AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

160 saturday evening AMS Philadelphia 2009
whose father and brother had died in the concentration camps, mocked Death with the sarcasm
of one who had also looked the Grim Reaper in the face. Despite the obvious differences
in style and all external factors, there is an astonishing number of similarities between the two
operas that I will attempt to explain by tracing the intellectual histories of the two librettos
and invoking the theory of the absurd.
BERND ALOIS ZIMMERMANN’S SoLdAteN, TEMPORAL
PLURALISM, AND THE POLITICS OF RESISTANCE:
RE-VOICING LENZ, BüCHNER, BERG
Christopher Alan Williams
Bowling Green State University
When Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s opera die Soldaten premiered in February, 1965, it was
hailed as a masterpiece of postwar modernism, and as an ideal distillation of the composer’s
style, technique, and ideals, the most vivid embodiment of what he termed “musikalische
Pluralismus.” But problems were also cited: the extraordinary difficulties it presented
for performers, for audiences through its relentless loudness and morbid despair, and, for
some American commentators, its uncomfortable fusion of serialism with “post-modern”
evocations of jazz and multi-media collage techniques. From the standpoint of a German
avant-garde then dominated by the pronouncements of Karlheinz Stockhausen and his circle
(for American academics the most influential mouthpiece for European developments), a
further problem resided in the work’s use of historical forms and “conventional” dramaturgy,
which suggested a moribund dependence on tradition. Despite these many obstacles, the
opera has benefited from repeated revival on both sides of the Atlantic, in at least five major
productions, most recently in 2008, more than any other postwar opera not firmly rooted in
the tonal tradition.
Somewhat buried in debates about its genesis, contemporary significance, and reception
is the fact that the work’s strong ties to its source text and musical models invoke a tradition
of anti-militarist theater rooted in its source play. An experiment in presenting simultaneous
action unfolding in different physical spaces, transgressive to the point of incurring a bitter
and devastating reaction from Goethe, Jakob Michael Reinhard Lenz’s 1776 die Soldaten in
turn served as a source for Büchner’s fragmentary Woyzeck, itself the source of Alban Berg’s
Wozzeck, the most direct musical model for Zimmermann’s conception. This paper traces a
path of transformation from Lenz to Büchner to Berg to Zimmermann, focusing on an episode
that Zimmermann apparently modeled on act 1, scene 1 of Wozzeck. By strengthening
the connection between his “pluralistic” opera and historical models exploring similar themes
and the temporal disunity of its source play, Zimmermann extends his definition of pluralism
from style into the temporal dimension, and in so doing created an artifact embodying
resistance not only to militarism and the arc of German history from the “humanistic” age of
Goethe and Schiller to the present, but to a facile iconoclasm that had become the dominant
voice in the German musical avant-garde.