There have been a lot of reviews already both pro and con on this opera and its most unusual production. This was in fact the first time I had seen it live, as I unfortunately missed the production at the NYC Opera in 1991. I prepared for the evening by watching the DVD from the Stuttgart Opera, where it was performed more as a period piece in 18th-century costume, though unquestionably there was much that was innovative about the staging.
The production at the 7th Regiment Armory was designed to make the most of this huge ungainly eyesore occupying the full block bounded by Lexington and Park between 66th and 67th Streets. This staging was first conceived for last year’s RuhrTriennale in Bochum, Germany, and used the same cast, orchestra, and conductor. On this occasion the stage was a long, narrow strip in the center of the venue; here in New York there was less available space, and so what emerged as the stage that formed a T shape. The audience was seated on bleachers that could be literally moved back and forth to give greater or lesser closeness to the singers, while the main orchestra was situated at the far left and a smaller percussion ensemble at far right.
I suppose it gives some sense of my reaction to this opera that I find it more interesting to talk about the staging and the potential use of this space than about Zimmermann’s work itself. I would sum up my reactions to the experience in three ways: 1) I found the performance itself gripping and at times unbearably tense, 2) I was not convinced for the most part that the music reached the level of the Berg operas, the work’s most obvious ancestor, and 3) this production was a fascinating if not entirely successful break from the traditional proscenium stage, with considerable potential.
Unquestionably, Zimmermann was an angry man who poured his rage into this tale of Marie, the young girl who is seduced by the chance of marrying into the higher ranks of the military, but then abandoned and finally raped. Strong stuff, and I was utterly drawn in to the last act with its rape scene and Marie’s devastating fall into prostitution, where in attempting to beg a few coins from her own father is met by his failure to recognize her. Shades of Lulu’s descent into whoredom in London, and there are so many points in comparison with the Berg operas that I suspect Zimmermann was deliberately trying to outdo his great predecessor. Here instead of the Doctor, Captain, and Drum Major, we’ve got an entire regiment of brutal soldiers all itching to ravish Marie.
Gripping as I said, and there can be no question of Zimmermann’s sense of pacing, the power of his response to the horrors of the drama, the disgust he shows towards the oafish and brutal military men who violate his heroine. Yet I don’t think Zimmermann’s musical imagination reaches Berg’s. For one thing, the characters are not sharply delineated musically; unlike Wozzeck where each personage is musically recognizable, Zimmermann seems to throw his anguished intervals and tortured dissonances like a trowel on his musical canvas. Blasts of brass, sharp strokes on the percussion can come at any time in this opera, whether they feel integrated with the vocal texture or not. Perhaps only in the third act, where Marie, her sister, and the Countess who is mother to one of Marie’s soldier-lovers, is there a five-minute span of time where Zimmermann shows he has a lyric side. But although Marie has three such soldier-lovers in the opera, I could not distinguish any of them musically or even dramatically.
In Berg’s Wozzeck, the climactic event is Wozzeck’s murder of his Marie, followed by his descent into total madness and his (possibly unintentional) suicide. In Die Soldaten, the climactic event is obviously Marie’s rape and her degradation into prostitution and beggary. Berg’s response to Wozzeck’s fate, and it has been criticized as sentimental or out of place, is a D-minor elegy intended not to idealize Wozzeck but to lament the fate visited upon the wretched of the earth. Zimmermann’s response to Marie, far more musically brutal, is to reduce the texture primarily to tutta forza rolls on multiple snare drums, as Marie finally wanders off from her oblivious father. This seems to me to focus on the differences between the two works, and the insufficiency of the Zimmermann. It is unquestionably powerful, yet it somehow lacks musical variety and nuance.
It would be hard to fault the singing, acting, or playing. (Well, one reviewer – I think it was Anne Midgette - tried, finding the conducting of Stephen Sloane to lack flexibility. Who could tell.) But the real star of the show was undoubtedly the transformation of the Park Armory itself. (I attach a diagram so you can get the main idea.) With the use of a movable audience, it was possible to zoom in and out of intimacy with the actors, an approach I think that was inspired by film, but here it’s not the camera zooming from long shots to close ups but the audience. Unlike the proscenium stage, which has some degree of width but not much depth, here the stage was all depth but virtually no width. And because of this, the set was inevitably minimal, as any kind of elaborate stage setting could not be accommodated as it would be in the proscenium theater. But the stage allowed for some unusual effects that Zimmermann apparently wanted, such as positioning characters at multiple points along the main axis. Given the many short scenes, characters from the scenes before and after the current one could be present on stage simultaneously, thus fulfilling Zimmermann’s wish that the action take place at once in the present, past, and future.
There were some problems. Not with the mechanism, which purred back and forth with amazing quietness. But despite the steep raking of the audience area, sight lines were troublesome. For the first half I sat in row H to the right, which meant I could not see much of the stage immediately to my left. After the break, friends pointed me to a location much farther back in row T, which turned out to be far superior as being higher up gave me a wider, unobstructed view. The presence of two people on wheelchairs showed there was handicapped access, but to get to the higher seats one had to climb quite a few stairs, and I overhead a woman halfway up the platform in a panic that she could not go any farther. Surely an escalator or some other kind of mechanical transport could be devised for people not in sufficient physical condition to climb mountains. The acoustics are reverberant, and discreet mikes were necessary for the singers, but probably a lot of orchestral detail was lost. And will any other opera make good use of two orchestra pits that are on either side of the audience?
That the producers spent a fortune on the technical elements was reflected in the horrendous ticket prices, and having done all this for one opera, they hopefully will not abandon the concept. Already Messiaen’s St. Francis is scheduled in the Armory for 2009, under the stewardship of entering NYC Opera director Gerard Mortier. It will be interesting to see if I can sit through five hours of Messiaen; my standard joke towards the Vingt Regards is that Dix would have sufficed, or even Deux. But one thought that occurred to me is that here New York finally has an appropriate space for complex antiphonal works like Stockhausen’s Gruppen and the Berlioz Requiem.
