‘Die Soldaten’ to open opera at New York’s Seventh Regiment Armory

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This article was published 02/12/2007 (6601 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NEW YORK – Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s “Die Soldaten” will be staged at the Seventh Regiment Armory next summer as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, the first of what could be many operas presented at the new arts venue in Manhattan.

The complicated staging by David Pountney, which originated at Germany’s Ruhr Triennale in 2006 and 2007, involves installing railroad tracks so that audience seating can be moved over the long stage during the 15 scenes that take place over four acts.

Juergen Flimm, the Triennale’s artistic director, took notice of the connection between the work’s title and the venue.

“Soldiers in an armoury,” he said last week, chuckling.

Constructed from’77-81, the armoury’s Drill Hill resembles a European train station and is similar to Bochum’s Jahrhunderthalle, where Pountney’s staging of the 12-tone opera first appeared. The armoury will seat about 880 for the opera, said Rebecca Robertson, the president of the Seventh Regiment Armory Conservancy.

Gerard Mortier also intends to use the armoury, hoping to stage Messiaen’s “Saint Francois d’Assise” there during his first season as general manager of the New York City Opera, in 2009-10.

With conductor Steven Sloane leading the Bochum Symphony, “Die Soldaten” requires a 110-piece orchestra with a large percussion section and about 40 singers, actors and dancers.

“The sound is like a big ball. A kugel,” Flimm said.

Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” was to have been performed at the armoury last spring but was moved to Lincoln Center’s Fisher Hall because air conditioning and audience amenities couldn’t be installed in time on a cost-effective basis. Robertson said ducts for air conditioning were now in place.

“Die Soldaten,” which premiered in Cologne in’65, is an antiwar work that includes film, taped music and amplification. Based on a play by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, its U.S. premiere was given by the Opera Company of Boston in’82, and New York City Opera mounted a production nine years later. Nigel Redden, director of the Lincoln Center Festival, saw last summer’s production in Bochum and decided to bring it to New York.