Infernal Opera.('Die Soldaten')(Opera review)

When Mozart placed a loud, dark, bone-chilling chord of D minor in the first bars of "Don Giovanni," he set a new precedent for operatic curtain-raisers: instead of charming his listeners into paying attention, he would stun them into submission, with intimations of the awakening of the dead and the opening of the gates of Hell. Modern scholarship suggests that Mozart may have derived aspects of his famous gesture from none other than Antonio Salieri, that most unfairly abused of composers, whose opera "La Grotta di Trofonio," premiered two years before "Don Giovanni," contains some strikingly similar demonic noises. Ever since, composers have tried to outdo each other with carefully engineered hammer blows of fate. Verdi's "Otello" begins with a rumbling six-note dissonance; Strauss's "Elektra" with a souped-up D-minor detonation; Alban Berg's "Lulu" with a sharply stabbing figure that foreshadows the heroine's fate.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann's 1965 opera "Die Soldaten," the story of a woman's degradation at the hands of a series of heartless soldiers, has a prelude of such stupefying intensity that it stands for the moment as the ne plus ultra. The full orchestra sustains an enormous dissonance spread out over many octaves. Beneath it, the timpani pound out, "in iron rhythm," the note D--perhaps a nod backward to "Don Giovanni." The onslaught returns several times as the prelude unfolds, though it periodically gives way to a frenzy of competing voices: the trumpets tangle in independent rhythms, violins buzz around maniacally in their upper registers, the timpani repeatedly fall out of synch with the principal one-two pulse. The music is at once hyper-organized and deranged, a death machine that leaves chaos in its wake.

The masterstroke of David Pountney's production of "Die Soldaten"--an amazing, alarming spectacle that had its premiere two years ago, in a former steelworks in Bochum, Germany, and travelled last week to the Park Avenue Armory, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival--is to put the audience at the mercy of a physical mechanism that is nearly as formidable as the infernal devices suggested in the score. Before the music started, we were seated in bleachers, which rested on wheels at one end of an array of railroad tracks. When Steven Sloane, the conductor, gave the downbeat, the apparatus began gliding slowly across the vast expanse of the Armory's Drill Hall. Five minutes later, we came to a halt at the far end of the space, more than two hundred feet away. As we moved, we passed the writhing orchestra, which was positioned on risers to the left; it was a bit like taking a hot-air-balloon ride over a volcanic eruption. I imagined Mozart saying, "O.K., you win."

With certain artists, the summoning of apocalyptic visions can seem a calculated move, a swaggering display of power. With Zimmermann, however, there is no question of insincerity. He was born in 1918, grew up amid the insanity of Hitler's Germany, and served in Poland, France, and Russia during the Second World War. In the wake of his wartime experiences, he focussed obsessively on themes of social injustice, reserving his greatest scorn for racism and militarism. The bleakness of his world view was doubtless related to the anguish of his daily life: he was beset by a severe skin condition, debilitating eye problems, and attacks of depression. Friends found him lively company, but despair overwhelmed him in the end; in 1970, at the age of fifty-two, he committed suicide--an act that he had contemplated, according to his diary, as early as 1945.

If Zimmermann found any relief from his agonies, it may have been by transmuting them into music. Most of his works rely on Schoenberg's twelve-tone method of composition, but the system is employed less as a free-standing, abstract language than as a kind of master matrix on which any kind of material can be plotted. Thus, the twelve-note row of his 1954 trumpet concerto, "Nobody Knows de Trouble I See," allows for the incorporation of the African-American spiritual of the same name and, ...