21 Sep 2011
Willy Decker’s staging of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron
As a rule the celebrated incomplete operas of the repertory eluded completion due to the untimely death of the composer.
Subscribe to
Opera Today
Receive articles and news via RSS feeds or email subscription.
Recently in Reviews
Two song cycles by Sir Arthur Somervell: Roderick Williams and Susie Allan
Robert Browning, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Charles Kingsley, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, A.E. Housman … the list of those whose work Sir Arthur Somervell (1863-1937) set to music, in his five song-cycles, reads like a roll call of Victorian poetry - excepting the Edwardian Housman.
Roger Quilter: The Complete Quilter Songbook, Vol. 3
Mark Stone and Stephen Barlow present Volume 3 in their series The Complete Roger Quilter Songbook, on Stone Records.
Richard Danielpour – The Passion of Yeshua
A contemporary telling of the Passion story which uses texts from both the Christian and the Jewish traditions to create a very different viewpoint.
Les Talens Lyriques: 18th-century Neapolitan sacred works
In 1770, during an extended tour of France and Italy to observe the ‘present state of music’ in those two countries, the English historian, critic and composer Charles Burney spent a month in Naples - a city which he noted (in The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1771)) ‘has so long been regarded as the centre of harmony, and the fountain from whence genius, taste, and learning, have flowed to every other part of Europe.’
Herbert Howells: Missa Sabrinensis revealed in its true glory
At last, Herbert Howells’s Missa Sabrinensis (1954) with David Hill conducting the Bach Choir, with whom David Willcocks performed the piece at the Royal Festival Hall in 1982. Willcocks commissioned this Mass for the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester in 1954, when Howells himself conducted the premiere.
Natalya Romaniw - Arion: Voyage of a Slavic Soul
Sailing home to Corinth, bearing treasures won in a music competition, the mythic Greek bard, Arion, found his golden prize coveted by pirates and his life in danger.
Le Banquet Céleste: Stradella's San Giovanni Battista
The life of Alessandro Stradella was characterised by turbulence, adventure and amorous escapades worthy of an opera libretto. Indeed, at least seven composers have turned episodes from the 17th-century Italian composer’s colourful life into operatic form, the best known being Flotow whose three-act comic opera based on the Lothario’s misadventures was first staged in Hamburg in 1844.
Purcell’s The Indian Queen from Lille
Among the few compensations opera lovers have had from the COVID crisis is the abundance – alas, plethora – of streamed opera productions we might never have seen or even known of without it.
Ethel Smyth: Songs and Ballads - a new recording from SOMM
In 1877, Ethel Smyth, aged just nineteen, travelled to Leipzig to begin her studies at the German town’s Music Conservatory, having finally worn down the resistance of her father, General J.H. Smyth.
Wagner: Excerpts from Der Ring des Niebelungen, NHK Symphony Orchestra, Paavo Järvi, RCA-Sony
This new recording of excerpts from Wagner’s Der Ring des Niebelungen is quite exceptional - and very unusual for this kind of disc. The words might be missing, but the fact they are proves to have rather the opposite effect. It is one of the most operatic of orchestral Wagner discs I have come across.
Wagner: Die Walküre, Symphonieorchester Des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Simon Rattle, BR Klassik
Simon Rattle has never particularly struck me as a complex conductor. He is not, for example, like Furtwängler, Maderna, Boulez or Sinopoli - all of whom brought a breadth of learning and a knowledge of composition to bear on what they conducted.
Dvořák Requiem, Jakub Hrůša in memoriam Jiří Bělohlávek
Antonín Dvořák Requiem op.89 (1890) with Jakub Hrůša conducting the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. The Requiem was one of the last concerts Jiří Bělohlávek conducted before his death and he had been planning to record it as part of his outstanding series for Decca.
Philip Venables' Denis & Katya: teenage suicide and audience complicity
As an opera composer, Philip Venables writes works quite unlike those of many of his contemporaries. They may not even be operas at all, at least in the conventional sense - and Denis & Katya, the most recent of his two operas, moves even further away from this standard. But what Denis & Katya and his earlier work, 4.48 Psychosis, have in common is that they are both small, compact forces which spiral into extraordinarily powerful and explosive events.
A new, blank-canvas Figaro at English National Opera
Making his main stage debut at ENO with this new production of The Marriage of Figaro, theatre director Joe Hill-Gibbins professes to have found it difficult to ‘develop a conceptual framework for the production to inhabit’.
Massenet’s Chérubin charms at Royal Academy Opera
“Non so più cosa son, cosa faccio … Now I’m fire, now I’m ice, any woman makes me change colour, any woman makes me quiver.”
Bluebeard’s Castle, Munich
Last year the world’s opera companies presented only nine staged runs of Béla Bartòk’s Bluebeard’s Castle.
The Queen of Spades at Lyric Opera of Chicago
If obsession is key to understanding the dramatic and musical fabric of Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades, the current production at Lyric Opera of Chicago succeeds admirably in portraying such aspects of the human psyche.
WNO revival of Carmen in Cardiff
Unveiled by Welsh National Opera last autumn, this Carmen is now in its first revival. Original director Jo Davies has abandoned picture postcard Spain and sun-drenched vistas for images of grey, urban squalor somewhere in modern-day Latin America.
Lise Davidsen 'rescues' Tobias Kratzer's Fidelio at the Royal Opera House
Making Fidelio - Beethoven’s paean to liberty, constancy and fidelity - an emblem of the republican spirit of the French Revolution is unproblematic, despite the opera's censor-driven ‘Spanish’ setting.
A sunny, insouciant Così from English Touring Opera
Beach balls and parasols. Strolls along the strand. Cocktails on the terrace. Laura Attridge’s new production of Così fan tutte which opened English Touring Opera’s 2020 spring tour at the Hackney Empire, is a sunny, insouciant and often downright silly affair.
OPERA TODAY ARCHIVES »
Reviews
Think Turandot or Lulu. Arnold Schoenberg lived on for many years with two acts of Moses und Aron finished, but the third act he had planned never became a reality. He did not allow for performances of his incomplete opera, and so it was only shortly before his death that Moses und Aron was first performed. In the decades since then, this harsh but fascinating work has made it to the stage of most of the world’s great opera houses…and festivals.
The Ruhrtriennale is an arts festival in Germany, and Willy Decker has led it since 2009. His staging of Moses und Aron was filmed in 2009, and the DVD preserves a scintillating performance, well outside the bounds of standard operatic performance. The only criticism of the DVD package is that there is no bonus feature on the production, and that is a keen disappointment not just because such features have become ubiquitous. Generally they are only modestly enlightening, if even that, but after viewing this production, many a viewer is likely to want to hear more - from the director, musicians and performers - as to the experience just seen. At least the modest booklet offers the director’s thoughts (translated into English by Stewart Spencer). Decker basically provides a detailed synopsis that probes the psychological reality of the libretto’s action. Then in his last paragraph, Decker finds in the unfinished state of the opera a metaphor for the work’s themes: “Schoenberg…equated his own inevitable failure with the tragic failure of his eponymous hero Moses…”
The performing area is unorthodox. The audience sits in two bleacher-like sections, facing each other, and the orchestra is off to one side. At key moments the bleachers pull apart to create a performing space. Sometimes a scrim-walled box descends from the rafters. At other times, one side of the theater, opposite the orchestra, opens for entrances and exits. The contemporary costumes of Wolfgang Gussmann and Susana Mendoza come in shades of gray and black. Instead of suggesting a specific time, however, they help to create a sense of timelessness, which makes the action both metaphorically consistent with the libretto’s narrative and evocative of its universal themes.
Decker has always been a master of theatrical movement, a very real rarity in the world of opera. Anyone who has seen Decker’s Salzburg Traviata should know that. His work here with the chorus, let along the leads, is phenomenal. The sense of a lost people, torn in their allegiance, prey to the more ferocious impulses of human weakness, makes for a stage orgy that is not risible - a notable achievement in itself.
Dale Duesing as Moses and Andreas Conrad as Aron live every moment, some of which must have been physically arduous. Their vocalism is unimpaired, thanks to being projected through small microphones. Michael Boder leads the Bochumer Symphoniker in a reading that makes the sheer aggression of the score an adrenaline rush, a bravura demonstration of orchestral power. No, no one will leave humming any tunes, but Schoenberg’s sound world leaves its own impression, one of force and honesty.
At around 100 minutes, the sheer intensity of the performance almost becomes exhausting. Perhaps with a completed third act, Moses und Aron would simply be too brutal an experience. Someone may yet attempt a completion, as was done for Berg’s Lulu. But even if successful, a completed version won’t eclipse the achievement of Willy Decker and company in this remarkable DVD.
Chris Mullins