ARTS & AMUSEMENTS
Bloody, Bold and Resolute
REID
RACKING my operatic memories and the critico-historical record, I cannot remember or trace anything to touch Schoenberg's post- humous operatic torso Moses and Aaron as we see and hear it in the Solti-Hall-Bury production at Covent Garden. For structural audacity and span Wagner's Ring is unbeatable, I suppose. The snag there is Wagnerian metaphysics: all fog and confusion. Alongside The Ring, Schoen- berg's piece is tiny: a mere 105 minutes of music. But these 105 minutes serve a theme whose sim- plicity and grandeur make most repertory scenarios seem piddling affairs indeed. Naturally, it is a theme that scandalises all champions of received ideas. Of that, more in a .moment. Meantime, a word about Moses and Aaron as spectacle. Peter Hall took an outsize operatic chorus, stiffened it with non-singing actors (movement-leaders, let us call them) and turned that chorus into one of the great anthropological hives: the Chosen People. We see the Chosen People in bondage. They sweat and swarm about the scaffolding of half-built temples, dwarfed by a monster pharaonic head with blank stone eyes. Aaron tries to sell them the idea of God unseen. unknowable. At this they laugh in harsh, precisely notated rhythm. The People's shouts and ex- claimings, whether of anger or joy or bestiality. are all notated thus, usually in sprechstinnne. Within their technical limits, such passages are required to be performed as exactly as the great sung choruses. those monuments of atonal counterpoint, each inscribed implicitly to the memory of J. S. Bach. Anything in the way of chorus ad-libbing, even where spoken or semi-spoken words are involved, would, of course, have been unthinkable to Schoenberg, whose rhythmic schemes are tightly locked frames. But note how his general pro- cedure serves his particular purpose. A chorus tHat laughs or yells ad lib., that is to say, any old" how, resolves into a pack of individuals. which wasn't Schoenberg's idea at all. What we get from the score is a conception of the Chosen People as a multifarious entity or swarm. In a way, they are special bees or ants of God. This conception Hall conveys with surging and con- trolled passion. When the Chosen recoil before rod-become-serpent and taste of water-made- blood, when they gorge themselves on raw meat flung up from the slaughter-pits and writhe in copulatory heaps around the Golden Calf : when these and a dozen other things happen, we sense the imperious current of racial predestination. The Chosen taste of a paradise and a purgatory which, against a later code, transcend personal penalties and rewards.
Are there, among operatic spectacles, any valid comparisons? The Gibichungs' scene in Goner- &ammo ttng? Aida? Orfeo? Les Troyelts? Hardly. No conceivable production of any one of these could achieve what Hall, helped by John Bury's spacious, penetrating designs, has brought off at Covent Garden. The basic reason for that is simple. None of these other spectacles raises so grand an issue.
Schoenberg's libretto (in German but twice Englished, the second translation, David Rud- kin's, being the one Covent Garden uses) derives --with slants and glosses of his own-- from the Books of Exodus and Leviticus. When he died in 1951, he left nothing more than fragmentary musical sketches for his third (and concluding) Act. Inevitably, then. Covent Garden takes us no farther than the end of Act 2. Heavy-tongued, self-tormented Moses is, to all appearance, dialectically dished by that honey-mouthed Bellini tenor and demagogue, Aaron. While the Chosen troop behind the Pillar of Fire towards the land of Aaron's promise, Moses smashes the Tables of the Law, renounces as madness all he has believed in, and sinks to the sand as if hoping that it will swallow him up and cancel him out. At the same time, the massed violins make a last, Peter Hall desolate arc of melody and come, to rest on an F sharp that skewers the soul. This is the end. An end that is no end.
While reluctant to write one critical word against Mr. Solti and Mr. Hall, whose work on Moses and Aaron has been prodigious and noble, I must reproach both for supporting orally or 'in print the thesis that, dramatically and philo- sophically, this ending is all compact and com- fortable, as the father said (vide Sam Weller) who cut off his little boy's head to cure him of squinting. Mr. Hall unashamedly rejoices in the torso as torso for reasons of startling irrelevance: that is to say, because 'its incompleteness is . . . so characteristic of our Godless age,' because 'our time of doubt distrusts solutions,' because he 'can't help feeling that the defeat of Moses is the work's truest end,' and because 'Schoenberg's dilemma was . . . that of any thinking man in search of God.'
But Schoenberg's Act 3 text, dramatically a lame duck (one reason, perhaps, why he never got round to writing the music for it), restores Moses to self-faith as well as to power and ends with the affirmation that even in the wasteland the Chosen shall be victorious and achieve 'the goal: unity with God.'
Now it is true that God isn't exactly a la mode. But God is what Moses and Aaron is about, however distasteful that may be to those who dote on doubt; and there's no point in Mr. Hall's suggesting that on this he knows Schoen- berg's mind better than the archaic old boy knew it himself. There is every reason to suppose that Schoenberg believed in God much in the way and light that Moses did. Why' on earth should he have gone driving around in dilemma-and- pair like any Old Earnest of 1965, searching for what he didn't for a moment think might not be there?
Altogether, Moses and Aaron, for all its grandeur, is as bad a case of torso as could be. There are glaring :esthetic consequences. The great chorus and crowd movements in Act 1 and later lead with crushing logic to a long orgy that is mainly (and savagely and seductively) orchestral. In a purely musical sense, then, we walk the plank. Any first-year student can see that the Golden Calf 'dances' should have been counterpoised by a third 'Act of predominantly vocal structure, though with different textures from the splendid and ferocious and frightening ones of the opening Act.
Later on in the present run (lamentably short) I hope to write more about the production, some of the people who are in it and certain of the musical aspects. Also about certain weaknesses. Some of these are inherent. Others might be cured by a bit of rethinking. It is all too clear that Moses and Aaron has sent me potty. But it would be idle to pretend that, while unique, it offers nothing but the best in the best of operatic worlds.
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