by Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi

‘Die Soldaten’ debuted in the 60s in Cologne and has never been represented at Teatro alla Scala before. Saturday 17th January is the first time the opera by Bernd Alois Zimmermann was represented, with conductor Ingo Metzmacher and the staging by Alvis Hermanis.

The German four-act opera is based on Jacob Lenz’s 35 scenes he published in 1776, that arrived on stage only in 1863. Military life is used as a metaphor of human existence: men are soldiers condemned to war.

The ambitious opera has 25 solo performers, an orchestra of 112 elements, of which 15 are percussionists and 4 of these play from 2 balconies. The music is enticing and diversified, as jazz intertwines with opera to portray the state of confusion of the characters and the accumulation of catastrophic parallel stories. Lewd images are projected on stage as horses stroll in the background: Hermanis’ mise en scene adopts the scenery of the Felsenreteschule, the former riding school in Austria transformed into a theatre, venue of the Salzburg Festival, that has co-produced the representation at la Scala.

In the opera Marie (Laura Aikin) and her sister Charlotte (Okka von der Damerau) have just moved to Lille with their father Wesener (Alfred Muff), a fancy goods merchant. Marie is engaged to Stolzius (Thomas E. Bauer), a draper. Baron Desportes (Daniel Brenna), an aristocratic young French army officer, makes advances to the young bourgeois girl, and succeeds in winning her affections. Wesener himself raises his daughter’s hopes of making a socially advantageous marriage; in spite of this, she suffers from disturbing premonitions of her eventual fate. Desportes’ officer friends invite Stolzius, who supplies the regiment with cloth, to join them at a coffee house, where they make cruel and obscene insinuations about Marie’s relationship with Desportes. Stolzius writes Marie a letter conveying his disappointment in her, which in turn distresses Marie, who consequently gives in to Desportes’ advances. In the meantime, the officers amuse themselves as officers do. Eisenhardt (Boaz Daniel), the field chaplain, and Captain Pirzel (Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke), whom the stupefying mindlessness of military service has turned distinctly eccentric, and who is the butt of his comrade’s scorn, try in vain to regulate the unscrupulousness, corruption and unbridled pleasure-seeking that prevails in the regiment. When Desportes grows tired of Marie, he tries to palm her off on his comrades. Stolzius joins the regiment in an attempt to keep an eye on Marie. He becomes the batman of Mary (Morgan Moody), a friend of Desportes’. Mistreated and beaten down, he can only watch as little by little Marie becomes, in his mother’s indignant words, ever more like a “soldier’s whore”. When the son of the Countess de la Roche (Gabriela Beňaćková) is the next to fall in love with Marie, the Countess takes the girl into her home, both to protect her from the officers’ advances and to prevent her son from making any foolish mistakes. Marie, though, keeps trying to contact Desportes, who finally gets rid of her by luring her to his supposed whereabouts, where she is raped by his gamekeeper. Dishonoured and broken, she is forced onto the streets. Her father, her family and the Countess search far her in vain. Stolzius avenges his lost fiancée by poisoning first Desportes and then himself. – One day, a streetwalker begs Wesener for money. Wesener fails to recognise that she is his own daughter.

The quote that has now defined Laura Aikin truly pertains to her performance of Marie: “she wields the colours of her voice like a vocal Renoir.” Her range of over three octaves and her stage presence overwhelm as she epitomises the Sturm und Drang of her character. Incredibly stunning are the performances by Gabriela Beňaćková, who portrays a motherly ironic Countess de la Roche, and Okka von der Damerau, as the sceptical sibling who scorns her sister’s love for Stolzius. The male singers – Alfred Muff, Thomas E. Bauer, Daniel Brenna, Boaz Daniel, Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke, Morgan Moody – brilliantly convey the despicable masculinity of Zimmermann, through outstanding vocal executions.

‘Die Soldaten’ is a captivatingly distressing experience, tears and tortures leave a weight upon wandering thoughts, at the tyranny of pleasure and pain. Creations of the mind materialise the dread of vanished shadows. Time and space become of secondary importance, as the audience gets absorbed in the realm of wild reality. The representation of Zimmermann’s masterpiece at Teatro alla Scala, attests how the most meaningful operas of the second half of the 1900s is a a total work of art.

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