Requiem für einen jungen Dichter

The Requiem für einen jungen Dichter [Requiem for a Young Poet] is Zimmermann‘s second major work alongside Die Soldaten. The work with a duration of just over an hour features the united forces of soloists, narrator, three choirs (including a male-voice choir), orchestra, a jazz combo and tape recordings. Zimmermann termed his Requiem as a “Lingual” [speech work], thereby highlighting the significance allocated to the compositional moulding of speech sounds. Above the basis of the Latin Requiem text, Zimmermann constructs a multilingual “panacoustic” consisting of political speeches and philosophical and literary texts combined with live-performed musical sections. Towards the end of the work, Zimmermann overlaps the orchestral and vocal tutti with tape recordings of mass demonstrations. The text “wie jeder weiß…” [as everyone knows] is taken from Konrad Bayer’s volume of poems entitled der sechste sinn – alongside Yesenin and Mayakovsky, one of the three poets at the core of this work. The Requiem closes with the outcry “Dona nobis pacem” by all choirs: a powerful testimony of pacifism in the Federal Republic of Germany towards the end of the 1960s.