Udo Zimmermann (no relation to and not to be confused with his namesake Bernd-Alois) is an East German composer in his mid-forties whose stage works have been conspicuously successful, if frequency of performance is any measure of success: within two years of its premiere in Hamburg Weisse Rose (''White Rose'') had been produced in over 30 cities.
''White Rose'' was the name adopted by a resistance group in Nazi Germany. Its activities, centred on the University of Munich, were discovered and the members of the group executed in February 1943, just a few months before Zimmermann was born. The fate of the group, of two of its members in particular (the brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl) has obviously exercised a strong fascination on the composer, since this is his second treatment of it. The first, a sort of 'opera-documentary', was produced in Dresden in 1967, the present work, which apparently shares no material, verbal or musical, with its predecessor, is a sequence of 16 dramatic but nonnarrative scenes exploring the memories and the state of mind of the Scholls as they awaited execution.
It could be regarded, I suppose, as at best an impossible task, at worst almost an impertinence to set such poems to music, No. 7 for example which expresses Sophie Scholl's pitiful terror at the darkness of her prison cell and her dread of every footstep that passes it. Zimmermann's solution, effectively, is not to set it to music at all: the soprano speaks the words in a terrified, breathless whisper, accompanied by a rapidly fluttering ostinato figure that gradually descends in pitch and increases in menacing volume as the piece proceeds. That is all: not so much a setting as the devising of a pair of musical gestures to match the text, and this is often Zimmermann's way. Except when the instruments erupt in explosive or sinister dramatic grimaces (often reminiscent of Weill) their role is very much an evocative and accompanimental one. The voices often rise from speech to recitative and plaintive arioso (often based, like the accompaniments, on ostinato figures), but these melodies too are used more as gestures (or as what a semiologist would call 'signs': for nostalgia, pity, anguish or whatever) than as musical material to be developed and transformed into a structure greater than its parts. The parts are always effective, sometimes touching or horrifying, and I can imagine Weisse Rose being a gripping experience in a simple and sympathetic staging. On record I found myself ungratefully asking for more. No. 8, for example, consists of two lines of expressively spoken text (''They have cropped her hair. What have they done to her?'') followed by a pattern of staccato chords that grow gradually quieter. A graphic and pathetic 'sign' for Hans Scholl's pity and revulsion at his sister's disfigurement, but not much more graphic and pathetic than the printed words themselves. Honorably but in the ultimate resort disappointingly Zimmermann has concluded that music can effectively assist the utterance of such texts but cannot add to them.
At all events, one can scarcely imagine them more vividly projected: Gabriele Fontana copes with the cruelly extended range of the soprano line with heroic eloquence, and her tenor partner is accomplished both as actor and singer. The instrumental contribution (under the composer's direction) is precise and pungent, as is the crisply forward recording.'