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World without God
At the
Salzburg Summer Festival,
GIUSEPPE PENNISI was enthralled by
Bernd Alois Zimmermann's 'Die Soldaten'
The Salzburg contemporary music section has also had a special slant: a focus on Bernd Alois Zimmermann (five of the fifteen concerts either were
entirely devoted to his compositions or included his music). Also, the contemporary opera was the seldom
performed Zimmermann masterpiece Die Soldaten
(premiered in 1965 in Cologne and acclaimed as the only twentieth century opera which could be considered at the
same level as Alban Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu). Until then, Zimmermann was an academic (professor of composition at the University of Cologne) who moonlighted for a broadcasting
station (Westdeutscher Rundfunk) and provided music for plays,
movies and even modern ballet. He was a maverick in the German musical world. He was distant from the main avant-garde school, Darmstadt, for both ideological reasons (he was a thousand miles from Marx and
Marcuse) and for strictly musical reasons. He was adopting quite openly a
plurality of styles with citations and collage techniques (also from folk song and jazz) within the formal twelve note row system.
After the sudden celebrity he received
from Die Soldaten, he was working on a new opera, Medea,
but he committed suicide in 1970. Thus, only a few fragments survive from his second opera, at a very early stage. The writing of the libretto and the composition of Die Soldaten had taken ten years of his life: the opera was completed during the two years he spent in Rome at the German Cultural Institute in Villa Massimo, thanks to a
fellowship he had competed for. During those two years, he could focus
only on Die Soldaten without having teaching duties or needing to moonlight for radio, theaters and movies.
Alfred Muff as Wesener, Laura Aikin as Marie and ensemble in
Zimmermann's 'Die Soldaten' at the Salzburg Summer Festival. Photo ©
2012 Ruth Walz. Click on the image for higher resolution
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Zimmermann was born in 1918. Thus, when World War II started, he was drafted and served on the Eastern front (Poland, Russia) until the bitter end. This was a traumatic experience which molded
the rest of his life, including, of course, his work. The Salzburg Festival published a large part of his war epistolary with his family, mostly with his sister; this reveals quite openly the impact that life at the front had on his professional experience and on his soul. I was in Salzburg when the Zimmermann concert session finished. Thus, I can solely emphasize that his war trauma
underlies most of his recorded music -- sonatas, suites after composition for plays and movies and the large scale oratorio Omnia Tempus Habent.
The trauma is central to Die Soldaten.
The opera is based on a thirty-four scene Jacob Lenz play that was published in 1776 but performed only in
1863 in Vienna and immediately forbidden by the Austrian censorship. Lenz's play has been occasionally revived in the
twentieth century. Zimmermann took a commission to make it an opera for Cologne in 1957 and undertook the task of reducing and simplifying the libretto. The
play was reduced to fourteen scenes in four acts. When the work was completed and delivered, the Cologne
opera management thought it could never be staged. It entails three orchestras and forty soloists in both singing and spoken parts -- of whom 'only' twelve have major roles. Also, Zimmermann requested that there should be at least three
stages because a number of scenes -- especially in the second and fourth
acts -- had to be performed in parallel, not in sequence. In addition to
what is normally available in an important opera house accustomed to having Wagner and Strauss in its repertory, the orchestra had to include percussion, tubular bells, marimbaphone, piano, several harpsichords, a celesta and an organ, as well as electronic apparatus. Further, film sections had to be shown in parallel to the scenes on the stage.
Briefly, enough to scare any opera manager. Some parts of Die Soldaten
were broadcast. The main conductor of the Cologne Opera, Michael Gielen, was enthralled, and eventually
the work was premiered on 15 February 1965. The enormous success was not an easy road to new productions.
Laura Aikin as Marie, Matthias Klink as the young Count and Gabriela
Benacková as the Countess in Zimmermann's 'Die Soldaten' at the Salzburg
Summer Festival. Photo © 2012 Ruth Walz. Click on the image for higher
resolution
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In Italy, Die Soldaten was seen and heard only in Florence in the seventies as part of a Cologne Opera tour. In the United States, it reached the New York City Opera in 1991 but was never shown at the Metropolitan or other major opera houses. In the seventies, it was seen in Kassel, Nuremberg, Munich, Hamburg, Warsaw and Edinburgh -- often in simplified productions. Particularly significant was a revival in Stuttgart in the late nineteen eighties with Harry Kupfer as stage producer, Bernhard Kontarsky in the pit and Nancy Shade as the protagonist. A DVD based on the Stuttgart production is, until now, the only one available in the commercial catalogues. Die
Soldaten is an apologue: in a world without God, men are always at
war with, and destroy each other. When the actual fighting is on, they
kill their enemies or are killed by them. During the periods of armistice
or of temporary peace, they are at war with women and make them their whores.
In the late seventeenth century, a merchant moves from Flanders (where
fighting is on) to Lille to give his daughters a better future, especially to his cherished Marie; she is engaged to a nice Flemish
draper who remains close to the battlefield. In Lille, Marie becomes the
object of attention of an officer (a French Baron) who is in rest-and-recreation from the frontline. She thinks
that he would help her in Lille's social life and that she could also keep her relationship with her fiancé. Her father tries to dissuade her, but she ends up in the bed of the Baron, who
passes her on to a Count and then even to their underlings, retinues and soldiers -- also as a mass rape entertainment. Only the mother of the Count and the army's chaplain make attempts to stop her downfall. The draper learns that she is the soldiers'
whore, kills the Baron and commits suicide. In the last scene, all the characters but Marie, her father and the Chaplain are dead. She is begging as
she has not had anything to eat for three days, her father does not
recognize her but gives her a few coins, whilst from far away, the
Chaplain sings the Pater Noster prayer.
Alfred Muff as Wesener and Laura Aikin as Marie in Zimmermann's 'Die
Soldaten' at the Salzburg Summer Festival. Photo © 2012 Ruth Walz.
Click on the image for higher resolution
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In Salzburg, the opera is performed in the
Felsenreitschule, the huge hall formerly for riding horses, and home to horse shows during
wintertime. It has an oversized extremely wide front scene and a perfect acoustic which almost envelops the audience. The Wiener Philharmoniker (suitably expanded) was divided by the
conductor, Ingo Metzmacher, into three sections: the pit for the regular
orchestra, and the left and right sides of the audience, mostly for the
percussion, the tubular bells, the harpsichords, the celesta and the
organ.
The stage sets by Alvis Hermanis and the costumes by Eva Dessecker place the action in the World War I period. The front stage is so wide that several scenes can be shown
simultaneously in Lille and in Armentières (near the Flemish
battlefield). A wall with a series of arches separates the front stage
from the rest of the set, where the military life can be seen: men riding
horses, their prostitutes in Amazons' attire. From time to time projections on screens (pulled down in the arches) show
postcards of brothel life at the beginning of the twentieth century. This
orchestral and dramaturgical set up is as close as possible to the instructions
provided by Zimmermann. To grasp this, it is sufficient to read the composer's indications and compare Salzburg's production with the Stuttgart
DVD.
Renée Morloc as Stolzius' mother in Zimmermann's 'Die Soldaten' at the
Salzburg Summer Festival. Photo © 2012 Ruth Walz. Click on the image
for higher resolution
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The action goes swiftly and is very powerful dramatically. The four acts are divided into two parts. On 22 August 2012, the
audience was fully absorbed by the opera and applauded enthusiastically,
even though the music lasts over two hours, each scene is in a rigorous structural form (strophe, chaconne, fugue) -- as in Berg's stage works, and the twelve note row system is molded with pop
music, jazz and even a Dies Irae from a Gregorian Mass. Also, singing is brought to the limits of human capability (ie in terms of extension of Cs and Gs) and some twenty
of the soloists have spoken rather than singing roles. The cast is excellent. It is difficult to comment even only on the principal soloists because they are so many. However, Laura Aikin (as Marie)
must be mentioned because of her ability to sustain a very hard role, both vocally and acting.
This 22 August 2012 performance was the
second of the five scheduled at the Festival. At the end, the audience
erupted in a protracted ovation. This was well deserved.
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