Title: Die Soldaten
Content: Bernhard Kontarsky, conductor: Nancy Shade, Mark Munkittrick, Milagro Vargas, Grace Hoffman, Michael Ebbecke, Elsie Maurer, William Cochran, Alois Treml, Gregor Brodocz, Guy Renard, Karl-Friedrich Dürr, Klaus Hirte, Raymond Wolansky, Ursula Koszut, Jerrold van der Schaaf, Johannes Eidloth, Robert Wörle, Helmut Holzapfel; Staatsoper Stuttgart Chorus, Staatsorchester Stuttgart; Harry Kupfer, director. CD: 1988–1989 (Teldec), WARNER classics 2011, DVD: 1989 (Arthaus). ; Steven Sloane, conductor; Claudia Barainsky, Claudio Otelli, Frode Olsen, Katharina Peetz, Hanna Schwarz, Kathryn Harries, Andreas Becker, Peter Hoare, Robert Wörle, Jochen Schmeckenbecher, Adrian Clarke, Robert Bork, Michael Smallwood, Christopher Lemmings, Bernhard Berchtold, Helen Field, Adrian Thompson; Bochumer Symphoniker; David Pountney, director; Robert Innes 
Title: Die Soldaten
Content:  Center Festival. Die Soldaten was first performed at the Salzburg Festival on 20 August 2012, with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Ingo Metzmacher. A year later it was staged by Calixto Bieito at Zürich Opera; Marc Albrecht conducted, with Susanne Elmark as Marie and Peter Hoare reprised the role of Desportes he had sung in Bochum, Tokyo and New York. The same production went to the Komische Oper in Berlin in 2014, always with Susanne Elmark in the role of Marie, Gabriel Feltz conducted. On 25 May 2014 the opera returned to the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in an staging conducted by Kirill Petrenko with Barbara Hannigan in the role of Marie. This was streamed 
Title: Die Soldaten
Content:  Die Soldaten (The Soldiers) is a four-act opera in German by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, based on the 1776 play by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. In a letter accompanying his newly printed play (23 July 1776, aged 24) that he sent to his best friend, the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, Lenz described himself as "an enigma to even his most precious friends", while saying of the play, "Here, into your holy hands, the piece which carries half of my existence. [The ideas it contains are] true and will remain so, even if centuries may walk contemptuously across my skull". Zimmermann wrote and revised his opera in phases between 1957 and 1964; it was premiered in 1965 and dedicated to Hans Rosbaud. Zimmermann himself faithfully adapted the play into the libretto, the only changes to the text being repeats and small cuts. It is the composer's only completed opera and is considered an important work of the second half of the 20th century.
Title: Die Soldaten
Content:  Die Soldaten came about as a result of a commission from the Cologne Opera, and Zimmermann began the work in 1957. His original idea was to present the opera on twelve stages surrounding the audience, who would be seated on swiveling chairs. Upon reviewing an early scored version of this idea, however, the Cologne officials, including Wolfgang Sawallisch, advised Zimmermann that it would be impossible to realize ("unaufführbar"). In 1963 Zimmermann completed a Vokal-Sinfonie using music for the opera consistent with the original idea, to demonstrate in concert that the music could in fact be played. He did not, however, go on to complete a version of the opera consistent with the original idea, as presented in draft form to Sawallisch and the other officials, according to his widow. Instead, from 1963 to 1964, during a study visit to the Villa Massimo in Rome, Zimmermann revised his composition into the version we know today in order to get it performed. The premiere followed the next year.
Title: Die Soldaten
Content:  by English National Opera with Jon Garrison as Desportes. The U.S. premiere was on 7 February 1982 by the Opera Company of Boston led by Sarah Caldwell with Phyllis Hunter as Marie, Beverly Morgan as her sister Charlotte, William Cochran as Desportes, and Joaquin Romaguera as Captain Pirzel. Die Soldaten arrived in New York in 1991 in a production by New York City Opera under Christopher Keene's baton. In 1988 and 1989 Bernhard Kontarsky conducted Stuttgart performances and recording sessions of the complete opera, with Nancy Shade as Marie. These resulted in a Teldec CD set and, much later, an Arthaus DVD. Dresden's Semperoper gave the opera for the first time in 1995 in a celebrated 
Title: Soldaten (Gurlitt)
Content:  Soldaten is a 1930 opera in 3 acts by Manfred Gurlitt after the play of Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. It was premiered 9 November 1930, Düsseldorf, but later overshadowed by Bernd Alois Zimmermann's setting of Die Soldaten (1965).
Title: Die Soldaten
Content:  The prelude is written to sound as mechanical as possible, with dissonant combinations of instruments colliding against each other rhythmically to portray the mechanised movements of the soldiers on stage. As with Alban Berg's operas Wozzeck and Lulu, the individual scenes are built on strict musical forms; strophes, chaconnes, ricercare, toccatas, etc. Musically, the work makes extensive use of twelve-tone technique, and expresses debts to Berg's Wozzeck, such as in the shared name of the principal female role (Marie) and in the number of scenes (15). Just as Zimmermann allows temporal levels to flow into one another, he also makes use of musical styles from several periods. Jazz rhythms (as in the coffee house scene), J. S. Bach chorales (from the St Matthew Passion), a folksong and the Dies irae plainchant sequence are juxtaposed and assembled in a way which creates a score which seethes with tension.
Title: Die Soldaten
Content:  WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk) broadcast scenes from Die Soldaten in 1963, but the first staged performance, with Cologne Opera forces conducted by Michael Gielen, did not take place until 15 February 1965, after Zimmermann completed revisions to the score in 1964. WDR documented this with a recording, made in sessions on 21 and 22 February and 2 and 3 March in its main studio. In 1969 Gielen also conducted the successful and widely reviewed Bavarian State Opera premiere run in Munich. The first British performance came during the 1972 Edinburgh Festival, when the Deutsche Oper am Rhein company took a 1971 Düsseldorf production to the King's Theatre. The opera did not reach London until November 1996, in a 
Title: The Soldiers (play)
Content:  The Soldiers (German: Die Soldaten) is a 1776 tragedy by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz written from his own experiences during his service under Friedrich Graf Kleist von Nollendorf. It was influential on Georg Büchner in his attempt to write the drama Woyzeck (left incomplete 1837), although that is set at a lower social stratum. The play is the source of two operas: Soldaten by Manfred Gurlitt (1930) and Die Soldaten by Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1965).
Title: Die Soldaten
Content:  very great demands on any opera company. In addition to the sixteen singing and ten speaking roles, it requires a one hundred-piece orchestra involving many unusual instruments and pieces of percussion. With its open action, a large number of scenes which at times overlap one another or run simultaneously (the second scene of act 2, for example, or all of act 4), its multimedia structure incorporating film screens, projectors, tape recordings and loudspeakers, in addition to the sound effects of marching, engines and screams, Die Soldaten –an opera composed using the strict rules of twelve-tone music and presenting a high degree of complexity despite its careful design for the stage– is 

Question: Who was the composer of Die Soldaten?
Answer: Bernd Alois Zimmermann.