Die Soldaten Opera in four acts by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, text by the composer after the play of the same name by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz

Rarely has an opera from the second half of the 20th century been so unanimously acclaimed as Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten was at the RuhrTriennale last year. David Pountney's new production in the Jahrhunderthalle Bochum with its movable auditorium is indeed the most spectacular implementation of the composer's music-theatrical vision. »How exactly should a new house (...) architecturally be designed, what should be at disposition? The omni-mobile, absolutely disposable architectural room! The new theatre has to be a wide-span arrangement, manifold modulated; (…) altogether a wide-ranged formation that is able to give an entire city landscape its imprint: as a documentation of an intellectual and cultural freedom which understands theatre as the most elementary place of encounter in the broadest sense.«
More than forty years after the Berlin world premiere (1965), Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten took place outside an opera house for its first time,  performed by the Bochum Symphoniker and conducted by Steven Sloane. The special setting Jahrhunderthalle is predestined for a work in which the composer freed itself from the »despicable famous bulla of the three unities« (J.M.R. Lenz) of time, place and action. Zimmermann musically layered various plots on top of each other and side by side by applying three orchestra ensembles and he interdigitated jazz elements with baroque chorales in order to point out his music-dramatical idea of a »sphericity of time«: »The Subsequent is pre-dated and the Previous is back-dated«(Zimmermann). The draft for this master piece was the five-act drama Die Soldaten, written by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz around 1775. Lenz narrates in his play about the destiny of the young Marie Wesener, daughter of a gallantry salesman from Lille, who gets into the world of the soldiers and who ends as a prostitute.

The opera recording of the 2006 seaon is available at the Online-Shop.