It is fascinating to think that Die Soldaten, a vast, experimental opera by the German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann, was written in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the same time during which the AMC’s popular hourlong television drama Mad Men is set. Mad Men is about the advertising world in New York just before America’s decorous lid got blown off with rock ‘n’ roll, be-ins, the Vietnam War, and all the rest. Zimmermann’s opera tried to blow the lid off of opera; his goal was “opera as total opera theater! In other words: architecture, sculpture, painting, musical theater, spoken theater, ballet, film, microphone, television, tape and sound techniques, electronic music, concrete music, circus, the musical and all forms of motion theater combined to form the phenomenon of pluralistic opera. In my Soldaten, I have attempted to take decisive steps in this direction.”
Die Soldaten was first performed in 1965 in Cologne, Germany, in a scaled-down production because it was considered “unperformable” the way Zimmermann had … read more
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