He still owes the world a "Gantenbein".

For years the composer Udo Zimmermann put off this opera project based on the novel “My Name is Gantenbein” by Max Frisch, for years it was already certain that nothing would come of it.

A serious illness had silenced the artist for almost a decade.

The last compositions were a cello concerto for Jan Vogler and a violin concerto for Elena Denisova.

The artist, who was born in Dresden in 1943, was particularly known for his bustle.

After starting out as a composer at a young age in the Kreuzchor under Rudolf Mauersberger, Zimmermann studied singing, conducting and composition.

He created vocal and instrumental works, but was best known for his musical theater.

The chamber opera “White Rose” about the fate of the Scholl siblings is one of the most frequently performed contemporary pieces and has already been staged more than 200 times.

But also “Levin's Mill” (after Johannes Bobrowski), “The Shoe and the Flying Princess” (Peter Hacks) and “The Wondrous Shoemaker's Wife” (Federico García Lorca) made him known in East and West.

He believed in the power of music

In addition to his compositional work, Zimmermann also excelled as a mediator, founded the “Studio Neue Musik” in 1974 and developed it further into the Dresden center for contemporary music. This resulted in today's European Center for the Arts Hellerau, which he was director until 2008. From 1985 he was also active in Bonn, where he directed the contemporary music theater workshop at the local opera house.

Armed with good contacts both in the artistic community and in the national feature pages, Udo Zimmermann took over the Leipzig Opera from 1990, which, in his eleven-year directorship, advanced to become a flagship of modernism. With the full-bodied slogan “Opera on the rise” he set standards and brought premieres by Jörg Herchet, Dieter Schnebel and Karlheinz Stockhausen on stage. My own artistic creation, however, faded into the background. At the Deutsche Oper Berlin, where Zimmermann was the general manager of Götz Friedrich's successor from 2001, he was granted only a short stint. In 2003 he had to leave the house again, but remained artistic director of musica viva at Bayerischer Rundfunk until 2011, where an astonishing 175 works were premiered during his fourteen-year tenure.

“I couldn't even imagine,” Zimmermann once said, “that you are an artist and have no faith in whatever.” He believed in himself and in the power of music.

With this armament and the early influence of a musical family as well as his time in the Dresden Kreuzchor, he lived with the claim to be a citizen of the world.

Even during the division of Germany, he conducted well-known orchestras on both sides of the border and did not want to be a “fine-minded administrative officer” even after reunification.

He owes the world the opera “Gantenbein”, which was only sketched in a few sketches.

Udo Zimmermann died on Friday at the age of 78 after years of illness.