The End of a World

By Michael Walsh

Zimmermann 's Die Soldaten writes fine to a stark tradition

The important beginnings in musical history are often easy to identify: the birth of the romantic symphony with Beethoven's Eroica, for example, or the founding of German Romantic opera in Weber's Der Freischuetz, or the full flowering of the twelve-tone system with Schoenberg's Op. 25 Piano Suite. Endings, however, are more elusive. When precisely did the Baroque conclude? Did the symphony die with Brahms or Mahler, or is it still a vital form? These are moot questions.

Yet occasionally a work comes along that sums up everything--right or wrong--about a given period so completely that nothing can come after it: an unequivocal double bar, a decisive fine. Such a piece is the late German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann's sprawling, eclectic but ultimately unsuccessful serialist opera Die Soldaten (The Soldiers). First performed in Cologne in 1965, the work was given its American premiere last week by Sarah Caldwell's Opera Company of Boston. With it, an experimental tradition begun by Schoenberg, continued by Alban Berg and refined by avant-gardists of Germany's Darmstadt school of composers in the 1950s comes to a dead end. In fact, that tradition expires in a spectacular artistic auto-da-fe symbolized by the holocaust that is the opera's final scene.

Die Soldaten was conceived in 1958 as a gigantic, multimedia opera designed for Zimmermann's vision of a "theater of the future." The composer projected a vast structure containing twelve stages; all the stages would simultaneously present action set in the past, present or future, thus abolishing the traditional dramatic unities of time and space. But officials of the Cologne Opera, which had commissioned the piece, convinced Zimmermann that his idea was unperformable, so he scaled it down to the proportions of a conventional opera house--though he retained a split-level stage and the use of film.

The libretto, drawn from Jakob Michael Lenz's 1776 play, concerns the seduction and degradation of a middle-class girl, Marie, by a group of soldiers, among others. The opera's connections with Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu are obvious. Wozzeck too is about soldiers and their sordid love lives and has a heroine named Marie; like Die Soldaten, it is constructed in 15 self-contained, even aphoristic, scenes. Lulu--like Die Soldaten, a twelve-tone opera--similarly features a heroine who ends up a common prostitute. Zimmermann deliberately invoked the shade of his illustrious predecessor; the challenge he set himself was to improve upon the originals. That he failed is less a comment on his ability than a tribute to Berg's genius: Wozzeck (1922) epitomized 20th century alienation in its tale of a miserable soldier ground to pieces beneath the wheels of an uncaring universe, while Lulu (1935) thoroughly explored the expressive possibilities inherent in the twelve-tone system. Each is, in its own way, a definitive statement.

Not that Die Soldaten lacks arresting moments. The brutal prelude mixes the Dies irae with an orchestral primal scream, propelled by a relentless pounding of timpani that recalls the opening of the Brahms First Symphony. Along the way, several of the ensembles are strikingly crafted, such as a dramatically dilatory but musically effective trio for Marie (Phyllis Hunter), her sister Charlotte (Beverly Morgan) and a haughty but generous countess (RoseMarie Freni). And the final scene, in which civilization explodes in a brilliant burst of light and a final crash of the drums, is chilling.

Zimmermann's score is derived from a single twelve-note row containing all the musical intervals, but still has room for such disparate elements as Gregorian chant, Bach chorales and, during a dance number, an anachronistic rock band. Each of the scenes in the opera's four acts is organized according to a musical genre: chaconne, toccata, ricercar--another explicit resemblance to Wozzeck.

Yet the opera's weaknesses outweigh its strengths. They include awkwardly leaping, ungrateful vocal lines, a wearisome tendency to have everything sung fortissimo, an ultimate sameness of musical vocabulary, and a dramatic shift at the end from an 18th century moral object lesson to a Goetterdaemmerung of destruction that occurs on "the last day of the earth." Nor was the Boston performance much help. The work was slackly conducted and indifferently staged by Caldwell and only sporadically well sung, principally by Morgan, Hunter and Freni, and John Brandstetter as one of Marie's military lovers.

"What are the requirements for modern opera?" asked Zimmermann before his suicide in 1970. "The answer can be given in one sentence: Opera as total theater! In other words: architecture, sculpture, painting, musical theater, spoken theater, ballet, film, microphone, television, tape and sound techniques, electronic music, concrete music, circus, the musical and all forms of motion theater combine to form the phenomenon of pluralistic opera. In my Soldaten I have attempted to take decisive steps in this direction."

So he did--a latter-day Wagner gallantly reaching for the 20th century's Gesamtkunstwerk (all-embracing work of art). But he fell far short. Given the present-day disinclination of opera houses to produce untried, experimental and expensive new works, as well as a changing musical aesthetic that now looks upon serialism merely as a compositional tool and not an end in itself, it is unlikely that Die Soldaten will spawn any successors. --By Michael Walsh

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