Moses and Aaron: an unfinished opera (News article) | Opera Online - The opera lovers web site > Home > News > Moses and Aaron: an unfinished opera Moses and Aaron: an unfinished opera Next saturday, Moses and Aaron is played at the Opéra de Paris , in a new production signed by Romeo Castellucci (which will be broadcasted online next week). A choice taken by Stéphane Lissner for his first season at the very head of the parisian house, who wants to « interrogate about the greater questions on the world we are living in ». We take this occasion to analyse the issues (mostly lyrical) of this rare opera, sometimes diffcult to access.

*** Moses und Aron, an unfinished opera, is the last and most imposing lyric work composed by Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), aside from his huge dramatic oratorio Gurre-Lieder (1900-1911).This biblical drama, for which the musician himself wrote the libretto based on passages from the Pentateuch, holds a special place in the history of music.Moses und Aron remains Schoenberg’s most complex and formally audacious work, to the point that the musician himself feared it would never be performed because of the many difficulties involved in staging and performing it.This is a “dodecaphonic” opera that seeks to provide a response to new challenges.Once the classical tonal language has been called into question, how can one give musical and dramatic consistency to a lyrical work of great scale? Riddled with these questions and these formal trials, Moses und Aron also became known for its insistence on questioning existence itself.Two Biblical characters, Moses and his brother Aaron, symbolize the opposition between Thought and Action in a period dominated by political upheaval that ended in Nazi barbarism.

In search of opera A founder and instructor of the “Vienna School”, Arnold Schoenberg (1874- 1951) was responsible for a profound change in music history.He shattered conceptions of classical music by developing “dodecaphonism” and “serialism”, i.e., use of the technique of “composing with only twelve sounds connected to one another”. Alban Berg (1885-1935) and Anton Webern (1883-1945) were his best-known pupils. The first of his works based entirely on the new musical language he developed was the Suite for piano op. 25 (1921).In 1918 he founded the “Society for Private Musical Performances” in Vienna, to keep out any critic or criticism, as no one was allowed to make any value judgment!It should be noted that, by and large, critics could not find sufficiently harsh words to denounce and belittle a form of music that seemed to them just barely listenable.

Schoenberg’s creative evolution was not even remotely understood by his contemporaries.He considered himself “a conservative forced to turn radical”.In 1925 he was appointed professor at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, where he remained until 1933. It was there that he began the long and difficult process of composing Moses und Aron, a work that cost him so much effort and caused him such torment that it was never finished. Before Moses und Aron, which looks like a summary, two works appeared as attempts to revive the lyric tradition, Erwartung (Expectation) (1909) and The Hand of Fate (1908-1913). In these two dramas, both of them only about twenty-five minutes long, unity is assured only by the libretto, as the abandonment of tonality carries with it the loss of the usual points of reference in the lyrical genre. This raises the question of how one can give musical and dramatic consistency to a work that unfolds in one continuous movement with no tonal foundation.In 1928, Alban Berg wrote an article entitled “Opera’s Problem”.

The twenty years during which Schoenberg continued to compose Moses und Aron without ever managing to finish it can be explained by the issues raised by the conception of an opera in a new genre, based entirely on a dodecaphonic series. In Moses und Aron, all of the musical material derives from a series of twelve tones, the tones of the scale, which is first introduced in Aaron’s speech: “Oh, sons of my fathers”, subsequently undergoing multiple combinations and variations according to the system conceived by the composer himself.

In early 1930, Schoenberg began thinking about a large-scale opera.The first sketch dates from 7 May 1930, and by June the composer had devoted himself entirely to his new project, working at a feverish pace.He had two jobs, it might be said: he was writing the score and the libretto simultaneously.This aspect needs to be underscored, as it is quite unusual for a musician to work on his libretto at the same time as he is composing the music.As he himself stressed, this assumes that you have: “… a very precise idea, and the trick consists not just of always keeping this vision alive, but even more of strengthening it, enhancing it and expanding it as you create the details”.In a letter sent to Anton Webern in September 1931, Arnold Schoenberg spells out the problems he encountered and the care he applied to writing the libretto:“Given my experience, I do not dare estimate the proportions of the third act which, at the moment, I do not believe will exceed twenty minutes (…).What wastes a great deal of time is writing the text (…).The precise creation of the “Dance around the Golden Calf” scene required a great deal

 of work.I wanted to leave as few things as possible to the new masters of the theatre arts, the directors, and I also wanted to create and plan the choreography to the greatest extent possible (...)”.

The first two acts were completed on 18 March 1932 in Barcelona; the final text of the third act did not appear until May1935, in the United States.Schoenberg kept trying to compose the music for this final act until his death on 13 July 1951. Whilst several theories can be advanced to account for this creative paralysis, one immediate explanation might be the sudden change in lifestyle which political events forced on the musician.The persecution of the Jews that came with the rise of Nazism affected Schoenberg, even though he had converted to Protestantism in 1898.In 1933 the musician was dismissed from his professorship at the Berlin Academy of Music because of his Jewish roots.He fled to Paris where, out of solidarity with the people he had never felt part of, he converted back to Judaism.“I finally learned the lesson that was beaten into me last year, and I will never forget it:I am not a German or a European, perhaps not even a human being, but I am a Jew.”He then moved to the United States where he lived in exile until his death, experiencing difficult financial conditions despite working as a teacher.

Schoenberg had begun this return to his roots in 1917 with the oratorio, Jacob’s Ladder, which remained unfinished, and with the drama entitled Biblical Road (1922-1923) in which we find a forerunner of the two brothers in Moses und Aron.In 1928 he set about composing a cantata entitled “Moses before the Burning Bush”, which gradually turned into a three-part oratorio bearing the title of his future opera, Moses und Aron. Schoenberg was persuaded that his opera was too much ahead of its time.The composer even doubted that his work would be performed “in the next few decades”.Schoenberg added new instruments to the classical orchestra, some of them rare ones like the celesta or the flexatone, a metal percussion instrument.Even aside from the two main characters, the treatment of the voice is rich and inventive.The voice of God echoing around the edges of the work is realized by a choir of six soloists, and a spoken chorus. There is a plethora of secondary roles, some of them making a very brief appearance.As in grand opera, the choral parts are among the most imposing.

The chorus, which by turns sings and speaks, also serves most often as a key figure.He is the Chosen People, always undecided in regard to Moses and Aaron.The climax of the chorus’s involvement comes in the Golden Calf scene, in which fury and savagery are truly unleashed. The people then become agitated and violent as Aaron himself seems overcome by doubt.To avoid the seething rebellion, Aaron re-establishes the ancient idol cult, which is besieged by worshipers. Orgiastic scenes accompany this step backward, far from the idea of an eternal, invisible god. In 1949 Schoenberg went so far as to admit that he had not written his opera to be staged, “except perhaps in the distant future, with a sound produced synthetically, electrically”.A partial staging took place whilst the composer was still alive, when “Dance around the Golden Calf” was performed in Darmstadt in 1951.

This staging was then planned as part of Florence’s Musical May in 1951.Schoenberg then suggested completing the two existing acts with a spoken performance of the third act, for which only the text existed.This solution was seldom adopted after that, and tradition has it that only the first two acts are played complete; fortunately, the two acts form a perfectly viable unit.It was not until 1954 that Moses und Aron was finally performed in concert version in Hamburg.The staged version was not created until 1957 in Zurich.Through the 1960s there were very few revivals of the work, which did not begin to appear frequently on the greatest stages until 1970. Omnipresent, invisible and unimaginable “…the sole, eternal, omnipresent, invisible and unimaginable God….”: Thus begins the work written by Schoenberg, who had been reading the Bible since he was a small child.This early indoctrination undoubtedly justifies a very personal interpretation of the Bible’s texts, as shown by the use and examination of various famous episodes such as the feats performed by Moses, attributed by the composer to Aaron, or the Golden Calf episode.

This very unique plot line is the basis for a philosophical reflection on the respective powers of thought and action, two entities incarnated by two characters, Moses and Aaron.By throwing them together, Schoenberg seems to be guided by Rilke’s verses, which he first put to music in 1914 in the second of his Four Lieder with orchestra op.22: “All those who seek Thee afflict Thee.And those who find Thee bind Thee to an image or a face.But I want to understand Thee.” Formally speaking, it can be said that the dodecaphonic series on which the work is based is comparable to that “..sole, eternal, omnipresent, invisible and unimaginable God….”that is at the heart of Moses’ concerns and questions as he is overwhelmed by the task God has entrusted to him, to free the Jewish people from Egypt. The unique, omnipresent and sometimes invisible principle of the series contrasts with the duality of the protagonists, Moses, bearer of God’s Thought, and Aaron, his brother, bearer of God’s Word. Moses feels incapable of convincing his divided flock, who are still bound to the old gods.

And the Eternal One replies: “Aaron shall be thy mouth”.The two brothers then face one another.Moses struggles to find the right words to share his demanding conception of God.The glib Aaron seduces and inveigles, establishing his supremacy over Moses.Moses, rendered mute, expresses himself only through “Sprechgesang”, a rhythmic recitation that contrasts with the ease of Aaron’s brilliant singing, a dramatic lyric role that holds the Chosen People under the spell of his voice. Use of the Sprechgesang technique alongside proper singing had already been perfected by Schoenberg in a work that had a huge impact, the Pierrot lunaire, a cycle of 21 melodramas for spoken voice and five instruments created in 1912. Schoenberg defined Sprechgesangas follows:“Spoken singing is not singing plus some speaking, it’s neither singing nor speaking”.The simultaneous use of singing and speaking was the work’s most significant innovation from a dramatic standpoint.This unusual alliance gives unusual expressive power to the confrontation between two brothers, and to the choral elements, as the choristers also switch between singing and “recitation”.

Hence the “Voice from the Bush” in Act 1 takes on a fantastical dimension because of the duality of the choir divided into two parts, with one singing while the other speaks while “enunciating very distinctly”.Moses expresses himself through Sprechgesangwith only one exception, (Act 1, scene 2) and he addresses to Aaron this single sung sentence, consisting of six measures:“Purify thy thought, flee futility, devote yourself to the Truth”. Having run out of arguments, Moses tries to use the magic of song to convince his brother who betrayed him by misrepresenting his thought which he was responsible for transmitting to the people.

At the end of the second act, Moses tries to find the words he needs to convince and convey his very demanding conception of God.After a final confrontation with Aaron, he realises his brother will never achieve the goal he has set for him:“Purify thy thought, flee futility, devote yourself to the Truth”.Tortured by his strong sense of powerlessness, Moses falls to the ground, ending his poignant monologue with these final words, which are a perfectly viable ending for an opera left unfinished: “O words, you words I miss so!”.This final cry rings out like that of the composer himself, who lacked the inspiration to complete his work.Schoenberg may have said everything he had to say about his very personal vision in one key scene in his opera, that of the Dance around the Golden Calf, unleashing all the resources of the lyric art, orchestra and soloists, choruses and dances, to convey all the madness, violence and self-destruction that can overtake helpless humanity.As he tells us himself:“The Golden Calf scene represents a sacrifice of the people trying to rid themselves of a ‘soulless’ belief.

In developing this scene, since it represents the core of my thinking, I went very far, and that is where my opera is the most operatic; it could not be otherwise”. Catherine Duault OPERA - 'MOSES' BY SOLTI - NYTimes.com By JOHN ROCKWELL Published: April 21, 1984 CHICAGO, April 20— Georg Solti's commitment to Arnold Schoenberg's monumental opera ''Moses und Aron,'' which the conductor performed in a concert version Thursday night with the Chicago Symphony in Orchestra Hall, is deep-rooted. He conducted it in English both at Covent Garden in 1965-66 and with the Chicago Symphony in 1971, and in French with the Paris Opera in 1973. This week's two performances in Chicago - the second is tonight - represent the first time he has done it in the original German, in part because he will record the opera next week for London Records. According to Schoenberg's publisher, these are apparently the first German-language performances of the opera in this country.

Tonight's concert will be broadcast live, in New York on WNCN, 104.3 FM, starting at 9 P.M. ''Moses und Aron'' is an opera of extreme rigor in its philosophical ideas, dramaturgical astringency and, above all, musical dissonance. James Levine, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera, has been trying to convince his board for years to stage it at the Met. He should keep at it: ''Moses und Aron'' may be difficult, but it is also a masterpiece. While it might seem more an oratorio than an opera, ''Moses und Aron'' blossoms with a properly imaginative, spectacular staging. Peter Hall's Covent Garden production aroused much interest with its lurid depiction of Schoenberg's full- tilt orgy in Act II, which calls for such scenes as priests violating naked virgins. Mr. Solti and his hundreds of singers and instrumentalists had to evoke the drama through sound alone Thursday, and they did a stirring job. Mr.

Solti is sometimes slack with inner rhythmic impulse; conductors such as Pierre Boulez and Michael Gielen have accented this music more alertly, and more adeptly circumvented Schoenberg's tendency to plod. But this was a minor flaw; Mr. Solti shaped a powerful statement of this truly powerful opera. The power derives not so much from the lurid episodes, although they have their barbarous impact, as from the dramatic clash of ideas that infuses this opera. The composer's text concerns Moses' calling, Aaron's transmission of his message to the Jews, their growing doubt in the desert, their relapse into idolatry, and Moses' anger upon his return with the tablets. As it stands, the opera ends tragically, Moses despairing at his apparent failure. In the libretto for the uncomposed third act, Moses prevails in grim triumph. Even as is, however, the opera makes a satisfying dramatic whole. ''Moses und Aron'' is about the purity of ideas versus their distortion in language and images. But a Schoenberg opera about an implacable visionary communicating imperfectly with a flawed world also must be taken autobiographically.

The composer surely saw himself as Moses, the man with a vision that the world pressured him to prettify. Thursday's performance was technically sold out, but some subscribers stayed away; they were probably at home in front of their hi-fi's, worshiping the Golden Calf of Tchaikovksy. Musically, ''Moses und Aron'' derives from a single 12-tone row, and is thus a quintessential example of the dreaded Serialism. But given half a chance, this is music of real, if severe, communicative power. Moses mostly speaks, while Aaron luxuriates in florid cantilena, part Mime, part David and part Nemorino. The most compelling music comes from the colorful orchestra and the even more colorful, impassioned and dramatic chorus, which is called upon to sing, speak, murmur, shout and whisper. The cast included Franz Mazura as a stern, fierce, utterly convincing Moses; Philip Langridge as a fine Aron; Aage Haugland as an imposing Priest, and a host of other superior soloists, not a weak one in the lot. But the real stars, apart from Schoenberg himself, were Mr.

Solti, his orchestra and Margaret Hillis's remarkable chorus, which was augmented by members of the Glen Ellyn Children's Chorus. Schoenberg's Moses und Aron: the opera that comes complete with an orgy | Music | The Guardian Classical music Schoenberg's Moses und Aron: the opera that comes complete with an orgy It's one of the masterpieces of 20th-century opera, but Schoenberg's theological work is notoriously difficult – for audiences and singers alike. But that's not the only reason the Welsh National Opera's forthcoming staging is so brave John Tomlinson as Moses (centre) and Philip Langridge (left), as Aron in the Metropolitan Opera's 1999 production of Moses und Aron. Photograph: Sara Krulwich/New York Times/Redux /Eyevine Share on Messenger Close The 80-strong chorus of the Welsh National Opera is simulating an orgy in a Cardiff rehearsal room. One bare-chested man is waving his shirt above his chest, couples are in clinches in the back rows and, a few feet from me, a man and woman have been grappling on the floor, while I maintain a polite rictus.

"Haven't you two finished yet?" jokes a colleague. This is Arnold Schoenberg's bracingly austere Moses und Aron , one of the most difficult of operas for audiences –at least for those not steeped in Kantian transcendental idealism, Schopenhauer's metaphysics, 12-tone serialism or the more abstruse questions of Jewish conceptions of the divine. It is soon to receive its first staged British production since 1976. But it would be unfair to suspect that choral sex is a cynical producers' ploy to make Schoenberg's two-act opera palatable to audiences who might otherwise run away from the Wales Millennium Centre with hands over their ears. Yes, the opera is forbidding both in dramatic theme (the ineffability or otherwise of God) and in music (the score is so mathematically pure in its 12-tone conception that Schoenberg dropped one of the As from Aaron's name so that the opera's title has 12 rather than 13 letters). But this production isn't sexing up Schoenberg , at least not unduly. The orgy has its basis in the libretto .

Picture the scene: the Israelites are in the desert having cast off their Egyptian yoke, but feel abandoned by their iconoclastic leader Moses who, for 40 days and 40 nights, has been on Mount Sinai taking receipt of a consignment of commandments. They're beginning to lose faith in the God Moses catchily describes as he addresses the burning bush in act one as "einziger, ewiger, allgegenwärtiger, unsichtbarer und unvorstellbarer" (ie unique, eternal, omnipresent, imperceptible and unrepresentable). What they want is a tangible god who can help them in their adversity. So, while his brother Moses is away, Aron makes them a golden calf to worship. Schoenberg's stage directions indicate that the Israelites' subsequent dance around the idol culminates in rape and murder, and calls for expensive props – not least live camels and naked virgins. But WNO's Moses und Aron will not be lavish. There will be no camels, no golden calf.

Instead, it's the conceit of Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito's production that the Israelites are watching a film that depicts sex, violence and the slaughter of virgins: the audience have to imagine rather than see the on-screen spectacle that drives the Israelites into the aforementioned frenzy. Whether this cost-effective device is dramatically powerful enough remains to be seen. This first British production for nearly 40 years strives also to be topical. "It's very much influenced by the Arab spring," says Sir John Tomlinson , the great British bass, who sings Moses. "Much of the action takes place in an assembly which is supposed to bring to mind the Egyptian parliament – the people there are wanting liberation." The production, though, remains true to the sibling clash at the heart of the opera – between Moses and his brother Aron. Tomlinson says of his character: "He will not describe God. He refuses to describe what God wants for his people. To do that is to limit God, which is blasphemous. "But then this raises the question: what's the point of God if nobody knows what he wants? And Moses can't – or won't – say.

He is the leader, the figurehead, but he can't speak to the people. Aron takes over and gives them what they want." The temperamental and philosophical differences between Moses and Aron are expressed in music. While Aron sings in seductive bel canto and, like a biblical Don Draper , titillates the masses with fatuous imagery, Schoenberg scored Moses in a halting bass Sprechstimme (sung speech) that makes him sound harsh, borderline inarticulate . Arnold Schoenberg in 1949: he never completed the third act of his great opera. Photograph: Fred Stein Archive Intriguingly, in an opera where Moses argues it is impious to represent God at all, Schoenberg scored the voice of God in six different ways, giving him three sung and three spoken voices – another oddity given that Moses is insisting on monotheism over pagan polytheism.Schoenberg was attracted to this biblical material after an incident in 1922 where he and his family fled the Austrian resort of Mattsee in the face of antisemitism. "I have at last learnt the lesson that has been forced upon me this year," he wrote to the painter Wassily Kandinsky .

"It is that I am not a German, not a European, indeed perhaps scarcely even a human being (at least, the Europeans prefer the worst of their race to me), but that I am a Jew." This realisation prompted the composer, who had converted to Protestantism in 1898, to reconnect with his Jewish identity and explore his people's emergence from persecution. In the same year Hitler came to power in Germany, Schoenberg reverted to Judaism and fled to the US. Some critics have taken Aron's creation of the people-pleasing golden calf as prefiguring the Nazis' degraded genius for imagery, or indeed akin to Hollywood's dream factory, with which Schoenberg had a difficult relationship during his Californian exile. The iconoclastic Schoenberg, argues Tomlinson, had much in common with Moses – neither were people pleasers. Moses und Aron, though, was never finished. Schoenberg scored two acts in 1932 and wrote the libretto for a third, which is sometimes performed without music.

(A performing version of the third act has been completed recently by Zoltán Kocsis.) WNO's production ends after the second act, with Moses left in the desert as Aron leads the Israelites to the promised land. "It's a great, great piece, a philosophical and musical masterwork. But, yes, it is very difficult for audiences," says Tomlinson. He's a veteran in the role, having sung Moses for James Levine's New York Met production in 1999 , and in a 2005 Bayerische Staatsoper production in Munich. And it's not just demanding for audiences. One reason the opera is so rarely staged is that its changing time signatures and tempi make it some of the toughest music in the repertory. "I was due to sing in Daniel Barenboim's production at La Scala," recalls Tomlinson, "but it had to be cancelled because the chorus couldn't learn it in time." "We've been rehearsing this for 18 months," says WNO chorus master Stephen Harris. "This is such a challenge. It's such a different sound world from what we're used to." After lunch I return to the rehearsal room.

Tomlinson and Rainer Trost, who sings Aron, are locked in philosophical debate about the libretto. They're working on the scene where Moses reproves Aron for creating false idols and in fury smashes the tablets on which he has written the laws God has just entrusted to him – a baffling moment. Why does the enraged Moses destroy the signs of God's will? "Because Aron says the laws are an image, like the golden calf," explains Tomlinson. "How can we limit God by expressing his words in our ephemeral tongue? That is what the opera is about." WNO is certainly taking a risk by staging an opera teeming with such philosophical puzzles and theological quandaries, all expressed in a musical language in which few are fluent. If you prefer easier diversions, you could always just drop in for the orgy. • Moses und Aron is at Millennium Centre, Cardiff 24 May - 7 June, Birmingham Hippodrome 18 June and the Royal Opera House, London 25 - 26 July.

Opera on Film: “Moses and Aaron” - The New Yorker Opera on Film: “Moses and Aaron” October 14, 2011 One of the highlights of the New York Film Festival so far (it runs through Sunday) is a short film by Jean-Marie Straub, “The Inconsolable One,” a version of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, based on a text by Cesare Pavese. It’s worth calling attention to one moment in it that I alluded to only glancingly in my capsule review —a single cut, from a series of one-shots to a two-shot, that is one of the two most audacious and revelatory cuts in any film I’ve seen from the festival. (The other is in Nicholas Ray’s “ We Can’t Go Home Again ,” which will be screening again this coming Monday at Film Forum .) Well, happily, there’s more Straub around: tomorrow night, 92Y Tribeca offers (and all praise to Miriam Bale for programming it) an all-too-rare screening of “Moses and Aaron ,” Straub and Danièle Huillet’s 1975 film of Arnold Schoenberg’s opera.

Straub and Huillet are the exemplary cinematic artists of the word—or, more specifically, the exemplary artists of the cinematic word, which is to say that they set texts the way that composers do, with precision, fidelity, and imagination. In Schoenberg’s opera—about the conflict between demagogy and prophecy—the populist Aaron’s words are set for a mellifluous tenor voice; Moses never sings, but only speaks, in the rugged voice of the true seer. It was screened a couple of years ago at Film Society of Lincoln Center; at the time, I wrote that it brings to life, on location in the desert, a reinterpretation of several crucial episodes of Biblical history—Moses’s presentation of God’s covenant to his chosen people, his recruitment of his eloquent brother Aaron to preach to them on his behalf, and Aaron’s weakening during Moses’s forty-day sojourn on Mount Sinai, resulting in the worship of the Golden Calf and Moses’s breaking of the tablets bearing the Ten Commandments. The brothers’ conflict—between word and image, idea and emotion—is also the directors’ argument for their own radically austere style over popular methods.

Here, their rarefied aesthetic coheres perfectly with the opera to come off as a kind of twelve-tone filmmaking which, like Schoenberg’s music, reclaims a classical ideal in a progressive way that owes nothing to nostalgia. Oblique angles, long takes, and static tableaux allow Straub and Huillet to go straight to the drama inherent in the story and the composition. They respond to every nuance of the opera and reveal both the complex modern music and their own stark images to be as passionate and engaging as they are profound and beautiful. In German. “Moses and Aaron” was scheduled for a DVD release in 2008 by New Yorker Films; the release was postponed to 2009 , but then the company “ceased operations” soon thereafter and the DVD never came out. So the screening on Saturday is all the more precious and necessary. More: MUSIC - 'Moses und Aron' And Its Problems Finally Arrive - NYTimes.com MUSIC MUSIC; 'Moses und Aron' And Its Problems Finally Arrive By MARK SWED; Mark Swed, a music critic, is at work on a biography of John Cage.

Published: September 16, 1990 Arnold Schoenberg's ''Moses und Aron'' may well be the most important opera never given a New York staged production. But that neglect hasn't been for lack of trying. Christopher Keene, the New York City Opera's general director, who will finally bring the masterpiece to Lincoln Center Saturday night, first proposed that the company mount it eight years ago. In fact, Mr. Keene, on whose stark black desk Schoenberg's large yellow-bound score glows like a Holy Grail, says he can get so carried away by the opera ''that sometimes I just want to dwell over it like an old medievalist looking over his mystical books.'' Mr. Keene is hardly alone in his reverence for the opera. Lincoln Center is full of Schoenbergians. James Levine, who has conducted ''Moses und Aron'' at the Salzburg Festival, has been hoping to put on the Metropolitan Opera's schedule for years.

At the New York Philharmonic, Zubin Mehta has long championed the composer - when he became music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the early 1960's he programmed the major orchestral works of Schoenberg before conducting all nine Beethoven symphonies. Mr. Mehta's predecessor at the New York Philharmonic, Pierre Boulez, has recorded ''Moses und Aron'' along with all the rest of Schoenberg's orchestral and choral works. Not to be outdone in its devotion to the composer, the Juilliard School last season put on a weeklong Schoenberg festival. ''Moses und Aron,'' which was never completed, and its composer, in fact, count some of the world's most glamorous conductors as enthusiasts. Sir Georg Solti, who conducted a Covent Garden production of the opera in London during the 1960's, has presented it in concert performance with the Chicago Symphony, toured with it to Carnegie Hall (the only New York performance of the work) and recorded it. Christoph von Dohnanyi, Claudio Abbado and Giuseppe Sinopoli are also noted exponents of Schoenberg. So what's the problem?

Why has it taken New York more than half a century to present one of this century's most notable operatic accomplishments? It's certainly not the music: ''Moses und Aron'' may be a difficult opera, but the musical language is no more daunting than Berg's ''Lulu,'' which was written around the same time and has been on the Met roster for years. Nor is it likely that the libretto is the problem. The opera may have a ponderously philosophical text, but what Schoenberg called his ''tremendous subject'' - which can be interpreted to include the crisis of communication between intractable, inarticulate religious vision and unbridled artistic expression - has, if anything, gained in relevance today. It's not an issue of stageworthiness: however oratoriolike some scenes may be, a full quarter of the opera is as long and explicitly lewd an orgy scene as any in opera. The orchestral writing is dense, but it is also stunningly beautiful and brilliantly descriptive. There are only two major singing roles - Moses and Aaron - and neither is impossible. While the orchestral challenge may be formidable, a greater stumbling block is the chorus, for the choral parts are frighteningly complex.

''Since I can't reckon on a performance of the work for a few decades,'' Schoenberg wrote in a letter while composing the score, ''I didn't feel obliged to avoid difficulties in the choral and orchestral parts!'' For the first staged performance of ''Moses und Aron,'' given in Zurich in 1957, six years after the composer's death, the opera was rehearsed over the entire season, and there were 350 chorus rehearsals. Mr. Keene can't match that number, but he says the company has had an unprecedented amount of choral preparation. But perhaps the greatest obstacle to performance has been Schoenberg's profound ambivalence toward ''Moses und Aron'' - an opera whose subject is profound ambivalence. Writing both libretto and music for the story of Moses, Aaron, the Israelites and their faith, Schoenberg intended ''Moses und Aron'' as both a musical and spiritual culmination of his life's work and thought. It was to be a grand statement of his beliefs in 12-tone music and religion, and the two beliefs were linked in his mind.

When Schoenberg began composing the opera in 1930, at the age of 55, he was secure in his controversial 12-tone technique, which he had begun a decade earlier, and he was becoming increasingly secure in his personal conviction in Jewish thought. Born to a Viennese Jewish family, he converted to Protestantism when he was 24. The process of composing ''Moses und Aron'' helped lead to his reconversion to Judaism in 1933. As a result, ''Moses und Aron'' was both Schoenberg's public and private dialectic on music and religious thought. The composer, who considered himself something of a musical prophet, identified with Moses the mystic, close to God but unable to express God, the inexpressible. Aaron, the man of the material world and Moses' mouthpiece, made God perceptible to others but only through the debasing mediation of signs and wonders. In the opera, Moses' deep baritone never rises to song, delivering lines in the restricted speech-song that Schoenberg had devised for ''Pierrot Lunaire''; Aaron, as tenor, soars in wondrous flowing and expressive cantilena.

In the City Opera production, Richard Cross will sing the role of Moses, Thomas Young, Aaron. 1 opera: Twentieth-Century Opera opera Twentieth-Century Opera In the early part of the 20th cent. the foremost operatic composer was Richard Strauss . Although influenced by Wagner, he composed operas with even richer and more stunning orchestrations, often using dissonant harmonies and abandoning tonality to emphasize the humor or drama of a scene. Among his most successful operas are Salomé (1905), Elektra (1909), Der Rosenkavalier (1911), Ariadne auf Naxos (1912), and the allegorical Die Frau ohne Schatten ( The Woman Without a Shadow, 1919). After World War I a period of innovation began that has continued to the present day. Alban Berg 's Wozzeck (1925) and Lulu (1937; posthumously completed in 1979) have been the most enduring of early atonal operas.

Arnold Schoenberg 's serial work (see serial music ) Moses and Aaron (unfinished, 1932) had successful revivals in the United States in the 1960s and again in the United States and Germany in the 1980s. George Gershwin 's Porgy and Bess (1935) is considered the first great American opera, while Paul Hindemith 's Mathis der Maler (1938), dealing with the life of the painter Mathias Grünewald, represents the trend of the 1930s toward lavishly staged, moralistic epics. Operatic composers who have emerged since World War II include Gian-Carlo Menotti , Samuel Barber , Alberto Ginastera , and Hans Werner Henze . The former two have composed in traditional musical idiom, such as Menotti's The Medium (1946), The Consul (1950), and Amahl and the Night Visitors (written for television, 1951) and Barber's Vanessa (1957) and Antony and Cleopatra (1966).

Henze's The Young Lord (1965) and Ginastera's Bomarzo (1964) and Beatrix Cenci (1971) are highly innovative and controversial. Operas by the Americans Douglas Moore and Carlisle Floyd used American history, legend, and folk music, as reflected in Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe (1956) and Floyd's Susannah (1955). The most internationally accepted post–World War II composer of operas was the Englishman Benjamin Britten . His first operatic success was Peter Grimes (1945), followed by The Rape of Lucretia (1946). Britten's other works include Billy Budd (after Melville's story, 1951), The Turn of the Screw (after Henry James's story, 1954), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960), and Death in Venice (after the novella by Thomas Mann, 1973). Britten's operas are cast in traditional musical and dramatic form.

Some late 20th-century avant-garde operas include The Devils of Loudon (1968–69) by the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki ; Le Grand Macabre (1978) by the Hungarian György Ligeti ; and Einstein on the Beach (1976), Satyagraha (1980), Akhnaton (1984), The Voyage (1992), and White Raven (1998), all by the American composer Philip Glass . Other operatic works by Americans in the same period include Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) by John Adams ; The Ghosts of Versailles (1991) by John Corigliano ; and McTeague (1992) and A View from the Bridge (1999) by William Bolcom . Owing to widespread indifference to new works on the part of the opera-going public and most major opera houses, plus the financial burden incurred in staging a new work, many composers in the latter part of the 20th cent.

turned to community and college opera workshops to produce their works. However, in the 1990s and 2000s this trend was partly reversed, with younger audiences becoming interested in opera, and more large companies presenting operas by contemporary composers. Sections in this article: Sound: Moses and Aaron - Film Comment Sound: Moses and Aaron By Allen Shawn in the November/December 2008 Issue Arnold Schoenberg composed his monumental 12-tone opera Moses und Aron during the years 1930 through ’32. It marked the end of a productive 10-year period during which he had refined and expanded his new “method of composing with 12 tones related only to each other.” By this point he could write a two-hour dramatic work based entirely on one 12-tone row. While filled with creative and personal happiness (Schoenberg married his second wife Gertrude Kolisch in 1924), the period also coincided precisely with the rise of the Nazis. Having been an early convert to Protestantism, Schoenberg found his own cultural and religious identification with Judaism returning.

As early as 1923 he wrote to Kandinsky expressing this identification and predicting both the catastrophe that was to befall the Jews of Europe and the eventual complicity of those who, like Kandinsky himself, had already agreed with the Nazi propaganda machine that there was a “Jewish Problem.” Elaborating on Exodus, Schoenberg’s libretto tells the story of the calling of Moses, who lacked the gift of oratory, to lead his enslaved people to the promised land; the paradox of his reliance on Aaron’s miracles to represent an invisible, fathomless God; the people’s descent into idol worship and ritual sacrifice during Moses’s 40-day absence on Mount Sinai; and his return with the Ten Commandments. Schoenberg’s work on the opera’s final act was preempted by his need to flee Berlin, where he had been teaching composition at the Prussian Academy for the Arts. In Paris, en route to the United States, he officially reconverted to Judaism. Once settled in Los Angeles, where he lived until 1951, he never found the time to complete the opera.

(He applied for a Guggenheim grant to do so, but was turned down.) As significant and as influential as his 12-tone “method” turned out to be, for Schoenberg it was a way of continuing to compose as he always had, a way of organizing the musical language which had emerged gradually in his first post-tonal works of 1908 and 1909. A natural composer who worked at a high speed and with feverish intensity, his language was never a slave to theory, and it continued to evolve after he had settled in the United States. His last phase of composition includes works that are entirely tonal and some that bridge the tonal and non-tonal worlds, alongside those that are strictly 12-tone. Schoenberg and other composers of the early-20th century who were writing highly chromatic, “atonal” music no longer based on major and minor scales, sought organizing principals for this new and uncharted musical territory.

Schoenberg’s idea was to give each piece its own particular sound-world by basing it on a distinctive melodic arrangement of the 12 half-steps of the Western chromatic scale (i.e., all of the notes found within an octave) which he called a 12-tone “row.” The row then became the musical DNA for that one work—the underlying source of all of its notes. This did not so much change Schoenberg’s language as unify it. The music of Moses und Aron (the superstitious Schoenberg omitted the double “A” in Aaron so that the title would not contain 13 letters) is comprised of four elements: Moses, who intones a rhythmically precise Sprechstimme (speech-song) like that used in Pierrot Lunaire; Aron, who sings soaring, angular melodies; the chorus, from which individual voices emerge to take on small roles and which divides in multiple ways to portray the Jewish people, as well as the voice of the burning bush; and the orchestra, which animates the work with its inspired, spiky, fiercely contrapuntal music. This is no period piece.

Schoenberg’s artistry takes the unity of its underpinnings and runs with it, painting the conflict between Moses’s inward spirituality and Aron’s ablity to communicate as an urgent, contemporary, abstract-expressionist canvas. The combined speaking and singing of the burning bush which calls to Moses in the opening scene; the miracles Aron produces to convince the Jewish people to follow Moses to the promised land; the worship of the Golden Calf and the sacrifices which follow; and the final confrontation between the two brothers, when Moses returns from the mountaintop and smashes the sacred tablets in despair—all these large-scale events and countless other small ones are embodied in music of extraordinary incisiveness and vividness. The work was clearly fueled by a sense of identification, reflecting both the current historical urgency of rescuing European Jewry, and the composer’s personal sense of embattled mission, wedded as he was to a musical language rooted not in external “style,” but in musical ideas. If Schoenberg never managed to complete Moses und Aron, it may have been because that moment of urgent identification had passed. But it also could simply be because the ending, as it stands, is perfect.

In 1973, six years after making their extraordinarily beautiful Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet produced a film version of Arnold Schoenberg’s great work (which has now been issued on DVD). As they had in the Bach film, the Straubs sought to strip their cinema bare of anything that could be seen to deliberately dramatize the story, establishing with exquisitely subtle, mathematically plotted camerawork and formalized direction, a visual counterpoise to Schoenberg’s complex score. The film was shot in the deserts of Egypt and Israel, and in the Italian Alba Fucens amphitheater, with the performers singing live along with the prerecorded orchestra. The performance used was superb (Michael Gielen conducting the Austrian Radio orchestra and chorus, with Günter Reich as Moses and Louis Delvos as Aaron). While mirroring the technical rigor underlying the music, the Straubs also established a directorial method that brilliantly underscored the work’s themes: Moses and Aron’s dichotomous relationship is presented with an extraordinary visual economy—yet they are never framed in exactly the same way. Sometimes the camera remains fixed; sometimes it circles them.

Oftentimes when we see one, we hear the other singing. Their opening dialogue culminates in a shot of twin mountain peaks in the distance. The burning bush in the opening scene sings to us invisibly while we view the back of Moses’ head. Throughout, the chorus is seen primarily in long shot, and is often out of frame precisely when it is most important. At the most exulatant moments the camera pans across the distant Nile, or to vistas of lush landscape (“the land of milk and honey”), or to open sky. Counterintuitively, the Straubs let the music itself be Aron—pulling us into the spiritual domain of the piece—while providing only restricted, if austerely gorgeous visual elements of what we might normally expect to see. No opera film has showed less of the act of singing than this one. For the most part, their method is one of radical non-interference—a restraint that suggests the presence of an awe-inspiring spiritual reality. By contrast, the Jews’ regression into paganism is reflected explicitly. The miracles are indicated in a literal, albeit spartan, manner.

Actual sheep and cattle, whose sounds are heard on the sound track over the music, are herded before the Golden Calf; the dance of the butchers before the altar has an almost jarring crudeness; the orgy is also suggested, in an emblematic way, much as it might be in a school pageant (although with slightly more nudity). Like Pasolini’s 1964 Gospel According to St. Matthew, the film conveys a Marxist perspective on ancient scripture, emphasizing the opera’s theme of rebellion against oppression. Again, as in the matter-of-fact realism of the Pasolini work, the film scrapes away the reverential patina surrounding religious subject matter to reveal contemporary urgency. No production of the Schoenberg opera has ever made one hear it so keenly. Moses and Aaron in Paris | by Robert Craft | The New York Review of Books Moses and Aaron in Paris December 13, 1973 Issue Moses and Aaron, Schoenberg’s largest twelve-tone work, was composed between May, 1930, and March, 1932.

Although the opera as planned is incomplete, the ending as it stands is in no way truncated, the unwritten third act, to judge from the libretto, containing little promise of further dramatic development. Yet Schoenberg’s failure to compose music for all of his text has been attributed not to unresolvable difficulties in the subject but to the threat of Hitler, a credible hypothesis but a difficult one to prove since the composer could very well have stopped where he did because of a philosophical and artistic impasse. After all, the dilemma of the Moses of the opera is one of the special concerns of all the arts of the age, that of being bound to words, which are instruments of falsehood. The opera has also been accepted as an expression of its composer’s religious beliefs, an interpretation that Schoenberg’s correspondence of the time tends to confirm. After the Hitler years, however, these beliefs changed, and to the extent that if the composition had been begun in 1945, Schoenberg, whose sympathies by then were Zionist, might have found more to embrace in Aaron’s activist philosophy than in Moses’ idealist one.

The first complete performance—in March, 1954, nearly three years after the composer’s death—was not staged, partly because of which a mistaken belief emerged that the opera was not theatrical and could as well be presented in concert form. The initial staging, in Zurich in 1957, was followed by others in Berlin, London, Boston (Sarah Caldwell), Dusseldorf, Vienna, and now Paris, which last, perhaps more than all the others, will establish the work in the international repertory. French is obviously the wrong language. When Covent Garden gave the opera in English George Steiner objected that “[Schoenberg’s German] words are not less ‘fully composed, musicalized’ than the music,” and French, of course, as sound and prosody, is that much more remote again from the original. Yet despite all handicaps the French translation not only preserved a high proportion of Schoenberg’s rhythmic values but was in some instances superior to the English. Moses’ “Ich kann denken/aber nicht reden,” for example, is hardly the same as “thought is easy/speech is laborious,” which also happens to be the opposite of the truth.

“Capable de penser/incapable de parler” does convey the sense, at least, though it seems to suggest that Moses suffers from a speech defect. (In the Bible Aaron is the stammerer, but Schoenberg makes him fluent, transforming the impediment to Moses, albeit in mental rather than in physical form.) The meaning is vital, moreover, being no less than the dramatic theme of the opera reduced to the simplest form. Much is to be said in extenuation of the Opéra’s decision to produce the work in French. Dr. Steiner’s argument against the necessity of translation was that “the story of Exodus is known to everyone and…a brief outline would have given an English-speaking audience all the help it wants.” But… This article is available to online subscribers only. Please choose from one of the options below to access this article:

Question: Who composed the music of the opera Moses and Aaron ?
Answer: SCHOENBERG