"...a great night for music in Boston..."

Oct. 28, 2006 performance reviewed by Karl Henning.

Boston Symphony Orchestra
James Levine, conducting
Schoenberg, Moses und Aron (concert performance with supertitles)

As a composer who writes about music, and who therefore habitually reflects on the shortcomings of language in attempts to describe (let alone define) musical experience, I don't run into many operas more pertinent to my work than Moses und Aron. This is not to say that I look down at all on operas where a derelict military officer kills the woman he loves because she's fallen in love with a bull-fighter, or where two men fight over an amnesiac woman who cannot help repeating herself, or where an embittered court jester hires an assassin to do in a randy duke, only to wind up killing his own daughter, who was the only unalloyed joy in his life, instead. These all make fine theater and I enjoy listening to and watching such operas as well as the next opera-lover. But the theme of Moses und Aron is the at-times maddeningly uneasy intersection of Idea and Life, and I cannot help feeling that the sleeves that Arnold Schoenberg rolled up to tackle this piece do not differ greatly from my own sleeves.

Moses has an encounter with the Almighty, in the bush which burns but is not consumed. God commands Moses to return to Egypt and deliver His people, but Moses tries to beg off the assignment, pleading his poor public speaking. The silver-tongued Aron will serve as Moses' spokesman.

The not-quite-pitched-singing technique which he used in Pierrot Lunaire and the third part of the Gurrelieder, Schoenberg puts to wonderfully apt dramaturgical use in this opera: Moses, the halt of speech, delivers his part almost exclusively in Sprechgesang, and by contrast, the comprehensible Aron sings in a lyrical, soaring tenor.

(Schoenberg deliberately dropped one 'a' to misspell the name Aaron. As a result, the title Moses und Aron consists of twelve letters rather than thirteen; and the new-formed name Aron is an anagram of the first four letters of Arnold. Whatever Schoenberg's feelings about the number 13, two events over which he presumably exerted little control, his birth and death, each occurred on the thirteenth day of its respective month.)

Scheonberg designed the piece in three acts, wrote his libretto in three acts. But, having completed Act II in 1932, he lived another 19 years producing much music else, but not more than a few sketches for the third act.

It is an opera which in some ways seems ideal for concert performance. The libretto has an intelligent density (matching the wonderful music), but in many ways is not "stagey"; he left detailed instructions for staging, but Schoenberg himself wondered if the piece could be staged, and his initial conception of the piece was as an oratorio. Even in its "incomplete" state, the opera is absorbing and impressive, possessed of many surprising sonic beauties.

Moses and Aron are brothers, and the Most High appoints Aron as Moses' spokesman. The drama playing through the opera is, superficially, Aron's difficulties in getting Moses' Idea across to the People. But the force driving this is the daunting challenge of reconciling Moses' abstract, radical, uncompromising Idea, with the comprehension, the experience, and the practical situation of the People.

It is Aron who is in the unenviable role of mediator here. As the opera stands in its two-act realization, it concludes with Moses' sense of abject failure - which may well be the poetically truest end that the opera may seek (a compromise of the Idea?) But the single scene of Act III (that portion of the libretto which Schoenberg never set) is the judgment and (divine) punishment of Aron: soldiers bring Aron onstage in chains, and Moses upbraids him for betraying, compromising the Idea. But when the soldiers ask Moses if they should kill him, the Prophet of the Law shows mercy: rather than punish Aron, he releases his erring brother so that he may seek union with God in the desert. Once unfettered, Aron falls dead.

The tension between Idea, and its Application. Part of Schoenberg's musical adventure was his development of the idea of "composition with twelve tones, related only to each other." It is a robust idea which admits of a rich multiplicity of musical application. Such diverse application indeed, that it would seem fair to judge the artistic merit of the applied results severally. But there has been a tendency instead to react to, to reject, to attack the Idea itself, as somehow inherently "un-musical," and thus relegate, hopefully (at least according to the rejector's hope) all the applications of the Idea, as a class, to artistic insignificance.

Moses on stage suffers internal torment and external frustrations, in devotion to his Idea. In a certain light, so did Schoenberg on the world's stage.

James Levine's uncompelled affection for Schoenberg's music leaves him puzzled in the face of hostility to the composer's very name. And to be sure, to simply listen (if our listening can recapture simplicity) to Schoenberg's music, which stylistically seldom strayed far from the High Romanticism of his musical formation, is a matter entirely different to heeding the noise over the ideas which orbit the music.

Schoenberg's life-work, then - the music itself - represents an ironic inversion of the issues of Moses und Aron. In the opera, it is the Idea - the One, Almighty, Omnipresent and Invisible God whose truth is the core of the universe - which is of outstanding importance, and whose Application is problematic. In the case of the composer, it is the music which is the meaning and the object, while the ideas of which the music is in part some kind of sonic realization, the ideas can be surprisingly ephemeral, and perhaps at the last (and in the face of the Music), inconsequential.

The performance at Symphony Hall was nothing short of stupendous (I would say "spectacular," only an opera unstaged seems somehow anti-spectacle). John Tomlinson and Philip Langridge have created the respective title characters with Levine at the Met, and their performance was masterly; few others in the world of opera could do as they did, in taking two of the toughest title roles in all of opera, and making them seem, let us not say easy, but wondrously unlabored. The chorus were magnificent, in a piece where they worked as hard as (indeed, at times harder than) the principals. In the sustained and thunderous applause which followed the close of Act II (it was astonishing, but entirely right, to see so much of the Symphony Hall audience on their feet - and for Schoenberg! And for a tough-nut twelve-tone score of Schoenberg's!) the volume of the ovation swelled appreciatively to acknowledge John Oliver, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and the PALS Children's Chorus.

If there has been at times mixed response to Levine's Beethoven-&-Schoenberg programming these three seasons, there was nothing mixed about the audience's response to Moses und Aron. It was a great night for music in Boston, a great night for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and a great night for maestro Levine.