The opera “Die Soldaten,” written in 1965 by the German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann, is nearly impossible to perform.

With its huge orchestra, its intensely difficult 12-tone score, and a narrative in which past, present, and future overlap — Zimmermann once imagined it being performed on 12 stages to distinguish the work’s times and locales — the piece has intimidated many an artistic director.

Next month, Lincoln Center Festival will present “Die Soldaten” at the Park Avenue Armory, in a production from the Ruhr Triennale in Germany that is, by all accounts, truer to Zimmermann’s intentions than any previous one. It is the festival’s most ambitious undertaking ever and the first opera to be presented at the Armory in its new incarnation as a cultural institution. And it will provide a taste of what’s to come when the Armory hosts other operas, including the production of Olivier Messiaen’s “Saint Francis of Assisi” that Gérard Mortier, the incoming general manager of New York City Opera, plans to do there in the 2009-10 season.

Like Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck,” “Die Soldaten” is a 20th-century opera based on a much earlier play — in the case of “Die Soldaten,” a 1776 play by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. The plot concerns a young woman named Marie, a merchant’s daughter in the French provincial city of Lille. Marie is wooed by military officers and members of the local aristocracy. Imagining that she can advance in society, she submits to them, only to have them shun and mock her. The man who truly loves her, a merchant named Stolzius, disguises himself to become the servant of one of her seducers. In the climax, Stolzius kills his employer, then himself, and Marie becomes a prostitute.

Although its title means “The Soldiers,” “Die Soldaten” is less about war than about “this very strong and very cruel-acting level of society we call ‘the establishment,'” the former director of the RuhrTriennale, Jürgen Flimm, said. “They’re going to destroy somebody because they are annoyed with her,” he said.

Mr. Flimm knew Zimmermann in the early 1960s, when Mr. Flimm was a student in Cologne. Zimmermann, who was drafted into the Wehrmacht during World War II but released due to a severe skin ailment, was a professor of composition at the music university there. The two became friends while Zimmermann was writing “Die Soldaten,” and Mr. Flimm, who already planned to be an opera director, promised Zimmermann that he would direct it one day.

Zimmermann, who suffered from depression, committed suicide in 1970, but Mr. Flimm still wanted to fulfill his promise. Over the years, he said, “Whenever I was asked [by general managers of opera companies], ‘What do you want to direct?’ I said, ‘Die Soldaten.’ And they said, ‘That’s too big, we can’t do that.'”

Finally, when he became director of the RuhrTriennale, which puts on productions in abandoned factories in the industrial Ruhr region, he had his chance. He also realized that the huge industrial spaces were perfect for the production’s demands.

“I stood in one of the halls, and I said, ‘This is it. I have to produce it here,'” he recalled.

Mr. Flimm didn’t have time to direct the production himself, which he said was “very hard” for him. The director he hired, David Pountney, came up with a concept to solve the problem of the multiple locales and time periods. The staging will be reproduced, with slight variations, at the Armory.

The singers move up and down an extremely long, narrow stage; in Germany, it stretched almost the length of the 150-meter hall; in the Armory’s Drill Hall, which is shorter, the stage will form a T, with the top of the T at the east end of the hall, toward Lexington Avenue. As in Germany, the audience at the Armory will sit on a platform that straddles the stage and moves on a set of tracks, so that viewers approach or retreat from the action as called for. The main part of the orchestra is on one side of the stage, and the 16-member percussion section on the other.

The director of the Lincoln Center Festival, Nigel Redden, and the president of the Armory, Rebecca Robertson, had each heard about the production and been interested in it before they realized that they could collaborate. Ms. Robertson had heard about it from Mr. Mortier, who founded the Ruhr Triennale and preceded Mr. Flimm as its artistic director. She saw it in technical rehearsals in 2006 and was blown away.

Mr. Redden, meanwhile, heard very enthusiastic reports from the production’s conductor, Steven Sloane. He was also facing a challenge about what to do for the 2008 festival, when several of Lincoln Center’s own theaters would be either unavailable or closed for construction. Doing a site-specific production elsewhere in the city seemed the perfect solution.

Mr. Redden, Mr. Flimm, Ms. Robertson, and Mr. Sloane all said in interviews that the unconventional staging made for a uniquely exciting experience.

“The closest seats are far closer than you would ever be to a performer in an opera house, because there’s no orchestra between you,” Mr. Redden said. “You could reach out and touch them.” At the same time, “You’re in this vast space, and when you light it, it becomes immense.”

Mr. Sloane expressed a similar attitude toward the music. “Everyone views it as a big bombastic piece, but it is actually the opposite; it is a very intimate, direct, emotional, musical language,” he said. “Once you get past the almost super-dimensional difficulty of actually playing the music,” he continued, “it actually becomes quite chamber-like.”

While many past productions of the work have suffered from musicians who weren’t up to the difficulty of the score, Mr. Sloane said, the orchestra of the current production, the Bochumer Symphoniker, has mastered it completely. Speaking for himself, he added: “Musically, it is the most challenging thing I’ve ever had to do.”

Ms. Robertson said she hopes “Die Soldaten” will give New Yorkers a sense of the kind of productions that can be mounted in the Armory, which is meant in the long term to become its own presenting organization. “We use all of these opportunities to show the public what the potential is,” she said.

Mr. Flimm, who credited Zimmermann with reviving the tradition of European avant-garde music that was wiped out by the Nazis, said that when he first saw “Die Soldaten” in Cologne in 1965, “I thought, ‘This is the new music theater.'” The current production, he said, fulfills the work’s promise. “It’s not a boring thing, where you’re sitting in a theater, and perhaps there’s some people down there in the orchestra pit, and then the curtain opens,” he said. Instead, as the audience moves up and down the hall, often passing between the orchestra and the singers, “There’s always a cloud of music you’re going through.”