three-way experience of the present in the here and now: the experience of a past that is ever-present and ever-becoming-present, the experience of hoping for and expecting a future event and the experience of the real now. This approach led him to incorporate into his works collages made up of quotations from earlier pieces and also from pieces by other composers – as in “Photoptosis” with its middle section artfully imposing itself on the first part. However, Zimmermann also developed a technique involving overlapping “temporal strata” in the form of aural and textural layers, rapidly pulsating and of various durations.

In “Photoptosis”, the Greek word for ‘incidence of light’, Zimmermann uses this device to achieve a magnified escalation progressing – in his own words – “from minimal exposure to light to maximum exposure at the end of the piece”. This optical escalation is rendered in the form of an orchestral score rich in musical colour. “Stille und Umkehr”, on the other hand, is the flip side of the “Photoptosis” coin. While in “Photoptosis” the principle of temporal strata combines with colourful orchestration to suck in the listener, “Stille und Umkehr” is an “orchestra sketch”, spare in its instrumentation, which dwindles to a standstill. The piece was written at a time when Zimmermann, plagued by depression and the diagnosis of an incurable eye disease, was turning to morbid thoughts. “Stille und Umkehr” was his penultimate work, coming shortly before his suicide on 10th August 1970.

Richard Wagner’s SIEGFRIED marked a caesura in more ways than one. With regard to the evolution of THE RING OF THE NIBELUNG itself, the break comes in Act 2. Having spent the period between 1846 and 1852 working on the lyrics of his cycle and the years up to June 1857 composing the score for the first one and a half acts, he then shelved the work for almost a decade. Deflated by his fruitless quest for a way to realise the four parts of the RING back-to-back in a four-day festival and affected by his affair with Mathilde Wesendonck and his TRISTAN project (inspired by the liaison), which already had real prospects of being staged, Wagner put his work on the RING to one side. This hiatus, which overlapped with his experience writing TRISTAN and the MASTER-SINGERS, is audible as a stylistic shift within SIEGFRIED.

Dramaturgically speaking, there is also the rift between mankind and the realm of the gods. In SIEGFRIED Wotan acknowledges that he has failed in his attempt to combine the principles of power and love in the hegemony of his dynasty of gods over the world. In a bid to regain the Rhinegold and, with it, power over the ring of the Nibelung, he has Fafner, the dragon, killed by Siegfried – who is blissfully ignorant of his own origins (as Wotan’s grandson) and his preordained role as a naïve hero, pure and bold of heart. In Act 3 of the opera, however, driven by an urge to win Brünnhilde, the sleeping Valkyrie, Siegfried defies Wotan, the restlessly wandering god. He breaks Wotan’s spear, the emblem of the gods’ rule over the world, in order that, in his union with Brünnhilde, the utopia of a new line of earthly rulers might flicker for a short time.

This Act 3 is presented as a concert performance by the orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin under the baton of General Music Drector Donald Runnicles. Simon O’Neill sings the title role, Michael Volle the Wanderer, Allison Oakes Brünnhilde and Judit Kutasi Erda.