ALONE IN A CROWD A unique new staging clarifies the myriad strands of action in Die Soldaten.

Photograph: Matthias and Clarchen Baus

Some challenging works of art occasion nods of knowing admiration even among partisans who haven’t experienced them firsthand. In literature there’s Moby Dick, Finnegans Wake and Infinite Jest, tomes more discussed and debated than read; in film, substitute “Un Chien Andalou,” Last Year at Marienbad or Week End. In opera the prize goes to Die Soldaten, a thematically harrowing, technically daunting work by German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann, which arrives here on Friday 5 under the auspices of the Lincoln Center Festival. An expressionist masterpiece conceived in 1957 and based on an 18th-century play by J.M.R. Lenz, the opera distills the horror Zimmermann experienced during World War II into a study of family dysfunction, class conflict, betrayal and degradation.

Zimmermann’s complex musical language, built on the foundations of Berg’s Wozzeck and Lulu, juxtaposes styles ranging from Renaissance music to jazz. “Opera as total theater!” he proclaimed of his intent. “In other words: architecture, sculpture, painting, musical theater, spoken theater, ballet, film, microphone, television, tape and sound techniques, electronic music, concrete music, circus, the musical and all forms of motion theater combined to form the phenomenon of pluralistic opera.” His concept called for 40 vocalists deployed in 12 areas of stage action, each with its own instrumental ensemble. A much-simplified version reached a Cologne stage in 1965, five years before Zimmermann took his own life.

Subsequent productions, including the American premiere by the Opera Company of Boston in 1982 and the first local performances at New York City Opera in 1991, were also forced to compromise Zimmermann’s original intent. Thanks to advances in technology, however, the composer’s prescient vision no longer seems so far-fetched. Last year, noted director David Pountney and stage designer Robert Innes Hopkins created an ingenious new production of Die Soldaten for Germany’s Ruhr Triennale, staged in a gargantuan former power plant. Pountney set the action on a narrow platform more than 260 feet long, and shunted the audience along both sides on railroad tracks. The 110-member Bochum Symphony Orchestra surrounded the seats. This week, that production—with most of the original cast, orchestra and technical team intact—comes to the Park Avenue Armory.

Nigel Redden, executive director of the festival, can barely contain his laughter when asked about the difficulties of mounting the elaborate production. “The better question would be, ‘Was there anything at all that was easy about it?’ ” he says. “There was nothing—nothing—easy about it!” He cites Pountney, Hopkins, Ruhr Triennale artistic director Jürgen Flimm and Park Avenue Armory president Rebecca Robertson for providing invaluable assistance in bringing what he deems a landmark event to New York.

The movable seats, an undeniably impressive gimmick, also serve a very real purpose: focusing attention and guiding viewers through the convoluted work. “This piece has a reputation for being a megalomaniac monster,” Pountney says. “It has a large cast, but actually it’s mostly intimate scenes, and in the big scenes, almost nothing happens.” He asserts that the opera is not about war. “These soldiers are not fighting at all,” he points out. “They’re doing a lot of other things, mainly chasing women.” Instead, Pountney suggests, Zimmermann was conveying his own experience of World War II, through indolent officers and a blanket of suffocating, contradictory sounds. The emphasis of the work—and the key to its universality—is its unbroken chain of dysfunctional relationships. “Everybody can sympathize with that,” the director notes. “The class issue is not really so applicable these days—though soldiers are still pretty prone to behave badly, we seem to read regularly.”

Pountney had to adapt his staging to a space 120 feet shorter than that for which it was conceived, a problem solved by reconfiguring the long strip into a T shape. Still, he professes admiration for the building’s unique atmosphere. “The fact that it was a regimental building gives it a special piquancy,” he says, “especially as I think this was one of those regiments that spent a lot more time flirting than fighting.”

Die Soldaten opens at the Park Avenue Armory Sat 5, with additional performances Mon 7, Wed 9, July 11 and 12.