The Soldier's Tale

A unique collaboration led last year to one of the great successes of the Salzburger Festspiele. The famous Salzburger Marionettentheater asked artist Georg Baselitz, the éminence grise of modern German expressionism who passed away in April of this year, to design the puppets and the set for a new performance of L’Histoire du Soldat by Igor Stravinsky. The internationally renowned violinist Isabelle Faust and some of her musical friends took care of the music. A golden move! That was evident from the reactions of both the audience and the international press. Stravinsky’s music theater work for a small ensemble was born out of necessity. The composer lived in Switzerland during the Eerste Wereldoorlog and needed a project with a small cast that could easily travel. The choice fell on a Russian fairy tale about a soldier who makes a Faustian deal with the devil and trades his violin for a magic book in which the future is revealed. When the devil is involved, things rarely end well. That initially also applied to Stravinsky's venture, because the tour was interrupted by the Spanish flu. But L’Histoire did go down in both theater and music history as a milestone of modernism.