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Back to 1968 with Zimmermann's Requiem at the Berlin Phil :: 5.08.2009

Late last month I had the rare concert experience of hearing a program that was not only powerful, wonderful, and extraordinary, but that really transported me to the times in which the works were conceived.

The Berlin Philharmonic under Peter Eötvös began with two Bach Chorales arranged by Schönberg and the Siegfried Idyll of Wagner. From this artfully constructed program, the Bach-Schönberg was beautifully tuned, and conveyed the outright religiosity with which the great synthesizer of the Baroque was viewed at the turn of the 19th and 20th Century. The Wagner was simply magical, as the Berlin orchestra's strings have the ability more than any other orchestra I've ever heard to play truly pianissimo, carrying the tone as if it were a slumbering, crowd-surfing infant.

The main event of the program, though, was the Requiem for a young Poet by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, written in 1968.

The first extraordinary thing about it is the scale: four cori spezzati, tapes, a veritable military band of a wind/brass section, vocal soloists, a jazz combo, two pianists, an accordion player, a mandolin, and more. Over the tape track, one heard bits of poetry, speeches by Mao, Hitler, Stalin, and others, a Beetles song, bits of Beethoven’s 9th, and at the very end, conflated recordings of political demonstrations from 20 or so different countries. At one absolutely frightening moment, two actors yell simultaneously through megaphones their renditions of speeches by Hitler and Stalin.

The entire piece plods inexorably forward at a precise Quarter-note = 60, which I believe was as much a narrative device as a practical tool to keep the music with the tape. It is difficult for me to adequately describe the effect this pulse had on the overall performance. It served as the one solid mooring amidst a storm of noise and ideas. In our society, the pulse of the second is more than familiar; it is almost intrinsic, and to some degree it beats silently within all of us. Therefore, no matter how challenging and literally painful the piece was to hear, the virtually uninterrupted beat resonated organically with the listener, and cultivated a sort of suspended rapture in the audience, a concentration that was the only foil to the schizophrenic rancor on stage.
Partly due to this concentration, the piece was viscerally transportative. I doubt I was alone in feeling that the work inculcated the zeitgeist of 1968, doing so as powerfully as, for instance, the smell of pipe tobacco might bring one back to his grandfather’s house (although subsitute gemütlichkeit with gewaltigkeit). I really felt the urgency of the time, with regard both to the socio-political climate that inspired the piece, and to the very nature and purpose of the piece itself. It conveyed very clearly the sense of necessity, responsibility, and incumbency that must have compelled Zimmermann and his contemporaries. I believe that if a piece such as this were premiered today, it would be dismissed as overly grandiose, indulgent, and perhaps worse, even as our society faces problems no less grave as those confronted in 1968. During the piece, I found myself imagining what the effect might be if the voices and words of Hitler, Gandhi, and Ezra Pound were replaced by those of Bin Laden, Maya Angelou, or George W. Bush. It would be an interesting paradox if the Zimmermann were to owe its effectiveness and meaningfulness today mostly to its anachronism; it may be moving precisely because it so perfectly captures the spirit of its own time, and embodies the sense that it was then incumbent on art to produce something like it. For me, someone who did not actually live through this turbulent period, the effect was doubly powerful: my grandfather never smoked a pipe, and yet, the smell of this tobacco conjured memories of experiences I’d never had.

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