Serialism Is Over! Someone Call Milton Babbitt!

Daniel J. Wakin of the New York Times recently wrote about B. A. (that’s Bernd Alois) Zimmerman’s epic, impossible-to-stage anti-war opera “Die Soldaten”. I have no issues with Mr. Wakin’s writing. My issue is with the stage director, who…well, let’s see.

First, though, the production sounds awesome. The audience is moved around an empty armory on bleachers on rails! So freaking cool. And, well…let’s just read on.

The Brutality of War, on a Big Stage

A FOREST of aluminum greets a visitor to the normally cavernous drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory. The thicket of metal forms the backside of what is essentially a giant, horseshoe-shaped set of bleachers filling much of the space.

The structure looks as fixed as a rock. It is not. Underneath are 12 railroad tracks, on which the structure and its nearly 1,000 seats glide back and forth, straddling a ribbon of stage running the length of the hall.

That is awesome.

It is on this stage that a 40-member cast of singers, dancers and actors will play out “Die Soldaten,” Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s dark and brutal opera steeped in post-World War II despair, starting on Saturday as part of the Lincoln Center Festival’s opening weekend. The audience periodically travels back and forth, at a top speed of seven and a half inches a second — the rate of a slow creep — as the scenes evolve onstage.

For a month now, technicians have been loading and building the set at the drill hall in one of New York’s most logistically complex opera productions this year. It will also represent a milestone in the armory’s recent transformation into a performance and visual arts space.

How cool is that? Answer: deeply cool.

“Die Soldaten” is considered one of the 20th century’s most difficult operas, both logistically and, for the audience, emotionally, because of its difficult subject matter. The orchestra numbers 110; it also has a separate percussion ensemble, a jazz combo and recorded sounds. The film of war scenes that the score calls for has been discarded as outdated.

I think that the war scenes films being discarded is too bad, since it was the composer’s intent to include them, but the rest of that is all kinds of super-modern/postmodern kinds of fun.

Based on a 1775 play by Jakob Lenz, the opera chronicles the fall of Marie, the daughter of a French merchant, at the hands of soldiers. She is raped and turns to prostitution. For the audience it is a work of total theatrical immersion, in which Zimmermann sought to portray past, present and future action simultaneously.

Sounds like more modern/postmodern kinds of fun. What else?

Zimmermann composed a thoroughly thorny 12-tone score.

Uh-oh. Sounds fascinating to me, but is potentially critical dynamite…

There are overwhelmingly loud passages, but also delicate moments of chamber music, jazzy rhythms and Bach-inflected passages.

Passages passages passages. But still, sounds interesting…

Sometimes three sections of the orchestra play completely different rhythms. In one passage percussionists embedded in the chorus tap out rhythms with spoons on bottles, as jazz dancers sound out a cross-rhythm. The demands on the singers are formidable. One particularly devilish vocal passage will be recorded and played back during the performance, a compromise sanctioned by Zimmermann himself.

Wow. I bet that’s a spectacle to behold, I wish I could see it.

“It’s incredibly challenging from the technical point of view,” said the conductor, Steven Sloane, who will lead the Bochum Symphony Orchestra, of which he is music director. “It’s been billed as unplayable all these years.” Yet each scene is constructed according to traditional musical forms, like rondino and nocturne. There are flashes of Strauss’s “Rosenkavalier” and Berg’s “Wozzeck” and “Lulu.”

Modernist techniques are combined with older forms and influenced by other works, creating an intertextual opera with multiple influences, and, potentially, interpretations. Awesome! Sounds like a graduate student’s Instant Dissertation Topic (TM).

“It is one of the monuments of 20th-century music,” said David Pountney, the stage director. “You can say, ‘I don’t like it,’ but you can’t ignore it.

I have no desire to ignore it! I am jealous of people going to see it! But wait…

It’s the end point of 12-tone music, really.”

Really? “Really”? Because, no.

This opera was written in 1957.

Nineteen Fifty-Seven.

Here, with a really minimal modicum of research, is a list of composers who wrote 12-tone music after 1957.

Wait. First, I will now go compose a 12-tone piece…

…okay, back. It’s short, but I did it. Now for my list:

Louis Andriessen
Hans Erich Apostel
Milton Babbitt
Arthur Berger
Pierre Boulez
Robert Ceely
Luigi Dallapiccola
Ernst Krenek
Joseph Johnson
Bruno Maderna
Donald Martino
Luigi Nono
George Rochberg
Roger Sessions
Nikos Skalkottas
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Stefan Wolpe

So, yeah. Not the end of 12-tone music. You can keep wishing it’s still 1842, but (news flash) it’s not.

The rest of the article is available via the link at the beginning of the post.
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