Rencontre autour du livre de Laurent Feneyrou, "B.A. Zimmermann – Action ecclésiastique"

Following the publication of Laurent Feneyrou’s B.A. Zimmermann – Action ecclésiastique (Contrechamps Poche, May 2025), IRCAM’s Resource Center is organizing a book-centered encounter, moderated by David Christoffel.

Scarred in his youth by having to come of age under Nazi barbarity, Bernd Alois Zimmermann was 21 at the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1970, after a life of intense creativity and landmark works, he composed his final, testamentary score: Ich wandte mich und sah an alles Unrecht, das geschah unter der Sonne (I Turned and Saw All the Oppression That Was Done Under the Sun), set to excerpts from Ecclesiastes and Dostoevsky’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. This “ecclesiastical action,” of extraordinary expressive density, proves tragically relevant: what becomes of music in a time of distress and under the trial of history?