Arnold Schoenberg had a superstitious horror of the number thirteen. He was born on September 13, 1874, the day after Rosh Hashanah. A Viennese Jew reared as a Catholic, he converted to Lutheranism in his twenties, before returning to Judaism in 1933.
Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron, based on passages in the books of Exodus and Numbers, was composed using the twelve-tone method he invented. He spelled Aaron with one “A” so his opera’s title wouldn’t have thirteen letters — though the plot summary provided by New York’s Metropolitan Opera for its new production locates Act One of Moses und Aron in the “thirteenth century, B.C.”
Few lives in art were more dogged by contradiction and controversy than Arnold Schoenberg’s. Recognized as a genius from an early age, he could have fashioned success in the manner of Richard Strauss. Or he could have assumed the legacy of Gustav Mahler, composing huge orchestral and choral works, as he did with the epic folk-song cycle Gurrelieder (1900). Schoenberg even composed naughty songs for the turn-of-the-century Viennese cabaret.
But with more and more insistence, “the dissonance” repressed inside the conventional language of music was clamoring for release from those harmonic rules that “required” music to end in the key in which it had begun. Harmony signals resolution, a neatness in the packaging, a pat solution that could no longer claim to be more than a fiction. And that became intolerable to Schoenberg, who regarded music as a vehicle for truth and himself as its reluctant emancipator.
From 1900 to 1913, Schoenberg’s compositions (and those of his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern) grew stranger and stranger to Viennese ears. In 1912, Schoenberg finished Pierrot Lunaire, a song cycle that still sounds like the future. In February 1913, his Gurrelieder was staged in Vienna to great acclaim. The next month, a performance of his more recent works provoked a riot. To the end of his life, Schoenberg drew the fire of critics and a middlebrow public that went to concerts for reassurance and relaxation, to be lulled instead of invited to think. It might have been the dissonance initially. But something more set the wasps about Schoenberg. Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Bela Bartok, and Richard Strauss exploited the new continent of dissonance opened by Schoenberg and found themselves embraced by audiences.
In the 1920s, Schoenberg constructed a compositional system to replace traditional key signatures with a series of twelve tones that defined and generated a musical piece. The tone row or series is no less arbitrary than traditional harmony, but it gave the composer’s musical instincts a shield against the chaos implied by the fall of the old musical gods and a way of answering the critics who assailed him for his method even as they reviled his compositions.
To say that Schoenberg was a Moses, emancipating dissonance and leading music toward a land he would not enter might be neat, but it doesn’t answer why Moses und Aron, written explicitly as an invitation to think, is such powerful music theater, against commercial pieties and all the other odds.
Schoenberg wrote the libretto of his 1932 biblical opera in three acts, but he only set the first two acts to music. In the following years, as prospects for its performance evaporated, the composer suggested that Act Three might be omitted or merely read aloud. Or, should resources preclude a full production, Schoenberg wryly suggested that the “Dance Around the Golden Calf” in Act Two might be performed as a stand-alone piece.
In any case, the prophet of serial composition and model for the protagonist of Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus died on Friday, July 13, 1951 — at thirteen minutes before midnight — having never witnessed a staging of his masterpiece. Last Monday, February 8, after more than forty years of wandering, Moses und Aron entered the promised land: a premiere production at the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center. (Four more performances are scheduled, on February 17, 20, 23, and 26.)
It opened to a full house. No one left before the first act, and most of the audience stayed for the second. This was itself a wonder, since the New York public customarily walks out of a concert hall at the first strange sound, the exodus from dissonance. The orchestra, directed by James Levine, plays Schoenberg’s score as music rather than as a lecture or demonstration. The huge chorus sustains the music and provides a context for the action. Moses, sung with clarity and conviction by British basso John Tomlinson in his Metropolitan debut, has a real beard. The spare, expressive stage set designed by Paul Brown uses only blue and orange-red to relieve its black and white, and a few shapes — wedge, wave, and bowl — to suggest Mount Horeb, the desert, the sky, Egypt, and Sinai. Costumes are modern street dress: black and white suits and dresses, shoes, plus some hats, and furs, and watches and jewels. In the tradition of Bertolt Brecht’s Berlin theater, each scene is identified by a caption printed on a piece of scenery.
Act Two takes place in Moses’ absence. After an orchestral interlude, Schoenberg’s libretto calls for the overthrow of the elders of Israel, the exaltation of the Golden Calf on the altar, the sacrifice of herds of animals followed by a dance of the ritual slaughterers, a faith healing, suicides, renunciation, murder, orgies of drunkenness and dancing, the sacrifice of four naked virgins, then a general stripping to shouted slogans praising creative power, fertility, and desire.
The Met production took some liberties with the libretto. First, it updated the dancing. As choreographed by Ron Howell, the herds are gone; butchers and leaders of the tribes of Israel and their followers have become fashion models and bulb-popping photographers, businessmen and politicians, gangsters, and teenagers chewing gum. The people who followed their prophet into the wilderness in Act One, dressed like any prosperous crowd of upper-West Side Manhattanites, became overly specific, overly topical. I found myself remembering the musical toughs in West Side Story instead of hanging on the action. As the flashbulbs popped and cash was spread around, I wondered when they’d get to the naked virgins already, and would the Metropolitan Opera pull its punches?
Schoenberg, in a performance footnote, demanded nakedness “insofar as the law and the needs of the stage permit and demand.” The Met’s virgins did peel, down to their undies; as did all the other naked people called for in the stage directions. I’m not sure whose rules and needs were being heeded. No New York audience would have been shocked by total nudity, and maybe if naked had meant naked, the New Yorkers might have actually felt rebuked by Moses’ descent from the mountain. Without that self-scrutiny, the dancing and cavorting before the Golden Calf — the entertainment for its own sake — proved thin gruel.
Act Two has much in common with cabaret or music hall. Besides strippers and naked dancers, it features stand-up comedians, tellers of quiet jokes. The renouncers give away what they don’t have, or don’t need, or don’t want, in sacrifice to an inanimate object that can’t use it anyway. The virgins give their passion; old people sacrifice the remainder of their lives; the poor donate their sad rags to the gods of self. Schoenberg’s figurative witticisms are like the jokes in Freud’s Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious: examples of behavior, pointed demonstrations or mild provocations to something other than laughter. In a peculiar variation on a song-and-patter routine (in this instance, an invention of the Met’s), the compromised Elders of Israel drop their trousers and put shoes on their hands, so that they appear to dance, upside down, the old soft shoe.
More than the Elders get stood on their heads. It would be reasonable to expect that song and dance, orgy and riot, bloodshed and spectacle would be more of a show than the anguished and self-consuming philosophical and theological dialogue of two brothers, but they aren’t. Schoenberg’s representation of theology in word and music beggars everything else in the opera. In Moses und Aron, thought carries the day; high art and religion make livelier theater than do the staples of entertainment. On this stage, virtue plays better than sin.
Dissonance, for Schoenberg, meant more than music theory. It referred as well to the moral uncertainty that accompanies the discovery that the world is not adequately described in terms of the self. It is Moses’ recognition that the Land of Milk and Honey doesn’t exist except as a promise, and it is Aron’s problem that when Israel hears the promise, they want it fulfilled. Made to wait, they seek refuge in the gods they know, gods like themselves. It is the uncomfortable intuition that people may choose freedom, but they desire bondage. Dissonance is embedded in the materials of language and art, because neither language nor art penetrates to reality, the thing-in-itself. Dissonance in Schoenberg’s hands invokes a belief in meaning beyond the self, at the same time acknowledging it’s just the self that knows.
Opera isn’t usually an arena for hard thinking. It is typically loved for grand passions realized in gorgeous fantasy, for impossibilities enacted in libret-toland. It is multimedia fairy-tale music videos for grown-ups. Moses und Aron offers a different kind of adult entertainment. It refutes the assertions that there’s no such thing as art, that no thought is higher than another. One clear voice can carry over a chorus, and an evening of opera can stay in the head as something other than a melody and masquerade.
Schoenberg uses the imaginative freedom granted by the operatic suspension of disbelief if not to justify then at least to engage God’s ways to man. His is the drama of monotheism, the song of the limited self in an infinite universe, of freedom and awe, bondage and security, the dance of the young who would be old and the old who would be young. Moses und Aron is stronger than pleasure.
A poet living in Patchogue, New York, Laurance Wieder is co-founder of Chapbooks for Learning.
