Conductor François-Xavier Roth on the background to Bernd Alois Zimmermann's monumental opera »Die Soldaten« and the challenges of bringing this piece to the Elbphilharmonie with over 100 participating musicians.

Stream the entire concert 🎥🔴▶️    • Elbphilharmonie LIVE | Bernd Alois Zi...  

// ABOUT THE CONCERT

The world premiere of Zimmermann's »Die Soldaten« in Cologne in 1965 went down in music history as an epoch-making event and made the work one of the most important German-language operas of the second half of the 20th century. However, it was a birth with obstacles. The expense of the huge musical apparatus seemed too great, and the fear of the audience was perhaps also too great. It was only after many revisions and even more rehearsals that »Die Soldaten« could be performed on stage.

Zimmermann's two-hour libretto, based on the 1776 play of the same name by Jakob Lenz, tells of fallen girls and the brutality of war. The German composer, who was born in 1918, used his personal experiences during the Second World War to write this piece. Using an incredible variety of musical and theatrical means, Zimmermann developed an anti-war piece whose cacaphonous, crashing sounds are still shocking today.

According to director Calixto Bieito, the orchestra becomes »a huge, murderous machine that is capable of devouring people and spitting them out again in a changed state.« And this orchestra is the Cologne Gürzenich Orchestra, as it was in 1965.

In collaboration with the Cologne Opera

#newmusic #zimmermann #Elbphilharmonie #avantgarde #opera

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