Ich wandte mich und sah an alles Unrecht, das geschah unter der Sonne

Bernd Alois Zimmermann completed his final work, Ich wandte mich und sah an alles Unrecht, das geschah unter der Sonne, only five days before his suicide. The music of the ‘ecclesiastical action’ provides an expression of Zimmermann’s anguish at the eternal suffering of mankind and the abuse of power on the part of the Catholic church. Two different texts provide the basis of the work: the biblical verses from Ecclesiastes Chapter 4 and passages from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov.

Zimmermann’s typically pluralistic style comes to the fore in the relationship between narrative and musical elements: he experiments with different types of vocal and linguistic expression lying between song and speech, lending the work a character similar to a radio play. The climax of the composition is the simultaneous conjunction of all elements: speech and singing, the Bible and Dostoyevsky.