stage
Andrew Clements in London
TEN singers, 16 actors, a hundred musicians, three film screens and a theatre space divided into several acting areas … No wonder it took three decades for Bernd Alois Zimmerman’s landmark contemporary opera Die Soldaten to premiere in London.
First staged in Cologne in 1965, the widely celebrated opera has been on the plans of more companies around Europe than any other modern work. But the sheer logistics of mounting it have strictly rationed the number of times Die Soldaten has reached the stage.
Now being presented by the English National Opera at the Coliseum in London, it amazes audiences with the complexities of both the score and the staging.
Die Soldaten, written in 1957, is Zimmerman’s only opera. Now regarded as experimental, at the time the avant-garde considered opera an outmoded musical form and Zimmerman saw himself as an outsider.
Based on an 18th-century novel by Jakob Lenz, Die Soldaten tells the bitter tale of a virgin seduced, abused and then ruined by soldiers.
Whether or not it is a great opera is difficult to assess. It certainly is a big opera.