"Unquestionably _the_ operatic event in these islands this year" it says in The Guardian. Well, the ENO PR department has been puffing away. And I'm a sucker for the quasi-infantile pleasures of huge orchestral setups with lots of percussion, so I thought I'd better see Die Soldaten. IMO, _the_ operatic event of the year is Peter Sellars' Theodora, probably followed by the revival of the ENO Ariondante. But Die Soldaten might be in with a shout as the non-Handel event. BTW, I have the impression that there's a transatlantic cultural issue here. I suspect that for many US audiences, an operatic event is a production cast with great voices in the most appropriate roles, or roles which present a challenge that the singer meets. Whereas UK and perhaps other European audiences regard the event as a production that delivers an interpretation of the work, and then some, with a cast that sings at least acceptably and engages dramatically. Anyway, here's my review: Die Soldaten by Bernd Alois Zimmerman, based on the play by Lenz Wesener Jan Opalach Marie Lisa Saffer Charlotte Emma Selway Wesener's mother Nuala Williams Stolzius Roberto Salvatori Stolzius' mother Anne Wilkens Colonel Anthony Cunningham Baron Desportes Jon Garrison Pirzel Christopher Gillett Eisenhardt Malcolm Rivers Haudy David Barrell Mary Nicholas Folwell Countess de la Roche Marie Angel Count de la Roche Richard Roberts Countess' servant Greg Winter Conductor: Elgar Howarth Director: David Freeman Die Soldaten is based on an eighteenth century Sturm und Drang play, related generically and also in tone to the Gretchen strand in Faust I, and a partial source for Wozzeck. The core plot is the fall of Marie, the haberdasher's daughter from Lille (and possibly the original Mademoiselle from Armentieres) from hopes of respectable marriage to Stolzius, the draper, via seduction by Desportes, the aristocratic officer and rape by his servant, to prostitution. The main context for the action is the instutional aggression of the army, and its effect on men. The libretto keeps some elements of the play that seem pretty odd today, for example, the debates between the chaplain and the philosophically virtuous Pirzel, and aims for the black comic tone of the original. Zimmerman focusses on the Sturm and Drang itself rather than the themes of the play (class and sex, in the end). He uses massive orchestral, vocal and production resources to create a nearly concrete physical evocation of the force of fate. In this production, the supers included a squad (?six of them, anyway) of soldiers drilling throughout, two naked soldiers bathing, a stripper (allegedly normally employed in a well known West End club) and a topless waitress in the bar, a group of disco dancers and various other specified characterizations. The set consists of a single element, remniscent of a bombed out building in 1945 Berlin (say), but including a fragment of an Ionic pediment. Videos were projected onto the upper walls of the building, and also onto small movable screens. Some of the videos were thematic (soldiers marching, birds fighting in mid-air, newsreels) and some were replays or preplays of the action on or off stage. Small proscenium arches were lowered to frame the action at the start of each of the three main strands in the plot: Marie's attraction to Desportes and subsequent seduction, Stolzius' quest for revenge for the loss of Marie, and Mme de la Roche's attempt to help Marie while keeping her son away from her. The three strands of action conclude simultaneously in a single scene before the final act. Incidentally, the main set is clearly recycled from the 1950s Cosi, though the various levels, doors and windows are hardly used, and the proscenium arches reproduce in triplicate the one in act III of Tosca (used for the shepherd boy and Tosca at the end). The music is, well, 60s avant garde. This production's greatest achievement is to make the music coherent and integrated with the action, which is also quite amazingly lucid. Clearly, special credit must go to the conductor, Elgar Howarth, and also to Lisa Saffer as Marie, for performing music with pretty much no personal qualities at all in a compelling way. I don't know a great deal about the context of Zimmerman's work, but judging from the program notes, I'd say that this production does an excellent job of delivering what he conceived. It depicts an abstract view of institionalized, specifically military, violence, and its destruction of a vulnerable women, without much identifiable malice on the part of individuals. The problem for me, and I believe (ear flapping during the interval and afterwards) for others in the audience is that the violence, particularly violence against women, is detached from any political or moral context. There's not much human sympathy, only conventional anti-militarism of a sort which probably meant a lot in West Germany in the 1960s but means less today. The production uses the contemporary British army, but studiously avoided specific contexts. The reason for this is fairly clear: Northern Ireland evokes important questions well beyond the scope of the drama; and other recent British military activity is generally regarded as humanitarian and benign, as in Bosnia. I didn't have any strong feelings to fill the presented emotional space, and kept reflecting on more important issues that the work didn't confront. In fact, I can't help feeling that the substance of Die Soldaten is covered pretty thoroughly in the Kanonensong from the Dreigroschenoper. (Or with much more sympathy in Christopher Logue's War Music, which I would guess originated in a similar political context to Die Soldaten.) Writing an opera seems like an act of excess on Zimmerman's part, and all the superlative qualities of this faithful production seem to me to be also superfluous to the real issues.