BOSTON OPERA: 'DIE SOLDATEN' HAS U.S. PREMIERE (original) (raw)
Arts|BOSTON OPERA: 'DIE SOLDATEN' HAS U.S. PREMIERE
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/08/arts/boston-opera-die-soldaten-has-us-premiere.html
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John Rockwell, Specia L To the New York Times
- Feb. 8, 1982
Credit...The New York Times Archives
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February 8, 1982
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Section C, Page
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Sarah Caldwell is honor ed for her labors of love, for American premieres of operas that no one else will touch, at least not until she has shown the way. Unfort unately, while love may insure a loving performance, it does not guar antee a good performance.
Last night's United States premiere by the Opera Company of Boston of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's ''Die Soldaten,'' widely regarded as the most significant German opera since Alban Berg's, was a sad case in point - a bitter disappointment for those who had heard the work on records and looked forward to encountering it live.
Zimmermann was born in 1918, died in 1970 and spent most of his life in and around Cologne. Although he was slightly older than the Darmstadt modernists of the post-World War II period, ''Die Soldaten'' is that school's operatic epitome. The work is based on a play of the same name by Jakob Michael Lenz, which tells of a young woman's transformation from middle-class maiden into soldier's whore, set within the larger context of the brutalities of militarism and man's bestiality. Written in 1775, the play prefigures both Georg Buchner and Bertolt Brecht in its social concerns and its vanguard refusal to accept the classical unities of time and place.
Zimmermann adapted the text himself (mostly through compression and conflation) and began composition in 1957. His original conception, for 12 stages surrounding the audience in a new, globular theater and for a grand simultaneity of effect, was deemed ''unperformable'' by those responsible for its performance. Zimmermann eventually simplified his plans - his widow last night said he had never completed the original score - and the premiere took place in Cologne in 1965. The opera has since received several West German productions, but this was its first outside that country.
O ne reason for its failure to ''travel'' is its sheer complexity, even in its s implified version. ''Die Soldaten'' is a compendium of the modernist techniques of its time. The underlying formal structureis serial, de rived from a single, ''all-interval'' row, with the serial permut ations extending beyond pitch to metronome markings, as well. But Zim mermann also makes extensive use of the massive orchestral so undcolor effects popular in the 1960's, as well as electronic mu sic, films, quotations, popular elements and grand brouhaha's re miniscent of John Cage-like ''happenings.''
It is always difficult when confronted with a failure to judge the relative responsibilities of the composer and the performance. The opera itself seems too overtly indebted to Berg in any number of ways. The libretto is oddly shaped, with subplots extending at length and with grand climaxes over in five minutes. The vaunted multimedia moments look dated and gimmicky - rather like, but less effective than, the three-screen exfoliations in Abel Gance's ''Napoleon.'' And the serial idiom sounds decidedly less grateful for lyrical and conversational passages than for scenes of agony and angst.
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