Zimmermann: Die Soldaten | Claudio Nicolai, Gerd Nienstedt, ...

classical music: Zimmermann: Die Soldaten | Claudio Nicolai, Gerd Nienstedt, ...

classical music:

Zimmermann: Die So...

	Zimmermann: Die Soldaten Claudio Nicolai, Gerd Nienstedt, ... Wergo Germany, 2008 average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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brutal-modernity today

I thought we lived in a post-ideological era, with culture the last bastion of the playing field gobbled up by the neo-liberal order. that this primary opera of modernity still lives and gets produced in New York City, and Europe is incredible. Zimmermann is in the center of the partilinear thread running from Wagner-Mahler thru Berg to Hartmann;, Lachenmann and Rihm occupy the post-war generation of orchestral language paradigm.

This opera in 4 Akts was re-written by Zimmermann while in Rome on a study stipend, 1963-1964.It was claimed to be unplayable. Creatively he was a late bloomer and tried his compositional hand at many styles enamored of jazz and popular froms at one end while acknowledging the innovative advances in graphic notation, assemblage, collage of the post-war avant-garde.But his powerful language resides in 12 Tone Atonal utilizations, Where here there are impacted clusters, of strident tones,like an impenetrable irrational wall(s) of timbre; Zimmermann tried to find a usable center to incorporate many styles simultaneously,but failed early and in many respects his thinking pre-dated the music we came to experience in the Eighties and Nineties, with strains and affinities for popular forms, structures, gestures and icons. This opera has resonance right now I suppose because the globe still endures exploitation, brutality, war, greed, lechery of the highest order, where Evil I suppose Badiou might say still resides within the primary Event. The story narrative resembles Wozzeck and why not? it is by the same author, based on his 1776 play of Jakob Michael Reinholt Lenz. The relative simplicity of his writings and textual incompletedness of it renders useful libretti materials. The story depicts the tyranny of power,on personal levels with soldiers, the mindlessness of violence, and how it destroys innocence, here portrayed by Marie, who falls victim to sexual abuse living out her last days on the streets, homeless. Here also a viable metaphor for today with the Iraq-Afghanistan Debacles, and the untold numbers of homeless those campaigns created. Zimmermann tries to synthesize various musical languages, like a modulation(s),resorting to traditional structures for each act as "notturni","Tropes","ciaconna" much like Alban Berg; a fairly fascinating idea.
You must decide yourself if he succeeds in this metamophosis while adhering to interesting dramatic invention.Production values are fairly near endless.For the early Sixties Zimmermann was on the cusp of the resolution we later see then with the abstraktion-ness in Heiner Mueller,(Hamletmachine) where the narrative gets cut, edited, siphered down to modernist graphic essentials. Zimmermann couldn't help himself, still mired in the 'jouissance' of modernity. The orchestral forces are enormous here,with a large array of speaking, sprechstimme; recitation and singing parts; The current New York production in the Park Avenue Armory is quite impressive,adhering to the original conception of a movable audiences-Publikum, while rendering the claustrophobia ambience like the audience itself is being tortured, or witness to atrocities.One in particular is the sexual abuse of Marie, where the men with Pig-Faces, line for like a circle-jerk,very fashionable stuff. Slavoj Zizek has written well on our increase tolerance, (which is not-tolerance) of violence, and torture today where the very thought of it has become commonplace.The place and time of the opera is in Lille France,where soldiers inhabit ugly unkept uniforms with untold numbers of buttons, places for protruding member parts to be explosed,disgusting, but all quite normal for the lifeworld of military expenditure. The narrative compactedness of the opera I think holds true to the time it was written. This with looking backwards(Zimmermann survived the German Army) without the insight of the wars and brutalities we were to witness; since the early Sixties. Godard's "Notre Musique" opening contains the residue of this, in a ugly-beauty of a series of fast convoluted images straffings,aerial bombings; red-black phosphorus, green-metallic blue, straffings of clusters bombings,very much like the striations,smooth spaces deployed in 'Mille Plateau', of Deleuze-Guattari.This is how soldiers deal with humanity, as grides to snuff out remaining opaque, not face to face; Here this is opera so the message comes in a linear package, although Zimmermann has this limitation of not seeing the spatiality his subject could have takened.Zimmermann's depiction of war,humanity,innocence here still holds tremendous power because of its age; in that we have lived and does not have as we see today with the media reportage and other politically de-caffienated productions as John Adams with political subjects.Colin Powell recall wanted war without casualties, or without war there is no peace. know Much of this complexity comes across in diluted forms in this reproduction,but live you have the massive orcehstral sound; but editing for Video certainly helps the cause.

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