Moses und Aron, and: Jenůfa (review)

In the early twentieth century, opera underwent a sea change as the dissonant strands of musical modernism and the burgeoning ideas of psychology began to drift onto the stage. Audiences, caught in a rapidly industrializing world, sought to understand their situation through the theater. Composers, for their part, embraced the new freedoms granted by those shifting audience expectations and began telling stories unlike those that already existed. Many scaled back their scope, weaving tales of more modest proportions, while others delved into the inner world of thought and belief, both conscious and unconscious. These two admittedly broad responses, among the many from the period, are clearly borne out in the recent DVD releases of Leoš Janáček’s and Arnold Schoen-berg’s greatest operatic works, Jenůfa and Moses und Aron. The nature of these DVDs speaks both to the place of these works in the modern repertoire and to the shifting current of modern audience expectation.

Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron is often acknowledged as one of the composer’s masterpieces in the twelve-tone language, but its troubled compositional history, daunting stage directions, and undramatic subject matter have kept it out of the performing repertoire. Schoenberg first conceived the work in 1922 as a cantata, but by 1930, had refashioned it into an opera libretto. He began composing the work and finished its first two acts by 1932, but he stalled there and never completed the work nor saw any of it performed. In fact, as the director of this particular production, Reto Nickler, notes in an interview included with the DVD, that Schoenberg did not think the work performable.

With Moses und Aron, Schoenberg turned to operatic territory unexplored neither in his earlier Erwartung (1909) and Die glückliche Hand (1910–13), nor in many other contemporaneous operas, namely the metaphysical. Moses and Aron represent for Schoenberg two different responses to spiritual revelation, and through them, he explored the nature of human faith and his ambiguity toward his own resurfacing Jewish identity. That search for a Jewish identity is given primacy over the question of faith in Nickler’s production for the Vienna State Opera in 2006. Nickler created a tensely charged atmosphere absent in other productions by casting the characters and chorus as Holocaust survivors. The resulting severity of the staging, costume design, and lighting pulls the viewer’s attention to the words and forces one to choose between Moses’s direction of faith and singularity outside of culture and Aron’s path toward assimilation, which ultimately, according to this production, leads to death. Unfortunately, the power of Nickler’s production choice is broken by the over-the-top nature of his staging of the act 2 centerpiece, Der Tanz um das goldene Kalb. The chorus of Jews assimilates into an Ayran culture by donning blond wigs and gold costumes to fall prostrate before a giant, golden “ICH,” while Aron instructs them to “worship yourself in this image.” The use of pictures of the chorus’s faces and a bank of giant television monitors is innovative and jarring, but undercuts the immediacy of Moses’s challenge by reducing it to spectacle. By the time Moses returns to the stage with the Ten Commandments, and the original production design resurfaces, the flow of Schoenberg’s argument is lost.

Any production of Moses und Aron must contend with the lack of a final act; this production wisely chose to end with act 2. However, the DVD release includes the fascinating special feature of Franz Grundheber, who is mesmerizing as Moses, reading the final words of Schoenberg’s libretto for act 3. This inclusion brings a sense of closure to the production’s severity as...