Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Die Soldaten (1965)

Here's this, which is meant to be one of the most significant German operas of the latter half of the twentieth century. There's a highly specific category. It's written more or less using Schoenberg's twelve-tone system, so we'll see how that works for me.

It's based on an eighteenth-century play about a woman driven to prostitution and madness and death. You know, that good ol' stuff. Marie is engaged to Stolzius, from her own, low, social class, but her head is turned by Desportes, a young soldier and noble. He loves her and leaves her, and she's purused by another man, Desportes' friend Major Mary, but that seemingly goes nowhere; Stolzius enters Mary's service in disguise to he can get revenge on Desportes, but not before Desportes sends his gameskeeper to rape Marie (he's a huge misogynist, obviously). Stolzius kills Desportes by poisoning his soup and then dies himself for no particular reason, and Marie goes mad and dies also. And there you have it.

Actually, I have to say, I liked the music here. I don't know whether I'm getting used to it, or whether I just liked how it was used more, but there are some very powerful moments and a cool jazzy dance number. I wasn't sure whether I'd actually like this; I was watching partly out of a sense of obligation (now seriously, what possible "obligation" could you have...?), but in the end, I was swept up in it. Something, one can't help noting, in between Wozzeck and Lulu, but I liked it better than either. This was Zimmermann's only completed opera, which is too bad.

There are two videos of this you can watch, this one from the Salzburg Festival and this one from the Stuttgart Opera. They both got good reviews, but I chose the former just because it was easier and cheaper to come by. And it's a very impressive production: it has this widescreen look to it, where the stage appears to be double the normal length. There are a series of windows in the background, basically, through which various people can be seen doing various things, and onto which are frequently projected old-timey black-and-white pornographic images, which seems highly appropriate for this particular opera. The whole thing is appropriately scuzzy: there's one bit where Marie's lying in bed and we see a bunch of soldiers in the background watching her with their hands in their pants.

And yet, I felt like I also might have been missing something here. Per Zimmermann's plan, there are supposed to be various films projected onto the stage at certain points in the production, and those aren't present here. Also, the conclusion, while shattering enough in its own way, is extremely unlike the description on wikipedia, which sounds super-apocalyptic in a way that this isn't quite. It might genuinely be worth seeing the other version for another take on this.