Auditions

Four Texts by Bernd Alois Zimmermann

Lenz and New Aspects of Opera

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During the winter of 1774–75, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz wrote The Soldiers [Die
Soldaten], the play that, as he described in a letter to Herder, had “taken half his
being.”1 The truth of this was to be verified in his bitter fate, and as the only Sturm
und Drang author to have lived out their oft-repeated phrase, “I will sink down and
be extinguished in smoke and steam,”2 he may well have had some foreboding ap-
prehension of his future.
The plot of Die Soldaten, its fable: nothing special. A pretty, middle-class girl
falls in love with an officer of rank, abandons her middle-class fiancé, and sinks,
herself abandoned, tier by tier until she is driven onto the streets by circumstances
that entrap her, step by step, in their complexity. The corrupted Bürgermädchen, the
hedonism of a class, her seduction—all of this was taken from the prop box of
“Sturm und Drang.”
However, this language! On one hand, absurd to the point of ugliness, tattered,
burned out; on the other, enchantingly lyrical restraint and radiant interference,
simultaneously murky and crystalline—and that archetypal situation that is driven
forward, concentrically spiraling between opposite poles, shooting at a relentlessly in-
creasing pace toward the center and end point; this is unprecedented in the power of
the characterization and the poetic language, as well as in the manipulation of the
dramaturgical medium: an astounding anticipation of the techniques and methods of
representation that had seemed reserved first for Expressionism.
“Because—and at this Because you are perhaps already impatient—the ability
to imitate, what all animals possess already at birth, is—not the mechanical—not
an echo—not, to spare breath, what our poets do. The true poet does not combine
in his imagination, according to his whim, what gentlemen like to call beautiful
nature, but which is, with your permission, nothing but failed nature. He takes a
stance—and must then, from this point, combine accordingly.”3
That was written by a man scarcely twenty years old: Lenz in his “Notes on the
Theater” [“Anmerkungen übers Theater”] (written between 1771 and 1773, before the
appearance of Götz von Berlichingen).4
How strange the seemingly incoherent sentence structure of the “Notes” must
have appeared to the public in Strasbourg, to whom Lenz gave a reading of his text,
along with his rejection of Aristotle’s “so dreadful, lamentably famous nonsense of
the three unities.”5

The Opera Quarterly Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 135–151; doi: 10.1093/oq/kbu016
Advance Access publication on September 12, 2014
© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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136 zimmermann

“And what then are the names of three unities, my dears?” he asked. “Is it not the
one, for which we search in all objects of the intellect, the one that gives us the view-
point from which we can grasp and survey the whole? What are the names of the
three unities? I will name you a hundred unities, all of which, however, will forever
remain the one, unity of language, unity of religion, unity of morals—indeed, what
then comes of this?? Always the same, always and eternally the same.”6

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Unity of the inner dramatic action: that is, in a certain sense, the geometric
locus, the germ cell from which all of the phases and stations of action, the charac-
ters, the entire theatrical phenomenon unfold. Here lies the fundamental idea of
Lenz’s dramatic conception: the derivation of manifold events from one precise
unity, which unfold and unfurl and may express themselves either successively or
simultaneously.
“Our soul is a thing whose workings are, like the body’s, successive, one after
another. How this came to be is—so much is certain—that our soul yearns with its
entire being to neither perceive nor desire successively. With one glance we would
like to bore through the inner nature of all creatures, with a single sensation absorb
all ecstasy that exists in nature and unite it with ourselves.”7
The idea regarding the unity of the inner dramatic action became decisive for
the Lenzian dramatic poem.
The three classical unities (of action, place, and time) were consequently negated.
Many plots were layered over one another. (Brecht attempted to coordinate this in
his adaptation of Lenz’s The Tutor [Der Hofmeister].)8 Die Soldaten takes place in ten
different locations, swinging back and forth between Lille, where Marie lives, and
Armentières, the home of her middle-class fiancé Stolzius; it oscillates between dis-
tinctly contrasting, partially superimposed moments in time; the swing of the pen-
dulum increasingly widens, and the wider its spatial path, the smaller the intervals
of time become, until in the fourth and fifth acts, time and space meld together in
a virtual simultaneity in the form of scenes, which at times consist of just a single
sentence, an exclamation formed from the gesture of a sentence: the Joycean
“simultaneous dance of the hours,”9 in which dimensions are interchangeable, the
successive and concurrent congeal and in which sound and image become the
place where the stream of consciousness and the stream of experience are identical:
music!, comparable to the unity of present, past, and future that St. Augustine
identified in the essence of the human soul, which in a moment of intellectual ex-
pansion reaches past the fleeting instant and brings the past and future into a per-
petual present.

And what do these Lenzian principles, what does his dramatic conception mean
for the composer? The answer has already been given: disintegration radiating
from a singular, elementary idea. In this way, the compositional method is defined,
indeed, precisely described. We call it “serial,” and it means: “put allspace in a
 auditions 137

notshall” [sic] (Joyce)10 and similarly, “I will name you a hundred unities, all of
which, however, will forever remain the one.”11
With regard to our starting point, what possibilities lie hidden after all in such an
old form, so frequently proclaimed dead, like that of opera? The answer has already
been given. It became clear to me that the nature of serialism opens new possibilities
for opera, operatic possibilities that are tailored specifically to the many-layered form,

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the monstrosity of opera; yes, it seems as if that concise unity of which I spoke earlier
is that which is able to most closely lead to an identification, to a fulfillment of Lenz’s
demands: the unity of the inner dramatic action—the pendulum swing between the
successive and simultaneous—the descent into the spiral of time—interchangeability
of the dimensions—rotations and interferences—the immense structure of sound
in time that arches over and contains the entirety of the work: the path and direction
of the composition are directed by the poet. A new idea of opera suspended in
midair between a centripetal conception of space and a centrifugal conception of
time, a centripetal conception of time and a centrifugal conception of space.
What does this mean for the everyday of stage life? - To begin with, transferring
the spherical conception of the space-time construction of opera to the flat, frontally
oriented stage and auditorium of our opera houses. This means that the stage, high
and low, would be peripherally surrounded by groups of percussion instruments.
The acoustic half-circle of the stage will be closed to complete a full circle through
the installation of groups of speakers in the hall (on the ceiling and in the back-
ground), and the stage and orchestra (in the orchestra pit) will interact with each
other in the center point of this circle, a variegated web of space-sound symbols, of
coordinated acoustical phenomena zooming to and fro. Through the ever-changing
spatial configuration, the instruments become the perpetually mobile partner of
the singer on the stage. The audience is now completely integrated within the
musical process in a far more intensive manner than was previously possible when
they were positioned frontally, in direct opposition to the stage.
That which drew me to Die Soldaten was not so much its period character (which
has only conditional interest for us) and not its “class drama” character, neither the
sociological aspect nor the social criticism contained within the work (both of which
are unmistakable and in their own way magnificent), but instead the fact that, in this
archetypal situation (determined not so much by fate as by the fateful constellation
of social classes, conditions, and characters, just as they are), essentially innocent
people, whom one could encounter in any era, are subjected to events from which
they cannot escape; neither the soldiers nor Stolzius, Marie, Desportes, Marie’s
family, and whoever else. This is just as removed from an existential aspect as from
the period character, the tendentious, as it still existed in Lenz’s plans. The period
aspect is merely the ground from which the events take off.
For the adaptation of the material as a libretto, the set focal point of the drama-
turgical pendulum swing between the successive and the simultaneous was just as
138 zimmermann

essential as the inviolability of the poetic language. Thus, the officers’ scenes,
which take up a great deal of dramatic space in Lenz’s text, are clustered together
simultaneously in the opera, especially in the first scene of the second act. From
this results the layering effect that was mentioned earlier. Everything interacts ac-
cording to the rhythm of the overlapping layers of time and experience, creating
that simultaneously spatial-temporal rotation of scenes, out of which scraps of con-

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versation, splinters of dramatic action, singular and multiple parts of the entire plot
are thrown as if from a vortex. From the whispered word to the primal scream, all
forms of human vocal expression are put to use: the spoken and the sung word
merge with one another, exchange places, and become noise actions, which rhyth-
mically transform into knocking, hitting, kicking, and stamping, indeed, going so
far as to become dance movements, where the overlay of simultaneous speaking,
declaiming, screaming, singing, and rhythmic noise actions alternates with phases
of individual musical and scenic action, a constant fluctuation between the appar-
ent chaos of a vortex and molecular structure. In the second scene of this act (the
second act of the opera), three scenes (two of which are in Lenz’s text already inter-
twined) are composed concurrently in three-part counterpoint: the seduction of
Marie by the young baron Desportes, the prayer of the old mother Wesener, and the
anticipation of the tragic conclusion through Marie’s unhappy fiancé Stolzius. In
the final peripeteia of the opera, the previously mentioned microscenes (in the
fourth and fifth acts of Lenz’s play) are drawn into the maelstrom of the spiral of
time, comparable to something like the twelve-tone chord, the simultaneous sound-
ing together of all twelve steps of the musical scale: a twelve-tone chord of the scene
within the pluralistic proportions of the musico-dramatic action.
The listener: in the middle of the action, which, determined by a selected dra-
matic situation, expands and contracts, the development entangling and disentangl-
ing itself in various forms, constantly fluctuating between the planar and the
circular. The entirety of the musical material of the opera was derived from a sym-
metrical all-interval twelve-tone row, out of which the constituent proportions for
the total-work [Gesamtwerk] were developed.

notes
1. On July 23, 1775, Lenz sent a copy of the
newly finished Die Soldaten to Johann Gottfried
Herder and attached the note: “Hier, Hierophant!
In Deinen heiligen Händen das Stück, das mein
halbes Dasein mitnimmt. Es ist wahr und wird
bleiben, mögen auch Jahrhunderte über meinen
armen Schädel verachtungsvoll fortschreiten.
Amen.” (Here, hierophant! In your holy hands the
work that has taken half of my being. It is true and
will remain, even if centuries stride forward
disdainfully over my poor skull. Amen.) Jakob
Michael Reinhard Lenz, Werke und Briefe in drei
Bänden, vol. 3, ed. Sigrid Damm (Leipzig: Insel,
1987), 329. All translations of J.M.R. Lenz are by
Elaine Fitz Gibbon unless otherwise noted.
2. Lenz wrote in a letter to Herder in December
1795: “Darf ich Dir zu dem Hügel Glück wünschen
auf dem Du itzt Batterien anlegen wirst, großer
Freund des Herrn?—Mein Herz wallt und
schwingt sich für Freude über alle die Aussichten,
ich aber ich mein Bruder—ach eine Träne aus
Deinem Männerauge—ich werde untergehen und

verlöschen in Rauch und Dampf. Doch will ich
die Liebe mitnehmen. Sie allein wird mich zur
Hölle hinabbegleiten und noch die tröstend zur
Seite stehen.” (May I wish you luck with the hill
upon which you will now be laying your
battlements, great friend of God?—My heart
flutters and swings for joy at all of the views, but
I, I, my brother—ach, a tear from your manly eye—I
will sink down and be extinguished in smoke and
steam. But I will take love with me. She alone will
accompany me down to hell and continue to stand
consolingly at my side.) Ibid., 360.
3. “Denn—und auf dieses Denn sind Sie
vielleicht schon ungeduldig—das Vermögen
nachzuahmen ist nicht das, was bei allen Tieren
schon im Ansatz—nicht Mechanik—nicht Echo—
nicht was es, um Oden zu sparen, bei unsern
Poeten ist. Der wahre Dichter verbindet nicht in
seiner Einbildungskraft, wie es ihm gefällt, was
die Herren die schöne Natur zu nennen
belieben, was aber, mit Ihrer Erlaubnis, nichts als
die verfehlte Natur ist. Er nimmt Standpunkt—
und dann muß er so verbinden.” Lenz,
“Anmerkungen übers Theater,” in Werke und
Briefe, vol. 2, 648.
4. Goethe’s drama Götz von Berlichingen was
written in 1773 and premiered in April 1774.
5. “Auf eins seiner Fundamentalgesetze muß
ich noch zurückschießen, das so viel Lärm
gemacht, bloß weil es so klein ist, und das ist die
so erschröckliche jämmerlichberühmte Bulle
von den drei Einheiten.” (And I still must shoot
back at one of his fundamental laws that has
made so much noise, despite being so small,
and that is the so dreadful, lamentably famous
nonsense of the three unities.) Lenz,
“Anmerkungen,” 654.
6. In this quotation from Lenz’s “Notes on the
Theater,” Zimmermann brings together two
different sections of Lenz’s text, additionally
omitting and changing small phrases within the
text. Compare Lenz’s text: “Und was heißen den
nun drei Einheiten, meine Lieben? Ist es nicht die
eine, die wir bei allen Gegenständen der
Erkenntnis suchen, die eine, die uns den
Gesichtspunkt gibt, aus dem wir das Ganze
umfangen und überschauen können? . . . Was
heißen die drei Einheiten? hundert Einheiten will
ich euch angeben, die alle immer doch die eine
bleiben. Einheit der Nation, Einheit der Sprache,
Einheit der Religion, Einheit der Sitten—ja was
wirds denn nun? Immer dasselbe, immer und
ewig dasselbe.” Ibid., 654–55.
7. “Unsere Seele ist ein Ding, dessen
Wirkungen, wie die des Körpers sukzessiv sind,
eine nach der anderen. Woher das komme, das
auditions 139
ist—soviel ist gewiß, daß unsere Seele von
ganzem Herzen wünscht, weder sukzessiv zu
erkennen noch zu wollen. Wir möchten mit
einem Blick durch die innerste Natur aller Wesen
dringen, mit einer Empfindung alle Wonne, die
in der Natur ist, aufnehmen und mit uns
vereinigen.” Ibid., 646.
8. Brecht began work on his adaptation of
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Lenz’s play (1774) in the fall of 1949, the first
complete version being finished on December
22, 1949. The work was written for the Berliner
Ensemble and received its premiere in the
Kammerspiele of the Deutsches Theater in
Berlin/GDR on April 15, 1950, and first appeared
in print in the eleventh volume of the Versuche
in 1951 (Berlin: Suhrkamp). Further information
on the origin and development of the work
can be found in the editorial commentary to
Der Hofmeister in Bertolt Brecht, Werke, vol. 8, ed.
Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei,
and Klaus-Detlef Müller (Berlin: Aufbau, 1992).
9. Here Zimmermann cites Leopold Bloom’s
reference to the Dance of the Hours ballet (in the
third act of Amilcare Ponchielli’s 1876 opera La
Gioconda) at the conclusion of the “Calypso”
episode in Ulysses: “Morning after the bazaar
dance when May’s band played Ponchielli’s
dance of the hours. Explain that: morning hours,
noon, then evening coming on, then night hours.
Washing her teeth. That was the first night. Her
head dancing. Her fansticks clicking. Is that
Boylan well off ? He has money. Why? I noticed
he had a good rich smell off his breath dancing.
No use humming then. Allude to it. Strange kind
of music that last night. The mirror was in
shadow. . . . Evening hours, girls in grey gauze.
Night hours then: black with daggers and
eyemasks. Poetical idea: pink, then golden, then
grey, then black. Still, true to life also. Day: then
the night.” James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Danis Rose
(London: Picador, 1997), 66–67. This holds for
all further repetitions of this quotation within this
and the following texts.
10. Zimmermann refers here to the phrase
“Putting Allspace in a Notshall,” located in the
second episode of book III of Joyce’s Finnegans
Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 455. This
holds for all further repetitions of this quotation
within this and the following texts.
11. “Hundert Einheiten will ich euch angeben
die alle immer doch eine bleiben.” Jakob Michael
Reinhold Lenz, “Anmerkungen übers Theater,”
in Werke und Briefe,” vol. 2, ed. Sigrid Damm
(Leipzig: Insel, 1987), 655. This holds for all
further repetitions of this quotation within this
and the following texts.
140 zimmermann

Three Scenes from the Opera Die Soldaten

My opera, Die Soldaten, after the eponymous “comedy” by Jakob Michael Reinhold
Lenz, was written between 1958 and 1960. That which drew me to Die Soldaten was,
above all, the way in which this work, written between 1774 and 1775, portrays an

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archetypal situation that encompasses all of those involved and is determined not
so much by fate, the blind Moira, but far more by the fateful constellation of social
classes, conditions, and characters as they are: people, whom one can encounter in
any era, are subjected to events from which they cannot escape: more innocent
than guilty.
Neither the period piece, nor the class drama, nor the social aspect, not even the
timeless critique of the “soldier’s position within society,” a criticism relevant not
only in the past but which will remain so into the future, formed the immediate
point of interest. It has to do with an opera.
With regard to the above, what possibilities lie in such an old form, so fre-
quently proclaimed dead, as that of opera? In writing his “Notes on the Theater”
(1771–73), Lenz not only produced a dramaturgy of “Sturm und Drang” but also
communicated a conception of drama that has influenced theater until today.
Indeed, it seems to be unfolding in its fullest effect only now. Unity of the inner
dramatic action: that is, in a certain sense, the geometric locus, the germ cell
from which all of the phases and stations of action, the characters, the entire the-
atrical phenomenon develop. Here lies the fundamental idea of the Lenzian con-
ception: the derivation of manifold events from a single unity, which unfold and
unfurl, expressing themselves either successively or simultaneously. Conse-
quently, the three classical unities of action, place, and time are negated, many
“plots” are layered over each other: an anticipation of the Joycean “simultaneous
dance of the hours.”
And what do these Lenzian principles mean for the composer? The answer has
already been given: disintegration radiating from a singular, elementary idea. In
this way, the compositional method is clearly defined: “put allspace in a nutshell
[sic]” (Joyce) and, similarly, “I will name you a hundred unities, all of which,
however, will forever remain the one” (Lenz).
In the libretto, none of Lenz’s language was altered. A number of scenes were
brought together simultaneously—in the final act of the opera, no less than ten.
The shooting descent into the spiral of time, as I like to call it—one of the most fas-
cinating moments in Die Soldaten—can only be overcome, in a way that satisfies
the direction referred to by the poet, through musical composition. This in particu-
lar possessed for me a compelling appeal to compose with the material.
I stated above that this has to do with an opera. And I would like to repeat that
this has to do with an opera.
 auditions 141

If one “opens” oneself to opera, one must be aware of one of the most fascinating,
perverse anachronisms of all time and, furthermore, that invariably opera means the
overcoming of the past. What I mean is this: the unfettered genius (apart from the
fact that, as Schoenberg observed, such a phenomenon does not even exist) is present
to the least degree in the field of opera; this means, among other things, that Berg in
Wozzeck drew forth the latent consequences present in Tristan and that every opera

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production today draws forth those present in Wozzeck. Must I say that this by no
means denotes a return to the compositional principles of Wozzeck? Only the perfor-
mance of my entire opera, however, can give the conclusive answer to this question.
The premiere of this work, commissioned by the city of Cologne in 1958, could
not occur until now. Five years after the work was commissioned, the Westdeutscher
Rundfunk [WDR, West German Broadcasting, Cologne] is now granting the possibil-
ity of a partial performance. Three scenes will be performed, the selection of which
was determined by three considerations:
First, in consideration of the practicality of the performance. (Of a work con-
ceived for the stage, what lends itself to presentation in concert? What is the
maximum number of vocal soloists that may be used for the project?)
Second, in respect to vocal considerations. (Scenes in which the songlike and
the sung stand in the foreground, in contrast to speech, which is wielded in various
transitions from the whispered to the shouted, from the spoken to sung word.)
Third, in regard to the dramatic action. (Thus, the main characters of the opera:
Marie, Desportes, Stolzius, Marie’s father, as well as Stolzius’s mother and Marie’s
paternal grandmother, will be introduced, though Marie’s fate will always remain in
the foreground.)
But what are three scenes removed from the whole complexity of a three-act,
evening-length opera?
The entire work is based upon a single, symmetrical, all-interval tone row. The
composition stands between my solo cantata, Omnia tempus habent, and Dialogues:
Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, written in 1957 and 1960, respectively.
During my work on the opera, I also wrote the Sonata for solo cello. My opera origi-
nated in the stylistic space of the three works outlined above.
My residency at the Villa Massimo in 1957 gave me the opportunity to occupy
myself with the question of a reorientation of composition out of and away from
serialism. In the process, this goal became the pluralistic sound in its entire com-
plexity. It would lead too far afield to discuss here all of the far-reaching composi-
tional undertakings required by the work on an opera. Of course, I would like to
name them “late serialist” techniques; collages (Bach chorales and much more)
and principles of pluralistic sound-composition form a large majority of the
methods that seek to temporalize (in the truest meaning of the word) the timeless
anachronism of opera through its paradox, and thereby incorporate the future and
the past into the perpetual present.
142 zimmermann

On Die Soldaten

If one begins to express something about opera, it is necessary that it be clear that
since its creation the form of opera has been an anachronism, and a timeless one at
that.

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If one is aware of this, much has already been achieved. But first and foremost,
another point must be noted: opera remains alive, though it is a completely “impos-
sible” form: despite all of its impossibility, opera remains alive.
I must admit that as a young musician this amazed me; it then amused me and
finally fascinated me.
A few words should be said about why I chose Lenz’s play for my material. It
was one of those discoveries that sometimes comes after long years of searching; a
reunion. Erich Bormann, the artistic director of the Cologne Opera at the time,
brought my attention to Die Soldaten. I had read the Sturm und Drang work when I
was quite young and had just run across Lenz’s “Notes on the Theater.” The unprec-
edented cleverness of this theoretical text, written in 1771 during Lenz’s time in
Strasbourg, pointed in a direction that, in a quite astonishing way, corresponded to
my musico-dramaturgical conception of form, which I had, at the time, despite all
misapprehensions, referred to as “opera.” What was the most exciting for me was,
above all else, the Lenzian conception of the unity of inner dramatic action that Die
Soldaten defines in such an incredible way, and Lenz decided to renounce the
“lamentably famous nonsense of the three unities” (namely, of place, action, and
time). As a consequence of this text, Lenz negated the three classical unities, and
multiple plots were layered over one another: an anticipation of Joyce’s “simultane-
ous dance of the hours.” The step from the dramaturgy of Sturm und Drang to the
present time is astonishingly small: the suspension of the three unities leads
directly to the suspension of space and time located within the “spherical form of
time”: future, present, and past become interchangeable: Ulysses–Bloom wanders
between the cities of day and night and represents a form of “present” that Joyce ex-
presses through the analogy, “put allspace in a nutshell [sic],” and Pound says, “It is
dawn at Jerusalem while midnight hovers above the Pillars of Hercules. All ages
are contemporaneous. The future stirs already in the minds of the few. . . .”1
Thus, the path to Lenz’s Die Soldaten is not long: the realizations are essentially
the same.
And now: what was it, to ask anew, that brought me to Die Soldaten?
At the beginning stands a negation:
neither the period piece, nor the class drama, nor the social aspect, and not
even the critique of the “soldier’s position” within society (as timeless yesterday as
it will be tomorrow) formed for me an immediate point of interest, but rather the
way in which all the characters of Lenz’s Die Soldaten (written 1774–75), more
 auditions 143

innocent than guilty, are inescapably forced into a situation that leads to rape,
murder, suicide, and ultimately the annihilation of existence itself. Not determined
by anything like fate—“the blind Moira” as the ancient Greeks still understood it—
the lives of people, whom we can encounter in any era, are subjected to events de-
termined by a constellation of social classes, conditions, and characters, from
which they cannot escape.

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The arrangement of acts and scenes is subjected to the demonstrated musico-
dramaturgical idea of the “pluralistic” within the spherical form of time: later
events lay the premise and earlier events the conclusion: Bach chorales and jazz
stand among others opposite the rudiments of the “number opera” as well as
“music theater,” among others—embedded in a kind of panacoustical form of the
musical scene, melting together all elements of speech, song, music, sculpture,
films, ballet, pantomime, tape montages (noise and speech sounds, musique
concrète) into the pluralistic stream of time and experience, which in every case
leads to that toward which we eternally and inexorably strive—and with that, the
final plea of “Our Father,” “. . . sed libera nos a malo,” concludes the opera.
Seen in this way, Marie’s “story” may perhaps appear meaningless: an everyday
tale that belongs to all eras; the stories of Maries, Magdalenas, Maggies. It doesn’t
matter what name is inserted, even the other “characters” involved are inconse-
quential: one name stands for all—and all are affected, and it is this very process
that makes Lenz’s Die Soldaten so exemplary.
Thus, my opera does not tell a “story” but portrays a situation, to be precise: the
account of a situation that from the future threatens the past. And seen from this
perspective, the use of material from the eighteenth century, with its language
that seems so archaic to us today, possesses its timeless meaning insofar as we are
constantly developing, constantly encountering the present, past, and future in the
rotating sphere of time. For the most part, the piece takes place swinging to and fro
between tomorrow, yesterday, and today. As the theatergoer continues to refresh
himself appreciatively (and at that, purposefully and freely) with a “terzet,” an unno-
ticed maelstrom of accelerating events breaks out, a vortex that sweeps away every-
thing in the same instant; to reiterate: the future menacingly eats into the past and
presents an image of the present, with which we are all—in the end—confronted.
And how now is Lenz’s material handled?
The poetic word remained unaltered. The officers’ scenes, which in Lenz’s text
are so extended, were clustered together in the form of a collage; in three places (in
the first scene of the first act, the first scene of the second act, and the fifth scene of
the third act) a total of three poems by Lenz not included in the play, in addition to oc-
casional interjections, such as in the actions of the dancers, were built into the opera.
In the second scene of the second act, three scenes are performed simultane-
ously; in the first scene of the fourth act, even more is torn away by the vortex of the
“spiral of time.”
144 zimmermann

Unity of inner dramatic action: that is the geometric locus, the germ cell from
which all of the phases and stations of action, of the characters, the entire theatrical
phenomenon develop. “I will name you a hundred unities, all of which, however, will
forever remain the one” (Lenz), and again, “put allspace in a notshall [sic]” (Joyce).
The composition was written between 1958 and 1960.
Its impetus, a commission by the city of Cologne.

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I revised the work during my second residency at the Deutsche Akademie “Villa
Massimo” in Rome (1963–64). In addition to the recently finished overture to the
opera and the interlude between the first and second scenes of the second act, in
Rome the preludes and interludes to the individual acts were inserted, and a new
division of the acts was completed.
Die Soldaten is dedicated to the memory of Hans Rosbaud, who, through his
decisive advocacy for composition during its recent, quite checkered past, in the
end paved the way intellectually for the realization of the work. Another supporter I
have to thank is WDR Cologne: in 1963 three scenes from Die Soldaten were
presented in a concert performance of the WDR.

note
1. This quotation is taken from the “Praefatio
Ad Lectorem Electum” of Pound’s The Spirit of
Romance (1910). Zimmermann’s citation
eliminates the sentence “It is B.C., let us say, in
Morocco. The Middle Ages are in Russia” (Ezra
Pound, “Praefatio Ad Lectorem Electum” in The
Spirit of Romance (London: J. M. Dent & Sons,
1910), iv), which in the original stands prior to the
final sentence quoted here. Zimmermann gives
no indication of the omission.

The Future of Opera

Some Thoughts on the Necessary Creation of a New Idea of Opera as

Theater of the Future
It is generally considered to be true that the form of opera known as absolute music
theater first came into being through Alban Berg’s Wozzeck. This is only condition-
ally true. Closer examination reveals that Wagner’s Tristan, which one can justifi-
ably describe as the point of origin for that which much later, branded, as ‘new
music,’ aroused the displeasure of so many–who were certainly not so annoyed by
the aforementioned work [that is, by Tristan]: Wagner, especially in Tristan, clearly
used forms of absolute music to such an extent that one can characterize the work,
in terms of its formal features, as a colossally expanded three-movement vocal
symphony.
It became evident no later than Tristan—if one sets aside the operatic creations of
Mozart, which occupy an exceptional place in the history of opera, comparable to no
 auditions 145

other and never again to be attained—that in the degree to which dramatic action
reached an identification with the forms of absolute music, these dramatic events were
only then able to unfold simultaneously to their highest effect and deepest expression.
In this sense, Berg in Wozzeck realized and, in a way, expressly called by name that
which Wagner had already demonstrated: forms of absolute music in opera; though
admittedly with the not insignificant difference that Berg made use of the stylistic and

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compositional materials of the so-called “Viennese School.” To exaggerate: when seen
apart from their singular importance as examples of modern opera, both Wozzeck
and Moses und Aron belong, though in different ways, to that group of works that mark
the final influences of the Wagnerian music drama. Even Verdi, as Luigi Dallapiccola
was able to demonstrate, used forms of absolute music in his works, a fact that de-
serves far more attention, considering the unjust preference for the differences over
the similarities between the two greats of nineteenth-century music theater.
Now when I speak of Strauss, it is less for his importance among the successors
to Wagner than because of one work that sidesteps this line of succession in note-
worthy ways with regard to its form: I refer to Ariadne auf Naxos.
In this work, Strauss (or should one say: Hugo von Hofmannsthal?) in certain
ways anticipated for opera that which would later be referred to in literature as
“theater of the absurd,” and which through Jarry’s Ubu Roi found such a phenome-
nal forerunner. The robustness with which Strauss knew to eliminate all that
flowed from his typical stylistic realm allowed for the idea, at the time quite bold, of
the simultaneous use of completely unrelated genres of opera to come into maturi-
ty, but which, excepting the “prologue,” did not threaten the possible consequence
of absolute and mutual loss of identity at this moment of fusion.
It is curious that, with this work, Strauss provided one of the most remarkable
opportunities to depart from the world of the Wagnerian music drama: an opportu-
nity, however, that apparently did not lead to further and productive considerations
of form.
From a completely different angle a new idea of form developed, once again a
so-called “hybrid form”: here I am thinking of Debussy’s Le martyre de Saint Sébastien.
It could be considered one of the greatest tragedies in the history of music theater that
because of a conservative disposition toward the contemporary on the part of the li-
brettist D’Annunzio,1 the possibility of a new form of absolute music was lost: the
work remained an anomaly, at least initially. It remains astounding that Debussy’s
genius did not deem the aforementioned possibility, an even more decisive turn away
from Wagner than in Pelléas et Mélisande, worthy of further pursuit. Although Ariadne
and Le martyre remained aberrations, the emergence from the narrow realm of opera,
even of music theater, is significant; we will see later to what end.
If one remembers that opera was first created with the sole purpose of reviving
antique tragedy, at least to the degree that it was then understood, it must
be remarked that this most singular invention distanced itself very quickly and very
146 zimmermann

broadly from its starting point. Although we still do not know to what end antique
tragedy was performed, we are at least certain that it formed a cooperation of archi-
tecture, poetry, music, dance, and gesture, and that above all else it was, in its origi-
nal, wide-reaching foundation, of religious origin and religious nature. Attic
tragedy, with which we are here concerned, was a ceremony in honor of the god
Dionysus: that is significant. If one were to search for an approximate analogy for

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Greek tragedy in the modern era, there can be no doubt that as regards form and
significance, one must mention the autos sacramentales of Pedro Calderón de la
Barca, which, as we know, were likewise fundamental and comprehensive compo-
nents of a religious ceremony: in this case, the ceremony of the Eucharist in the
feast of Corpus Christi. Here, too, the cooperation between different forms of repre-
sentation is striking: poetry, music, dance, gesture, and space.
(If I here convey some expression of my regret that the impact of Calderón has
dwindled to such a distressing extent in our time, then I hope not to inappropriately
convey along with it the Rhenish Catholicism with which I am intimate—and in
not accepting the, if anything, still more enormous phenomenon of Shakespeare as
an explanation of the enormous fascination for Calderón, then I hope to indicate
sufficiently the effort I believe worthy of an engagement with Calderón’s work.)
One can say without exaggeration that, with respect to the origin of opera, the
musico-dramatic works of Mozart belong to the most exciting chapter of human in-
tellectual history. If one holds the Divina commedia of Dante Alighieri as the pinna-
cle of all literary developments, one must celebrate the trios of Le nozze di Figaro,
Don Giovanni, and Die Zauberflöte as the consummate commedia umana: a develop-
ment of no small importance. What is formulated here as the highest and purest
musical idea can be defined only through the musico-dramatic manifestation of
these three works themselves. Thus, two hundred years after the invention of opera
as dramma per musica, the ideal of this genre was reached in form and design so de-
finitively that, from this moment, no further development of the form would seem
possible or even conceivable; it is not to be surpassed.
This is not the place to address that which followed Mozart: theater, exclusively or
nonexclusively, with song (represented at its purest by Italian opera), national opera
(receiving its strongest accents from Musorgsky and Janáček, among others), grand
opera (represented primarily by French opera), and the many forms of opera produc-
tion that were in essence variations of theater, exclusively or nonexclusively, with
song. If one recalls, it was the genius of Wagner and Verdi that introduced those im-
pulses (which have already been to some degree discussed) to music drama and who,
despite their differing origins, ultimately led opera more or less in the same direc-
tion: toward the unification of the dramatic with the forms of absolute music.
The decisive step away from “opera,” however, was reserved for the Wagnerian
Gesamtkunstwerk, and it must be considered significant that, as I see it, Wagner
sought (albeit somewhat circuitously) to usurp the religious element of opera’s
 auditions 147

origins in Attic tragedy through the incorporation of the mythic, and in fact, without
this fundamental, dimensional depth, the influence of Wagner’s work may never
have been fully explained or even achieved. Were not the fates of the gods and heroes
that he presented comparable to the fate of the antique gods and heroes? Tales of suf-
fering, even Passions, mythical correlatives of being [Seinsentsprechungen], which
wholly transcended that which had been and remained mere mythical decoration,

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the cultural fruits of repeated attempts at an understanding of antiquity that re-
mained, however, mere peripheral engagement. But with the term Gesamtkunstwerk,
beyond its many possibilities of interpretation and misunderstanding, did not an
idea come into being that sought to bring music theater2 beyond that which directly
concerns music?
It must be taken as more than a mere pretension of the Master of Bayreuth
that he understood himself first as a poet and only thereafter as a composer, and
that he demanded—and created—his own opera house: Festspielhaus. In my
opinion, this indicates a conception of theater as an all-encompassing institution,
an idea whose significance is not to be overlooked.
What conclusions can then be drawn from the above in the face of a new form
of operatic composition, an opera of today? What does it demand?
The answer can be given in one sentence: opera as total theater!
The peculiar situation in which our present-day theater finds itself, particularly
in Germany, entails that what is required by the present must be discussed as
something only the future can bring. And if then opera is discussed, one must
think of an opera, or rather of a theater, in which a concentration of all theatrical
media work toward the collective goal of communication at a site tailored specifi-
cally for this collaboration. In other words: architecture, sculpture, painting, music
theater, spoken theater, ballet, film, amplification, television, tape and sound engi-
neering, electronic music, musique concrète, circus, musicals, and all forms of physi-
cal theater, coalescing in the creation of the phenomenon of pluralistic opera. What
are the ramifications of this phenomenon?
If the creation of a pluralistic opera is to be attemped in this way, it seems to me
that the conditions for this endeavor are especially favorable precisely now. The
wealth of research that has as of late been carried out in such breadth within the
musical and theatrical fields has produced material of such a remarkable nature
and variety that the thinking and planning spirit of the composer, especially his
fantasy, need “only” avail itself of this resource. What powerful steps! The direction
in which these steps must be taken (especially now, after Die Soldaten) has been so
clearly demonstrated that there should no longer be any doubt.
Strangely, however, it seems that what the contemporary individual imagines
“modern” opera to be—a conception that seems quite blurry, as it until now had
not been formulated—is moving in a completely different direction, and so it is
not surprising that the echo which resounds from this direction remains an echo.
148 zimmermann

The entirely lavish clamor in certain circles of the avant-garde, who invoke this
completely worn-out term to elevate the “new” beyond any sensible usage, has
managed, it seems to me, to cloud our view of what now most urgently needs to
be accomplished: finally, the concentration and intellectual coordination of new,
recent creations. As important as facilitating new technical material and research
toward the discovery of such materials is for the development of a new style, its de-

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velopment cannot be achieved by these efforts alone. (We must once and for all
abandon what can only be called the patent office mentality, which has over time
produced a stylistic hypochondria beyond any true sensibility and resulting certain-
ly from the abuse of these speedily patented quack remedies: abandoning these
methods is essential.) An important task will of course be the coordination of the
various artistic genres in the creation of new opera. There, above all, lie problems to
be solved.
In Die Soldaten I attempted to take decisive steps toward this end, and, if the
reader might recall, in various scenes of the opera speaking, singing, screaming,
whispering, jazz, Gregorian chant, dance, film, and the gambit of modern “technical
theater” that today lies happily at our disposal have been placed in the service of the
idea of the pluralistic form of music theater. The question of the hierarchy among the
individual artistic genres within a com-position [sic]3 in the new form is a question of
the strength of the composer’s form-shaping abilities: in the integration of these
seemingly quite disparate media, which, despite their differences, converge under
the element of time, the most fundamental category of all experience.
Another question, meanwhile, concerns the hierarchy of the individual genres
of theater in realizing the new form of the pluralistic opera. In banal terms, how is
it possible to bring everything under one roof? In my opinion, there are two possi-
ble solutions: first, the introduction of a person of comprehensive abilities and a
similarly comprehensive intellectual responsibility for the work and its production,
an artistic director in the truest sense of the word—and second, the establishment
of an equally balanced team of experts responsible for their respective artistic
genres, subordinate to the necessary demands of the particular work and exercising
“direction” with the collective goal of doing the work justice.
Now, as regards the performers themselves, an educational institution would
need to be created that would provide foundational training in the required subjects
through the further developments of specialization, and without which the highly
complex challenges of new opera cannot be solved. (For example, in addition to
pure vocal experts, there would also need to be experts available who could, in addi-
tion to singing and speaking, dance and be able to execute any form of acrobatic
movement; and in addition to the pure speech experts, there would need to be
those that could speak, sing, dance, and so forth: in sum, alongside the pure
experts in their respective individual fields, there would also need to be available
those who have combined a standard field with another of their choice.) The
 auditions 149

coffeehouse scene of the second act of Die Soldaten requires from the performers a
variety of tasks of the kind just described. The acrobatics that played such a large
role in commedia dell’arte, Chinese opera, and the Meyerhold Theater (to name
just a few examples) deserve special mention. What comparatively humble tasks are
entrusted in our theaters to the buffi and soubrettes, from whom previously only
the slightest movements were tolerated!

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There can be no doubt that because of the inordinate prominence the respective
educational institutions of the performing arts previously placed on the standard
repertory, precious time that could be used to prepare for the demands of the new
is lost. No one will deny that a budding conductor, rather than be let go by a theater,
must master a few works of the standard operatic literature; but it is a truly horrible
irony that the first task for which the young apprentice will wave his arms, in the
case that one presses a baton into his hand, will, it is guaranteed, require of him an
interpretation of a modern ballet score (to give one example)—something for
which he is simply not prepared. And the young singer fares barely any differently:
parts within productions of new operatic works are trusted first to him rather than
the star, who, constantly on the road as he is, does not have the time to devote
himself to the production of a new work, not to mention the fact that the demands
placed on him as the star of “festival performances” are so exorbitantly high that he is
literally forced into a completely one-sided “high-performance sport.” Fortunately,
and under the happy arrangement of the fates, these circumstances in many cases
actually came to benefit new operatic works, as the young singer, unencumbered by
the soaring interpretive demands of the canonic repertory, could give his all to a work
that placed every thinkable interpretive possibility in his hands. (Not that there
should be anything said against those overbred productions that strive to be counted
as one of the “cherished moments” of operatic production and which—with all due
respect—are boring: productions of Mozart operas, for example, which least deserve
to be placed behind glass in a museum’s display case.)
To stay for the moment with our chosen example of Mozart productions, one
will also experience at our theaters a disproportionate number of rehearsals sched-
uled for the aforementioned production in comparison to those afforded a produc-
tion of a work of new music, despite the fact that the work in question has been
performed thousands of times and whose technical difficulties should therefore at
least still lie in the fingertips.
The solution to all these questions can lie only in a system that delegates
particular tasks to particular theaters: here a house that performs exclusively Italian
operas, there one that only performs early operas on period instruments, another
that devotes itself solely to “grand opera,” and so forth.
A theater that turns toward the pluralistic opera must necessarily be structured
in a way that excludes the standard repertoire and subscription system, which is not
to say that this kind of theater, whose architectural design is yet to be discussed,
150 zimmermann

would not be in a position to and should not produce model performances of stan-
dard works of the operatic canon.
And now, how ought a new theater of the kind described be architecturally
designed, what ought to be available? Answer: the fully mobile, freely available
architectural space! The new theater must be a structure of large capacity, modified
in diverse ways; a theater-city of complex, many-layered construction; of hierarchical

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conception in the entirety of its construction; internationalized, with its own legisla-
tive authority; a university with sites for research, instruction, and practical applica-
tion; with studios for film, television, and electronics—the new theater must, above
all, be a technical theater: a theater that should be as well-equipped as a spaceship,
a spaceship of the mind; in sum, an immense formation that can lend its character
to an entire cityscape; as a document of an intellectual, cultural freedom, which un-
derstands theater as the most fundamental place of encounter, in the broadest
sense of the term. In practice there must be made available, to name only a few
aspects, multiply tiered stages (if necessary, with the audience in a round or spheri-
cal seating arrangement), upon which it would be possible to perform simultane-
ously or successively, as required; these stages should be kept just as mobile as the
audience, or groups of the audience: changes of position by raising or lowering the
interlocutors—stage, and audience—drawing the attention toward a dramatic action
or turning away from another, in each case according to the directions of the piece
itself; exchange or comingling of events on stage and on film (the former develop-
ing from the latter or vice versa, or both simultaneously, etc.); the exchange of dra-
matic and orchestral action by raising the orchestra pit: the orchestra becomes the
stage for the instrumental theater, as required by pluralistic opera; the construction
of seats that tilt, rotate, and recline as fixed immobile-mobile “cardinal” points for
the viewer, so that he may with this flexibility follow the manifold events encircling
him: capable of communication in all directions.
The requirement of absolute mobility will determine and change the theater’s
face (in the most literal sense of the word) based on the selection of current reper-
toire, necessarily performed “en suite”: numerous relationships between the external
and internal structure of the theater, made to a certain extent architecturally visible,
suggest an ever-shifting progression in the theatrical process; from the outside it is
already possible to see that a new piece is playing or is in preparation: the technical
properties of the house ought to be designed so that transitions from one to another
possess a sense of organic growth (expansion or contraction).
The landscape of Cologne, with its defining architectural accents of sacred struc-
tures, bridges, and skyscrapers on the left bank of the Rhine and the commanding
industrial landscape of the right, would require a theater of immense structural ca-
pacity integrated centrally within the city, a far-reaching architectural project that
would embrace the Rhine as a “cantus firmus” within a complex polyphonic “vocal
framework”: theater as an international commonwealth of the mind, architectural,
 auditions 151

aesthetic, inflected by its surrounding landscape according to its topographical con-

ditions in a most comprehensive fashion.
The unfortunate position discussed earlier—that the needs of the present will
first be realized in the future—carries with it the fact that all that seems a utopian
dream is far less utopian than it appears: a development that moves inescapably
toward the total theater; an opera that, like Die Soldaten, demands such a theater; con-

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crete visions of young architects who are open to the suggestions of the composer
and who reciprocate with their own, as occurred with the architect P. J. Hölzinger4
during my second residency at the “Villa Massimo” in Rome—and I had thought
that it would be disastrous for composers, architects, and, above all, the theater com-
munity to collectively develop a new idea of theater—yet such a collective framework
places these ideas into practice.
Translations by Elaine R. Fitz Gibbon, with Emily Richmond Pollock

notes
Elaine Fitz Gibbon is a first-year graduate
student in German studies at Princeton University
currently pursuing research and furthering her
studies at the University of Heidelberg with the
support of a fellowship from the German
Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). She is
particularly interested in opera and vocal music of
the 20th and 21st centuries, in addition to
German intellectual and literary traditions of the
modern period.
Emily Richmond Pollock is the Class of 1947
Career Development Professor as an Assistant
Professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The translators would like to thank Bettina
Zimmermann, the daughter of the composer, who
has generously granted her permission for these
texts to be translated and printed.
1. Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938). His
only collaboration with Debussy was the 1911
five-act mystery play Le martyre de Saint
Sébastien.
2. Here Zimmermann uses the term
“musikalisches Theater” in reference to a
generalized form of theater involving music,
as distinct from his particular conception of
“Musiktheater,” in this text translated as “music
theater.” The translator wished to avoid the possible
confusion in translating this phrase as “musical
theater,” even though the distinction between the
two terms is thus not conveyed in English.
3. Zimmermann writes “Kom-position,”
emphasizing the Latin root of Komposition’s root
verb, komponieren: “Entlehnt aus 1. compōnere
zusammenstellen zu 1. pōnere ( pōsitum) setzen,
stellen, legen und 1. con-. Das Verb aus 1. pō- ab,
weg und 1. sinere (situm) niederlassen, niederlegen.
Nomen agentis: Komponist; Abstraktum:
Komposition.” Etymologisches Wörterbuch der
deutschen Sprache / Kluge, rev. ed., comp. Elmar
Seebold (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002) 24th
ed., s.v. “komponieren.” The English equivalent,
“composition,” stems from the same Latin root:
“Composition, n. Etymology: <French
composition, <Latin compositiōn-em, noun of
action <compōnére. I. As an action. 1. The action
of putting together or combining; the fact of
being put together or combined; combination
(of things as parts or elements of a whole).”
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “composition,”
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/37795?
redirectedFrom = composition& (accessed
May 22, 2014).
4. Johannes Peter Hölzinger, b. 1936.