A rare piece from Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s oeuvre can be heard at the close of the music festival. A jazz-oriented audio-play composition inspired by Elias Canetti that evokes the subject of time and temporality: The deadline.

Zimmermann kept returning to the then-current jazz scene, collaborating with well-known jazz musicians. For an audio-play based on Elias Canetti’s drama of the same name, Zimmermann composed his piece «Die Befristeten» which, to a great extent, relies on improvisations. It is an ode to the goddess of freedom, in the form of a dance of death. And so he understood the short, free lifespan of music as a finite one. It is the deadline that makes us dead. Three German free jazz musicians, trumpeter Manfred Schoof, saxophonist Gerd Dudek and pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach were working on the recording at that time. They worked with Zimmermann on the score and will now come to Bern to collaborate with young musicians to breathe new life into it and to share their experiences. The limited improvisation time is carried, as it were, into the future.