The sad state of Die Soldaten as an opera more
known of than known may largely be due to its composer’s ultimate refusal
to face life as it is depicted in this, his magnum opus. His suicide
in 1970 denied us at least a second opera, Medea, which he had
gone some way to sketching. Had he determined to live he would have
certainly been able, somewhat like Wagner (a comparison he would have
loathed), to drive through his dreams to create ‘total theatre’.
Multimedia wasn’t even a gleam in a PR director’s eye
when Zimmermann started to sketch the opera in 1957 after Lenz’s anti-capitalist
play from almost two centuries earlier (1775). His aim: ‘To concentrate…
all theatrical media for the purpose of communication in a place created
specially for this purpose.’ The commissionees at Cologne Opera House,
Oscar Schuh and Wolfgang Sawallisch, were having none of it. Having
simplified its music and dramaturgy in a revision, Michael Gielen took
on the premiere in Cologne in 1965. In London, ENO was the first to
stage it only five years ago or so (small wonder, considering a run
in Munich in 1969 required 33 orchestral rehearsals and 377 for the
soloists, according to Grove) and even then they shirked many of the
demands made by the score. The orchestra, including piano, harpsichord
and organ, spilled into two subsidiary rooms and was broadcast from
there. Director David Freeman could pay little more than lip service
to the demands for split-level staging and incorporation of film and
cinematic techniques on the operatic stage.
Fortunately the money was evidently around in Stuttgart
in 1989, for Harry Kupfer appears to have realised at least some of
Zimmermann’s theatrical fantasies with startling success. I say ‘appears’,
for the stage is often so underlit that it is nigh-impossible to work
out more than the movement of bodies, never mind which ones or where
they are. It is offset by the brilliant clarity of sound, noticeable
from the very start in the five-minute orchestral pile-up that summarises
and seems to reject all the music written before it. Voices project
clearly over the top of a texture almost permanently dense. The flip
side of such stridency is that hardly anyone ever sings quietly; but
with the complexity of what they must sing, it is a miracle that they
all project both text and music with such confidence. A small example,
from the first appearance of the Countess de la Roche, in Scene 4 of
Act 3; with a lyrical, albeit unpredictable melody she sings of her
sadness at her son’s unwillingness to trust her any more. This gives
way to spoken reflection and anger in sprechstimme before returning
to the lyrical vein – and all in the space of 30 seconds or so.
The work is often spoken of as an anti-war tract, which
it is – if that’s all you want it to be. The central character is Marie,
a nice girl who wants to better herself and, in an effort to please
her father and marry above her class, accepts the sinister advances
of Desportes, the first of several officer-soldiers who will toy with
her and ultimately reject her. In the meanwhile she must break off her
engagement to the innocent Stolzius. As Marie is reduced to a sexually
complaisant plaything for Desportes, Stolzius gets his revenge by becoming
the manservant of Desportes’ friend Major de Mary and poisoning his
soup before committing suicide. Her own father does not recognise Marie
as she begs in the street; her identity becomes lost in the work’s extraordinary
close, a cinematic and sonic collage depicting military brutality.
It may come as little surprise to those who know Wozzeck
that Georg Buchner admired and was influenced by Lenz. Zimmermann too
took his cue from Berg by building the opera in formally archaic blocks,
of Chaconnes, Ricercars, Toccatas and Nocturnes. In both music and dramaturgy,
Die Soldaten winds itself around Wozzeck and Lulu
like a wary serpent, entirely its own creature. Its musical eclecticism
and complexity come to a head at the end of Act 2. Marie and Desportes
couple in orgiastic oohs and aahs as Stolzius’s mother tells the young
soldier in 12-tone leaps of disapproval that he is being played for
a fool. To stage left, Marie’s grandmother sings a folk song with the
prophetic line, ‘Some day your cross will come to you’; and over it
all a chorale from the St Matthew Passion combines with the harmonies
below in unpredictable and genuinely beautiful interaction. One of the
great moments in opera of the last century.
Taking the voices one by one rather misses the point
of the unorthodox demands made upon them; they make nice sounds when
they are able to, but best of all, they are entirely committed to the
piece and fluent in its language. Stockhausen disciple Bernhard Kontarsky
somehow binds the whole together with nonchalant authority. The closing
tableau in Kupfer’s production is worth the price of the DVD alone.
There isn’t much in the way of competition; the one
readily available CD set, on Teldec, amounts to a soundtrack of this
production and, as is currently the topsy-turvy way, costs more than
this DVD. For those who want to hear Die Soldaten this is the
only game in town – and its dark message and unsettling music demand
to be heard.
Peter Quantrill
Bernd
Alois ZIMMERMANN (1918-70) 
Harry Kupfer (director)