Last week, the Metropolitan Opera announced that it was facing a budget crunch. Wow, like, that’s a surprise? Some staff members have already taken pay cuts, salaries will be discussed with unions. And of course the crisis will impact programming: Costly revivals of Ghosts of Versailles, Benvenuto Cellini, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and Die Frau Ohne Schatten have been scrapped; some won’t be replaced, others will be switched for less pricey productions. But the Met is not really representative because there’s no such thing as a really cheap show there: Your choices are expensive and very expensive. What I fear is that we’re really going to start missing out on very large, very outlandish, very ambitious productions all over town, not just at the Met. read more
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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