Music: New Exodus

When Arnold Schoenberg was working on Moses and Aaron in the ’30s, he predicted that it would take 50 years for his only major opera to be produced. Last week, six years after his death in Los Angeles, the work held the stage at the Zurich June Festival long ahead of the composer’s forecast.

His own libretto prescribed a cast of hundreds, including 70 elders, four “naked virgins,” “dancers, supernumeraries of all kinds,” and a golden calf. Vienna-born Composer Schoenberg’s preoccupation with the Biblical story of Exodus paralleled his indignation at growing Naziism in Germany, his brooding about the Jews’ new exodus. The opera’s first and third acts are dominated by a philosophical dialogue between Moses and Aaron; Moses only speaks his part—a sign that, unlike the, glib, singing Aaron, the word fails him. Schoenberg etches the contrast between the hard but true faith of Moses and Aaron’s emotional, almost political search for a human god-figure.

In the opera’s climactic moment, Moses causes the golden calf to collapse onstage (“Be gone, you image of powerlessness”). In the third act (not performed in Zurich because Schoenberg never completed the music for it) he denounces Aaron for having used God as a means to human ends. Aaron dies and Moses gives his uncompromising message to his people: “In the desert you shall achieve the goal: unity with God.”

Throughout, the deep, ringing speaking voice of Moses and the soaring tenor of Aaron were heard simultaneously. The orchestra played in a web of complicated polyphony, and the chorus sang in as many as twelve parts. Some found the rainbow shower of sound to their liking; others were puzzled and distracted, wondered whether the oratorio-like work was an opera at all. But Paris’ Le Monde called it a miracle. The Neue Züricher Zeitung found the score “an ingenious summary of all that makes Schoenberg the founder of a new musical language.” That language—like the words of Schoenberg’s Moses—was abstract, sometimes difficult to bear, but never to be ignored.