Lost in the desert with Schönberg’s Moses und Aron
At curtain up there is silence. Lines from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot flicker on a backstage screen. We are clearly being told we are all waiting for something. What? Downlighters the size of Saturn rocket launcher nozzles slowly brighten, revealing a stage of tiered steps with occasional barriers, like a yesteryear football stadium stand before compulsory universal seating. Except that there are carpets. Turkish carpets.
Moses is wrapped up in a carpet. He unrolls himself, tumbles down the terracing and puts on a top hat which complements his distressed black suit, purple shirt, bow tie and royal blue handkerchief. Moses is a dresser.
This is Komische Opera Berlin’s Kosky and Schönberg show, otherwise known as Moses und Aron; composer, Arnold Schönberg, director, Australian Barrie Kosky. Currently it is airing on the Operavision platform, and available here.
Why does Moses laboriously roll back the carpet from which he has just emerged? Because a burning bush is about to burst unexpectedly into life, then self-propel itself across stage on a grating, where the carpet would have been had Moses not meticulously shifted it. Prescient!
Snag from the outset. Moses can’t sing. He can’t speak. He is so absorbed by his private contemplation of the Almighty that he is struck dumb, sticks his tongue out and gapes at the audience over his horizontal walking stick. His walking stick has a tendency to burst unexpectedly into flames. More God talking.
Brother Aron will come from the desert and speak for Moses. Aron has been short changed. His name boasts only one “A”. Moses und Aaron would have comprised thirteen letters, and Schönberg, had a morbid fear of the number thirteen.
Aron appears. It is never fully explained why, as siblings, they are so distant from each other. Maybe Aron’s turquoise jacket, magician’s cane and the flourish of a bouquet of tulips have something to do with it. Perhaps it reminds Moses that Aron is the brother, if not from from hell, at least the naff magic shop round the corner from the last rock on the left in the Sinai; the one where the Israelites go to get kitted out for their party with the golden calf in Act II.
The plot is the familiar 13th century BC biblical narrative at the time of the Israelites’ subjugation in Egypt, the flight to the desert and the revelation of God’s word in the ten commandments brought down from Har Sinai.
Schönberg started the work in the early 1930s, but never completed it. He composed the music and wrote the libretto. It is a very personal oeuvre. There are three Acts of libretto, only two of music. In 2009 Hungarian composer Zoltan Kocsis received permission from Schönberg’s estate to complete the opera. Never really worked.
Kosky has opted to omit Act III. New York’s Metropolitan Opera did the same in its 1999 production. It is a wise judgement. Schönberg’s purpose is to transliterate the Old Testament narrative to exploding antisemitism in Europe, particularly Germany in the 1920s and 30s. Act II ends with Moses descending into an oblivion of despair – beneath the very carpet he first appeared in. It’s a typically irreverent and sharp Kosky touch.
I think that final moment of terrifying irresolution is the whole point of the opera. Act III was meant to clarify the ambiguous fraternal relationship of Moses and Aron, but that must have seemed irrelevant with Hitler round the corner and Schönberg’s forced emigration to the USA in 1933. He never completed the opera because his own life was fractured. Act II is the end.
Be under no illusion. This is a disturbing work, which in Kosky’s hands becomes truly terrifying. About Kosky: appointed Chief Director of Komische Oper in 2012 on the back of a controversy-strewn international career, the Australian has focused on obscure works, such as Paul Abraham’s 1932 Ball im Savoy, a tale of Parisian high society shenanigans set to modern music, and Oscar Straus’ 1923 Die Perlen der Cleopatra; poison pearls, a Syrian prince, and Mark Anthony finally turning up in Cairo harbour on the noon ferry from Rome. Anarchy.
Kosky thrives on anarchy. He is an uncontainable, plasmatic mass in his very own operatic Tokamak. His early days are narrated in a pin sharp, yet engagingly nostalgic Australian TV documentary by director, Melissa Rymer, Kosky in Paradise, still available here.
Nowadays the self-described “gay, Jewish kangaroo” is talked of as a future musical director of Bayreuth, Richard Wagner’s hallowed house. The Wagner family currently seems determined to re-enact the final scene in Gotterdammerung, tearing itself apart in factional wars to control the future of the shrine. A state of flux.
Kosky banned Wagner from Komische Oper in 2012, yet directed Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg at Bayreuth in 2017. He can’t be accused of inflexibility. If Kosky is Bayreuth’s solution, it must have a hell of a problem. He impishly dismisses the prospect of the Jewish kangaroo taking over the helm at Wagner’s home as “unlikely”, but in the next breath highlights the irony, the completion of a ring of logical progression. The ultimate victory over prejudice.
In this production he plays Aron to Schönberg’s Moses. Aron speaks Moses’ mind, interpreting his experiences with the deity to the sceptical Israelites. Kosky brings Schönberg’s visceral fear of the anti-semitic politics du 1930s jour into the present day, with brutal force.
He depicts a population changing loyalty from one false God to the next at a whim. A rolling camera conjures up a dancing Baal, hypnotising worshippers, much as social media today holds generations in its thrall. Some lines in the libretto, ever so slightly sharpened by Kosky, are wry: “The old Gods protected us, too. If one failed, we turned to another”. Why do the shenanigans at SAGE, where “following the science” of Covid 19 has led to the serial abandonment of one false-failed expert after another, mischievously spring to mind?
The handling of the chorus is critical to the opera’s success. Kosky deploys the members in a flow of constant, turbulent movement, swaying this way and that, forming factions, praising Moses, threatening, and ultimately ignoring him. Latterly, they all – there are about 80 chorus members onstage – carry before them effigies that are manipulated and finally deposited in a heap as a succession of Baals are conjured up by the spooling camera – a discarded generation.
At the zenith of despair one of the golden goddesses stands static, centre stage, now a raddled hag, golden-torsoed – actually, golden everything – mouth agape in an Edvard Munch “Scream”. She confronts the audience motionless for a full five minutes.
Some of the action was really over the top. The transformation of Moses’ rod into a snake was depicted by Aron pushing the rod – presumably collapsible – into his brother’s ear while his head is stuck in a top hat. Moses emerges with a snake descending from his mouth. Alarmingly, the snake twitches, its jaws opening and closing the while. Too much Cirque de Soleil shock and awe.
The water of the Nile-turning-to-blood moment had Moses, prostate on a barrier, blood flowing freely from his mouth, which Aron collected in a glass. When Moses came down from the mountain there were no tablets. The commandments had been etched onto his body in blood. Convention has it that Moses smashes the tablets. At Komische, he vents his anger at his fellow Israelites’ perfidy by stabbing himself – and the Word of God – with a dagger instead.
Completely over the top – and very Kosky. He first pulled the writing on the body trick in his 1991 production of The Dybbuk, a canonical work of Hebrew and Yiddish theatre about a young woman possessed by a devil, written by Sholyme Ansky around 1913. The writing is on the torso.
Moses und Aron is conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, the Russian/British conductor with a penchant for obscure opera. As it would be difficult to tell if the Schönberg score was played badly or well, he gets the benefit of the doubt for fighting through it.
Robert Hayward, bass-baritone sang/spoke/mouthed the role of Moses. He was a dominating presence throughout and seemed to revel in the extremities of Kosky’s direction. His angst and permanent struggle with his God who refuses to reveal himself were the compelling dynamo that drove the plot.
John Daszak, a British tenor, sang Aron. Daszak is earning a deserved reputation across Europe for pulling off awkward roles. He recently took on the dysfunctional character of the town drunk, Grishka, in Dutch National Opera’s production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, giving a five-star performance. Aron, with all his cheap magician’s flourishes, was right up Daszak’s street.
Schönberg’s atonal style of music is the hammer that drives the moral nail of this opera relentlessly homewards. There is no beauty; no lyricism. Moses, the principal actor, barely sings. Admission of failure. I don’t have much time for the vaunted Schönberg 12 pitch chromatic form of classical music. I find it a blind alley, down which most audiences simply do not wish to go. Intellectually pure? Maybe. Or, just a complicated confidence trick.
The self-conceit of Schönberg and his fellow members of the Second Viennese School, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, that the evolving tradition of western music had to be abandoned, not evolved, has led them, and much of twentieth century classical music, to the desert, not the promised land.
Yet, brutal and unenjoyable as listening material it might be, Moses und Aron is unforgettable theatre and a topical moral tale. The relentless misery is relieved by funny, self-deprecating aperçus. Such as, when the merits of Moses’ new God over the old ones are debated across the chorus: “Only an almighty God could have chosen so weak and humiliated a people to demonstrate his omnipotence”. Self-awareness in spades.
And who can go home complacent with the line, “Self-love compels us to make offerings” ringing in their ears. What a put down of today’s nauseating passion for virtue signalling at the drop of any old historical hat.
At curtain down, there is silence. Moses has disappeared. The word of God has been rejected. Kosky hangs onto the moment for a full minute. Keep your eye on Kosky. He has a voice for today, and a talent for spotting the works of the past in which he can express it. In his hands Schönberg’s Moses und Aron turns out to be the masterpiece it is vaunted to be.