About the work
Bernd Alois Zimmermann's opera „Die Soldaten" was premiered in Cologne in 1965 — after fifteen years of work and several theatres' refusals as „unperformable". The libretto by Zimmermann himself is based on Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz's Sturm-und-Drang play (1776). The opera is one of the most ambitious music-theatre works of the twentieth century and stretches every house's resources to the limit.
Plot
Marie Wesener, daughter of a fancy-goods dealer in Lille, is engaged to the cloth-merchant Stolzius. The young Baron Desportes seduces her and arranges her flight to Armentières. Marie's father wishes her good fortune; her grandmother warns of disaster. Desportes leaves Marie; she becomes the lover of an officer, then of his servant, sinks ever lower. Stolzius enlists in Desportes's regiment in revenge. He poisons Desportes. The grandmother, who in her early days had hopes for Marie's social rise, sees her granddaughter as a beggar in the street — neither recognises the other. Marie is dragged off into the war's chaos. The opera ends in a great apocalyptic finale: war, prostitution, revenge collapse into a sound-mass of voices, choirs, jazz orchestra, electronic tape — Zimmermann's „Pluralism of Time".
Cultural significance
Die Soldaten is regarded as the most important German opera after „Wozzeck". Zimmermann's „pluralistic" technique — multiple time-levels, multiple stages, simultaneous action — places extreme demands on the staging (12 sub-stages, 16 percussionists, jazz combo). Productions by Harry Kupfer, Willy Decker, Calixto Bieito and David Pountney (Salzburg 2012, with Esa-Pekka Salonen) shape the performance tradition. The work is a key text of post-war German anti-militaristic art.