Born 20 March 1918 in Bliesheim, Zimmermann described himself as a “typical blend of Rheinland monk and Dionysos,” and as “the oldest of the young German composers.” Born into a family of farmers, his father, Jakob, a devout catholic, was the supervisor of a railway signal post. His mother, Katharina, née Broichheuser, had five children, of which two died in early infancy, in 1917 and 1920.

From 1929 to 1936, Zimmermann received a strict Salvatorian education at the Steinfeld (Eifel) monastery, where he was introduced to ancient languages and music theory. He was allowed to play the baroque organ in the abbey as a reward for good grades, and he painted and wrote novels, short stories, and poetry.

After the Nazis closed the monastery, he completed his education at the Apotelgymnasium, a catholic school in Cologne. In 1937, he was drafted for a period of six months, from April to October, as part of the forced labour campaign of the Third Reich. He then abandoned the ecclesiastical career that his family had envisioned for him, and opted instead to undertake studies in pedagogy and music education at the University of Cologne; these studies were interrupted in 1939.

Until 1950, he studied musicology, German literature, philosophy, and psychology, albeit intermittently. Zimmermann belongs to the generation that was sacrificed first by the Nazi dictatorship, then by a war in which he participated as a dispatch rider in campaigns in Poland, France (in Paris, he discovered the works of Igor Stravinsky and Darius Milhaud), and Russia as a member of the Wehrmacht (armed forces of Nazi Germany) from 1940 to 1942.

In July 1942, he was relieved of duty due to chronic dermatosis after having been poisoned and then suffering an allergic reaction to the antidote. This led to several long sojourns in military hospitals. “In the place that we should presently occupy, we find the older generation, and when we finally take that place, the younger generation will have already moved beyond us, if we are not careful. This is the gift the millennial Reich offers us to compensate for having stolen our youth,” he wrote.

Starting in 1942, Zimmerman returned to his studies (music education, musicology, and composition) at the Cologne Musikhochschule. In order to fund this, he worked in cabaret bands, as a conductor of the Bliesheim Men’s Choir, and in a factory in the brown coal mining district in Horrem, where he handled the payroll and managed the stocks. His thesis focused on the use of music for piano written after 1900 for teaching middle school students, but he abandoned a doctorate on the historical evolution of the fugue in works for piano. He studied composition and music theory with Philipp Jarnach, a student of Busoni, who completed Doktor Faustus, and Heinrich Lemacher, a musician who was influenced by Renaissance music theory and the works of Anton Bruckner, whose masses and motets he published. He also studied piano with Hans Haas, music history with Paul Mies, and voice with Ewald Kaldeweier.

The first performances of Zimmermann’s works took place from 1944-1946 in Cologne, well before his aesthetic, which was neo-classical at that time, ultimately came to include the use of more modernist/contemporary idioms. As director of the department of radiophonic music, film, and stage at the Cologne Radio (WDR), he experimented with tape editing and collage techniques in the production of numerous radio works and educational programmes. In 1949-50, Zimmerman attended the seminars of Wolfgang Fortner and René Leibowitz at the Darmstadt Summer Course. This experience made apparent to him the gulf separating his works from the dominant style of serialism at the time, and he identified more readily with the work of Karl-Amadeus Hartmann and Luigi Dallapiccola. The second movement of Zimmerman’s Konzert für Violine und grosses Orchester (1950) was his first serial work.

From 1950 to 1952, Zimmerman was a professor of music theory in the Musicology Department at the Cologne University. In 1956, on the recommendation of Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Zimmerman was named president of the German section of the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM), a post from which he would resign the following year, feeling that he had failed to establish satisfactory dialogue among different generations of composers.

Zimmerman became the first composer in residence at Villa Massimo in Rome in 1957 (returning there in 1963). That same year, he became the successor to Franck Martin as Professor of Composition at the Cologne Musikhochschule, where he inaugurated a course on music for radio, film, and stage. At this time, he was also hard at work on his opera, Les soldats, and various other works for voice, notably Medea, based on the work of the same name by Hans Henny Jahnn. The composition of the former was plagued with difficulties, and the opera did not see its premiere until 1965, the year in which Zimmerman was elected member of the Academy of the Arts, the organisation for which he would go on to compose Musique pour les soupers du roi Ubu.

His health was declining at that point: he suffered from chronic insomnia, depression, and glaucoma, which severly affected his eyesight. Undergoing sleep treatment at a psychiatric clinic, he was unable to attend the premiere of his work Requiem für einen jungen Dichter in 1969.

A friend of Heinrich Böll and Walter Biemel, with whom Zimmerman would discuss Husserl’s The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, he was also a devout reader of Ecclesiastes, The Confessions of St. Augustine, Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor, The Cantos by Ezra Pound, and Ulysses by James Joyce; he set several exerpts from these texts to music.

Zimmerman died by his own hand 10 August 1970 in Gross-Könisgdorf.

• 1960: Grand Prix from the North Rhine-Westphalia Academy for Sciences and Arts (Karlheinz Stockhausen refused this honour the same year)
• 1965: Member of the German Academy of the Arts
• 1966: Kunstpreis from the City of Cologne