Of Soldiers and Puppets

© Martin Müller

With sets and costumes by Georg Baselitz and in cooperation with the Salzburg Marionette Theatre, one of the key works of musical modernism will be performed on a very special stage in Salzburg in the summer of 2025: L’Histoire du soldat – a “stage fairy-tale” which is to be read, acted and danced, according to its subtitle. At the end of World War I, Igor Stravinsky created this innovative stage work together with the poet Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, the painter René Auberjonois and the conductor Ernest Ansermet.

Because of the war and resulting circumstances in 1918, Stravinsky chose a sparse yet systematic cast – one high and one low representative of each instrument group: violin and double bass, clarinet and bassoon, flugelhorn and trombone, plus percussion. With its striking and energetic music, the story about a soldier who has deserted the army and enters into an unholy pact with the devil clearly evokes present times – in 1918 as today.

Matthias Bundschuh returns to the Marionette Theatre as a director; the actor Dominique Horwitz appears as the narrator. In designing the puppets for the Salzburg production, Georg Baselitz chose a combination of strong colours: “I limited myself to a few colours,” he said in an interview, “and these colours alone define the character.”

First published in the Festival insert of Salzburger Nachrichten