Bernd Alois Zimmermann ci interroga ancora: »und die allein fröhlich sein, die Unrecht tun?

To distinguish Bernd Alois Zimmermann from the most radical advocates of an exhaustion in abstracto of all the intrinsic potentialities of the chosen sound materials there is a conception of time, both historical and musical, much more articulated, that interweaves Benjamin’s Jetztzeit with Ernst Bloch’s multiversum and the Augustinian distensio animi. This means that in Zimmermann’s compositional poetics it is the temporal course itself that discerns, recombines and selects sounds and expressive forms, on the basis of ethical, even before strictly artistic, reasons, thus putting History itself on the stand and addressing the question: »und die allein fröhlich sein, die Unrecht tun?«.