Zimmermann: Die Soldaten

Gürzenich-Orchester Köln

Erschienen am 01.01.07 bei wergo
Künstler: Gürzenich-Orchester Köln
Genre: Oper

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Text in englischer Sprache verfügbar

The conventional wisdom in German-speaking countries (and even beyond) is that Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten is the most important opera to be written since Wozzeck, and based on its topicality, its seriousness, the musical and intellectual rigor of its construction, its dramaturgical innovations, and its visceral emotional impact, it's hard to argue with that assessment. Comparisons with Wozzeck are inevitable: the musical language is similarly spiky, although Zimmermann's opera is entirely serial (except for some interpolated idioms, like jazz and chorale tunes), with serial techniques extending even to the scenic elements and the larger musical structure; like Berg, Zimmermann uses traditional musical forms (chaconne, toccata, nocturne, ricercar, etc.) to give shape to the scenes; the subject matter is the brutalizing effect of military culture and the story is wrenchingly sad. In Wozzeck, though, it's obvious from the first scene that the die is already cast, and tragedy is the only possible outcome for its characters. Die Soldaten begins with the adolescent Marie settled in with her loving family with a happy future all but assured, but then the foolish choices she, her hapless father, and her devoted lover make lead them to depths of suffering they couldn't have imagined.
The opera consumed Zimmermann for a decade, and his unwavering commitment to his very specific and demanding vision has stood in the way of its being broadly performed. He calls for a gargantuan orchestra, not only in numbers, but in the size of the instruments; the percussion battery is so extensive that the full orchestra is too large to fit into the pit of virtually any existing opera house and conductors and designers have had to put the extra instruments in another room with the sound miked in, or deploy them on the stage or around the theater. Zimmermann also calls for 12 discrete performing areas (each accompanied by its own instrumental ensemble), allowing for different scenes to be simultaneously enacted, and the climactic scene of Marie's rape additionally requires three movie screens. In spite of its demands, the opera is performed regularly in Germany and has had a gratifying number of international productions, but it is not a project into which an opera company can enter lightly.
Zimmermann was an endlessly inventive composer with a brilliant theatrical sense, and each of his scenes is musically distinctive, motivically rich, with exquisitely nuanced text setting that creates believable and gripping characterizations. Much of the opera is scored with the delicacy of chamber music, but when Zimmermann pulls out all the stops, the effect is devastatingly powerful, as in the Prelude, easily one of the most brutal set pieces in operatic literature, and the overwhelming final scene. This 1965 studio recording was made just after the opera's premiere in Cologne. Wergo's engineers deserve high praise for the extraordinary sound quality they achieve with the mono recording; they create a terrific sense of immediacy and presence, as well as a clarity that lets the details of orchestration really shine. The performances are uniformly superlative. Edith Gabry had never sung "new music" before this role, but her Marie (written for "high dramatic coloratura soprano") is musically and dramatically spot-on. Bass Zoltan Kelemen is also outstanding as her father, Wesener, as is baritone Claudio Nicolai as her admirer Stolzius. There are no screaming or yelping attempts to negotiate Zimmermann's demands -- the entire cast sings this dauntingly thorny music with ease and with disciplined bel canto vocal production. The playing of Gürzenich-Orchester Köln is above reproach and Michael Gielen's conducting is electrifying. Any fan of contemporary opera should be grateful to Wergo for making this remarkable performance of Zimmermann's masterpiece available again, and anyone skeptical about the expressive possibilities of serialism ought to get to get to know this searing work.

© TiVo

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Zimmermann: Die Soldaten

Gürzenich-Orchester Köln

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Die Soldaten: Preludio