Moses and Aaron
SIR,—Someone has to say it.
I can't see the Emperor's new clothes.
I went to hear Moses and Aaron at the Promenade concert, having already heard it on the radio. I might have had reservations about criticising the score, on the grounds of unfamiliarity with the idiom; but these were liquidated by the programme note of Mr. Hans Keller, the Aaron of the Atonal School, in which we were assured that the music makes an immediate effect. So it does, but a most unpleasant one. When the opera was broadcast from Covent Garden, the BBC gave us music for lute and recorder by William 1.awes during the interval. The contrast between this simple but effective music and Schonberg's compli- cated score was most striking. The inherent disabilities under which an atonal composer works were stated thirty years ago by Constant Lambert. We are always being told of Schonberg's technical mastery, but the result seems curiously invertebrate. Perhaps this is due to the necessity for avoiding any harmony or melodic phrase that may suggest a tonic. If we can imagine musical octopods, then we can imagine an ideal audience for Schonberg. The limitations of the atonal idiom were exposed by the orgy scene. Any excitement caused at Covent Garden must have been due to the spectacle on the stage, not to the music. Now, if Moses and Aaron had been put on by private subscription there would be no point in writing a letter of this sort; but it was put on by the highly-subsidised Covent Garden Opera and broadcast (twice in full already!) by the British Broadcasting Corporation—broadcasts paid for out of our licence money. There is a case for preferring the foreign to the native product when the former is the better; but is there any case for preferring it when we can do better at home? The time and money spent on producing this typical product of Gay Vienna would have been better employed in giving us, say. Vaughan- Williams's rarely-heard masterpiece Riders to the Sea. There might well have been enough left over to give us A Village Romeo and Juliet as well!
13 Temple Road, Temple Cowley, Oxford
H. ROBERTS
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