Both productions cannot be recommended highly enough, with me the 1989 production was an ideal introduction to Zimmermann's opera and this performance serves wonderfully as an alternative production. Die Soldaten as an opera itself is very interesting, the expressionistic/serialist style will not be for everybody but it has a very powerful story and the music is clever and hits an emotional chord too. Like the Stuttgart performance, this production does everything right. The production values, with 40 meter stage, side by side scenes and the glass wall- where there is more action, and with the likes of leering horses just as harrowing- to name a few, are atmospheric as well as striking, and the staging is the very definition of thrilling. It is very sensual, at times almost over-the-top, but it also has the grittiness and intensity that is emphasised so clearly in the music and story. The final scene is just heart-rending. The orchestral playing is excellent, the playing itself is of great-sounding quality(beautiful in context of the opera is probably not the right word) and while it is very difficult music it doesn't fall into the trap of being too careful. The conducting keeps things flowing nicely and lets the drama speak for itself. The three lead roles are performed superbly, especially the poignantly vulnerable Marie of Laura Aiken, who sings with a bright, dynamic and never too acidic tone. Tomacz Konieczny is ardent and just as sympathetic as Stolzius, by far the more likable of Marie's two suitors, his voice rings out and doesn't show signs of being taxed. You really grow to hate Desportes and with his booming baritone voice and authoritative yet conniving stage presence Daniel Brenna more than convincingly shows why that is so. Die Soldaten is an ensemble work essentially and everybody is very good, Alfred Muff is every bit the noble father figure, but the three leads are the ones that stand out. Overall, fantastic. 10/10 Bethany Cox
2 Reviews
Innocent, naive, curious: it kills the pussycat
Dr_Coulardeau15 February 2021
Warning: Spoilers
First of all, you have the music, from the very first note to the last. It is a type of music that is supposed to keep you alert, and on your toes, your mental and artistic toes of course, since you are not here to dance. And on your toes this music keeps you, tense, so tense you may break, and you always wonder if you will be able to go to the end of it without collapsing, breaking down, sloshing and slurping into some kind of poisonous gooey thick glue.
Each voice is pushed to the extreme of its range and possibilities without any release of this tension and this extremism before the last note without a coda to soften it. It is so disturbing you are pushed into looking, with your eyes, looking for some compensation to keep yourself from falling, to keep your equilibrium well balanced, and at many moments you are not far from just losing it, loosening your tension, and falling down the precipice of a dark night of syncopal unconsciousness.
Then you can look left and look right; The stage is so long, so vast in length, that you cannot ever see both ends at the same time. All along this enormous stage, you have scenes and things happening, at times two or three actions simultaneously. How can you really keep everything under and within your eyesight? You just can't, and so you have to admit it is better to concentrate on what is supposed to be the main scene at each moment, the small section of this stage where the singing takes place, and forget about all that happens left and right. That is frustrating and it is intended to be frustrating, so that you remain alert once again and ready to receive any blow in your mind, any punch in your stomach.
But you can also, and you have to, watch what is happening in the second depth of the stage, behind the front of the horse riding school with its long line of vast arcaded glass windows or doors behind which many actors are standing, doing things with real live horses walking around with no shame, no fright, no interest, and this backstage behind glass opens with a whole set of military beds with soldiers in all stages of total derangement and having all sorts of temper-tantrums and delirious agitated bouts, nearly epileptic fits, and of course, you know at once, even if you have never been in an all-male military corps, that it is all sexual, and nothing but sexual. In that vision in the opening scene, the delirium of the soldiers is each one for oneself, each individual bound to and into his own delirium with no contact with anyone else. Strange in a way. As soon as you bring a great number of males in an all-male institution that cultivates the maleness and the maledom, and the malehood of these individuals - they might say the masculinity - you have all sorts of events that are generally gross, but they cathartically prevent violence, even though quite often they lead to contact, physical contact, but with no intention to hurt, just the need to touch another man with whom you are equal.
But the opera sets One girl in that inferno, a girl who still believes girls come in roses and boys in cabbages, or maybe both are brought by storks or some other migrating birds. The confrontation is brutal, absurdly brutal, and irremediably irreversible. The girl enters the contact with these soldiers as pure and innocent as a lily in the valley, though maybe not completely so in her secret mind, but to say she is, is good for the story. In no time she falls to some flattery, she yields to some gentleness - that as nothing gentle or gentile in it - and she also has to stoop to conquer and conquer she will, but in the end, and after all that conquering, she will be left behind, call a spade a spade and say she will be abandoned and rejected, with a child to abort and a living to make. Because by then she must have understood in her fit of corrugation that you must not target somewhat who is not from your low class and that beauty alone never makes a happy marriage in the upper classes, and the Countess, when she says that, implies that this poor girl who has become anonymous by then, was plotting with life to get a husband from a higher social tier than hers. She could have married the one she was promised to, the son of a cloth dealer, dealing a lot with the armed forces, which led the young man to follow the military units he was trying to sell cloth to, and his promised wife followed, attracted that she was by the smell and view of military uniforms.
And that's how little by little she fell down in the gutter, her nose directly into the drain. And she could not be reprieved any more. From the drain came a balloon and a clown.
The end is so bleak you will have nightmares tonight. The young man she was supposed to marry got his vengeance. By using his knowledge of the military forces his father was dealing with, he managed to get into the concerned corps and to become their cook, and one night, to serve a special soup of his, that he tried too, and they all ended dead like a bunch of rats. The only survivor or so, the poor girl who was known as Marie by her fiancé, is nothing but a begging nun in a Shakespearian "nunnery." And she comes across her own father looking for her in the street. She does not recognize him and neither does he. She begs for some money and he refuses appalled by the woman there in front of him that looks like nothing but a dirty, filthy, maimed beggar.
Bleaker than that you die. After the whole opera of shrieking, squeaking, screaming sharp notes, so shrill and so sharp that they pierce your own enjoyment with millions of fiery sparks and flames till you seem to be going to hypnosis, like a lullaby may bring a child to sleep. I must say that the provocative stage directing of the Latvian director, Alvis Hermanis, is adding a trillion more ideas and props and trivia and whatever you can imagine, to the music and the singing to make the show a real descent into the Maya Xibalba to meet the Death Lords there. Good morning, Lucifer, and Good evening, Beelzebub, or shouldn't I use the Canaanite name, Baal? The post-Soviet generation in this Baltic republic can reach extremes even the most aggressive and provocative western artists would not even dream of. They seem to have no sense of what we, in the West, call political correctness. And I must admit it sure stirs our senses to attention.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Each voice is pushed to the extreme of its range and possibilities without any release of this tension and this extremism before the last note without a coda to soften it. It is so disturbing you are pushed into looking, with your eyes, looking for some compensation to keep yourself from falling, to keep your equilibrium well balanced, and at many moments you are not far from just losing it, loosening your tension, and falling down the precipice of a dark night of syncopal unconsciousness.
Then you can look left and look right; The stage is so long, so vast in length, that you cannot ever see both ends at the same time. All along this enormous stage, you have scenes and things happening, at times two or three actions simultaneously. How can you really keep everything under and within your eyesight? You just can't, and so you have to admit it is better to concentrate on what is supposed to be the main scene at each moment, the small section of this stage where the singing takes place, and forget about all that happens left and right. That is frustrating and it is intended to be frustrating, so that you remain alert once again and ready to receive any blow in your mind, any punch in your stomach.
But you can also, and you have to, watch what is happening in the second depth of the stage, behind the front of the horse riding school with its long line of vast arcaded glass windows or doors behind which many actors are standing, doing things with real live horses walking around with no shame, no fright, no interest, and this backstage behind glass opens with a whole set of military beds with soldiers in all stages of total derangement and having all sorts of temper-tantrums and delirious agitated bouts, nearly epileptic fits, and of course, you know at once, even if you have never been in an all-male military corps, that it is all sexual, and nothing but sexual. In that vision in the opening scene, the delirium of the soldiers is each one for oneself, each individual bound to and into his own delirium with no contact with anyone else. Strange in a way. As soon as you bring a great number of males in an all-male institution that cultivates the maleness and the maledom, and the malehood of these individuals - they might say the masculinity - you have all sorts of events that are generally gross, but they cathartically prevent violence, even though quite often they lead to contact, physical contact, but with no intention to hurt, just the need to touch another man with whom you are equal.
But the opera sets One girl in that inferno, a girl who still believes girls come in roses and boys in cabbages, or maybe both are brought by storks or some other migrating birds. The confrontation is brutal, absurdly brutal, and irremediably irreversible. The girl enters the contact with these soldiers as pure and innocent as a lily in the valley, though maybe not completely so in her secret mind, but to say she is, is good for the story. In no time she falls to some flattery, she yields to some gentleness - that as nothing gentle or gentile in it - and she also has to stoop to conquer and conquer she will, but in the end, and after all that conquering, she will be left behind, call a spade a spade and say she will be abandoned and rejected, with a child to abort and a living to make. Because by then she must have understood in her fit of corrugation that you must not target somewhat who is not from your low class and that beauty alone never makes a happy marriage in the upper classes, and the Countess, when she says that, implies that this poor girl who has become anonymous by then, was plotting with life to get a husband from a higher social tier than hers. She could have married the one she was promised to, the son of a cloth dealer, dealing a lot with the armed forces, which led the young man to follow the military units he was trying to sell cloth to, and his promised wife followed, attracted that she was by the smell and view of military uniforms.
And that's how little by little she fell down in the gutter, her nose directly into the drain. And she could not be reprieved any more. From the drain came a balloon and a clown.
The end is so bleak you will have nightmares tonight. The young man she was supposed to marry got his vengeance. By using his knowledge of the military forces his father was dealing with, he managed to get into the concerned corps and to become their cook, and one night, to serve a special soup of his, that he tried too, and they all ended dead like a bunch of rats. The only survivor or so, the poor girl who was known as Marie by her fiancé, is nothing but a begging nun in a Shakespearian "nunnery." And she comes across her own father looking for her in the street. She does not recognize him and neither does he. She begs for some money and he refuses appalled by the woman there in front of him that looks like nothing but a dirty, filthy, maimed beggar.
Bleaker than that you die. After the whole opera of shrieking, squeaking, screaming sharp notes, so shrill and so sharp that they pierce your own enjoyment with millions of fiery sparks and flames till you seem to be going to hypnosis, like a lullaby may bring a child to sleep. I must say that the provocative stage directing of the Latvian director, Alvis Hermanis, is adding a trillion more ideas and props and trivia and whatever you can imagine, to the music and the singing to make the show a real descent into the Maya Xibalba to meet the Death Lords there. Good morning, Lucifer, and Good evening, Beelzebub, or shouldn't I use the Canaanite name, Baal? The post-Soviet generation in this Baltic republic can reach extremes even the most aggressive and provocative western artists would not even dream of. They seem to have no sense of what we, in the West, call political correctness. And I must admit it sure stirs our senses to attention.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
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