Avant-garde postmodern West German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann was born on this day in 1918 – exactly a century ago.
Dying in 1970, Zimmermann’s signature work is his opera Die Soldaten - regarded as one of the most important German operas of the 20th century.
Employing a wide range of compositional methods, including twelve-tone row and musical quotation, his major contributions to the violin repertoire include a concerto and a solo sonata.