Bernd Alois Zimmermann's opera Die Soldaten (The Soldiers), the "highlight of the festival season" (Süddeutsche Zeitung), breaks all records! The style and structure of an opera, acknowledged as one of the 20th century's key works, its musical and dramatic collage technique take it to the limits of what is playable. Now, in Salzburg's Summer Riding School, the opera has found the ideal performance venue and, with the Vienna Philharmonic under Ingo Metzmacher together with a top-flight cast of singers, its ideal performers too.
Everything in this production is on a massive scale: 170 musicians (around 50 of them in the side galleries) and 50 or so soloists on stage contribute to make this highly complex composition a direct and physically palpable experience for the audience. The sheer force of the music and its performance are reflected in the Latvian-born director Alvis Hermanis's staging: setting the scene on a 40-metre wide stage in the Felsenreitschule and taking advantage of the room's full height, he portrays the individual episodes and stages of the plot in the simultaneity required by Zimmermann and condenses it into an exciting drama. Based on the play written by Reinhold Jakob Michael Lenz in 1776, and first performed in 1965, the work is moved to the period of the First World War: the innocent young Marie is engaged to be married to the cloth dealer Stolzius, but is seduced by an officer, Desportes, who then abandons her to a cruel fate as a social outcast. Zimmermann reveals characters to us "just as we can meet them any time and anywhere, people who through no fault of their own can be destroyed."
The critics have seldom agreed to such a degree: the soloists, the orchestra, conductor, director, scenery and the standard of singing were all sensational. There was frenetic applause for all those involved at the end and a standing ovation for a "twentieth-century masterpiece in a highly accomplished twenty-first-century interpretation" (Die Welt newspaper) – a triumphant success for a landmark of a century!
