Word: zimmermann
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...Zimmermann 's Die Soldaten writes fine to a stark tradition...
...occasionally a work comes along that sums up everything-right or wrong-about a given period so completely that nothing can come after it: an unequivocal double bar, a decisive fine. Such a piece is the late German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann's sprawling, eclectic but ultimately unsuccessful serialist opera Die Soldaten (The Soldiers). First performed in Cologne in 1965, the work was given its American premiere last week by Sarah Caldwell's Opera Company of Boston. With it, an experimental tradition begun by Schoenberg, continued by Alban Berg and refined by avant-gardists of Germany...
...Soldaten was conceived in 1958 as a gigantic, multimedia opera designed for Zimmermann's vision of a "theater of the future." The composer projected a vast structure containing twelve stages; all the stages would simultaneously present action set in the past, present or future, thus abolishing the traditional dramatic unities of time and space. But officials of the Cologne Opera, which had commissioned the piece, convinced Zimmermann that his idea was unperformable, so he scaled it down to the proportions of a conventional opera house-though he retained a split-level stage and the use of film...
...then British Ambassador, was tricked into writing a letter stating that in the election of 1888 England favored the Democrats. There was the famous (and forged) Zinoviev letter, supposedly a directive from Moscow to the British Communist Party, that toppled the government of Ramsay Mac Donald. There was the Zimmermann telegram that pushed the U.S. into the first World War, and the letter General Douglas MacArthur sent Congressman Joe Martin from Korea indirectly attacking the Truman Administration, after which Truman directly attacked the general, and fired him. Truman of course wrote a splendid impulsive letter to Paul Hume, the Washington...
...brilliant historian once described the American participation in a controversial war: "In the lives of the American people," she wrote, "it was the end of innocence." The writer is Barbara Tuchman, the book The Zimmermann Telegram, and the event described, the American entry into World War I. The U.S., it would appear, is capable of losing and recovering its innocence not once, but over and over again...