Die Soldaten

"Yesterday, today and tomorrow" is how Bernd Alois Zimmermann defined the period of activity of his opera, first performed in Cologne in 1965, based on the drama by the 'Sturm und Drang' poet Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. Even Lenz was way ahead of the theatrical aesthetics of his time and proposed, in his theoretical essays, the dissolution of the unity of time, place and action. Zimmermann created a multimedia musical theatre in which, through the juxtaposition and interplay of a huge orchestra, stage music, jazz combo, electronics, tape deck and loudspeakers and using the media of film projection and simultaneous stages, levels of action overlap and individual fates are reflected in a broader panorama of destruction, violation, suicide and murder.

The bourgeois girl Marie Wesener moves from admirer to admirer, all from the ranks of the officers and soldiers until she gains a reputation for flightiness and becomes fair game for male lust. She ends as a whore and beggar. Her decline culminates in horrific visions of a brutalisation of mankind that spans centuries, in the apocalyptic picture of an endless spiral of constantly repeated compulsions and acts of violence by mankind against others and itself.

The story
In the words of the composer

Marie, the daughter of the luxury goods merchant, Wesener, is engaged to be married to the cloth merchant, Stolzius. Baron Desportes, a young officer in the service of the French, courts this girl of the middle-classes and succeeds in winning Marie’s favour.  Wesener’s  hopes for social advancement are near to his daughter’s heart, yet she is nonetheless overcome by worrying premonitions of what lies ahead of her. The officers – friends of Desportes – invite Stolzius, who supplies the regiment with cloth, to their coffee-house where, in a rude and offensive manner, they enlighten Stolzius as to the existing relationship between Desportes and Marie.  The disappointed Stolzius writes a letter to Marie, who is in turn also disappointed, thus prompting her to open her heart to Desportes’ approaches.  Meanwhile, the officers continue to amuse themselves in their own way, while the Army Chaplain Eisenhardt and Captain Pirzel – who, due to the dullness of military service, has become somehow strange and is thus the target of much mockery from his comrades - unsuccessfully attempt to lead the unscrupulous, corrupt and boundlessly hedonistic regiment.  When Desportes tires of Marie, he passes on the abandoned woman to his friends. Stolzius enters the regiment so that he may observe what has happened to Marie. He becomes the serving boy of Desportes’ friend. Horror-stricken and saddened, he must watch Marie as she gradually becomes, in the words of his outraged mother, a so-called “soldier’s whore”. When the son of the Countess de la Roche also falls in love with Marie, the Countess takes the girl into her home so as to save her from the unwanted attentions of the officers and, at the same time, to protect her son from foolishness. Yet Marie tries again and again to contact Desportes. He finally succeeds in getting rid of her by luring her, at an agreed meeting place, into the hands of his hunter. Disgraced and broken, she takes to the street, while the Countess, her father and her family search for her in vain. Stolzius wreaks revenge for his fiancée by poisoning Desportes – and he himself dies of the poison. One day, a beggar girl approaches Wesener. Wesener does not recognize his daughter.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann