Moses und Aron Pimp Post
Aug. 31st, 2011 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI realized that I don't really have anything on this journal explaining why Moses und Aron is my favorite opera. I actually haven't really pimped the opera very much at all, aside from that night a few years ago when Kate and I sat on her bed and I showed her scenes and she said "You're right, this is the most cracked out thing ever." So let's talk about the most cracked out thing ever.
Arnold Schoenberg was an early 20th century Austrian Jewish composer credited with the development of the 12 tone scale, and the earliest evolutions of atonal music, though he also created significant tonal compositions. He was an iconoclast who offered his new musical ideas as a revolution. His followers number among the most important musical innovators of the 20th century- Alban Berg, Anton Webern, John Cage, and numerous others.
As a Jew, I think his religious beliefs were reasonably comparable to those of German-language Jewry in his era. Of course, that was a quite wide swath of Jews, with key intellectual movements with influence including Chasidism, Haskalah/Enlightenment, (European) Reform Judaism, Secularism, Misnagdism, Communism, Biblical Criticism, Zionism, etc...Schoenberg was secular and in discourse with non-Jewish intellectuals, but he strongly identified as Jewish and found deep and powerful inspiration in his religion's ideas about faith and work. Narrowing it down a little bit, we look at figures like Martin Buber (who blended Enlightenment philosophy with Chasidism), Sigmund Freud (whose religious writings embodied a Biblical critical model that emphasized his psychoanalytic insights), Julius Wellhausen (the biggest name in Biblical criticism), Moses Mendelssohn (who encouraged the introduction of Western rationality into traditional religious approaches to Biblical study), and others among the baskets of ideas that seem to me to have driven Moses und Aron's creation.
So we have a text which for millennia was closed in certain senses to interpretation and which has just been reopened. In the era when Schoenberg wrote this opera, several 'biographies' of Moses had been recently published in German, including Freud's. These were attempts to take Moses the lawgiver and turn him into something else- often Moses the person in some sense, but in other cases into a metaphor for some new intellectual development.
Moses und Aron literally begins and ends with Buber, though, so it's worthwhile to spend a few moments on Ich und Du, Buber's seminal theological work which theorizes about the development of a personal relationship with God. Buber develops a distinction between two basic kinds of relationships a person can form: I-It relationships in which the I regards the partner in the relationship as a mere object it seeks to get something out of and the sublime I-Thou relationship in which the relationship is not bounded by needs but is instead an ends in itself. Obviously, Buber's point is to advocate for such an I-Thou relationship with God, to regard God as a partner worthy of developing a connection deeper than "If I pray, good things will happen." This notion of a relationship with God that is unbounded is the basic idea behind Moses's idea of God.
Meet Moses. He's a giant asshole. No, I dare you to show me a bigger asshole than Moses. God has told him that he has to be the leader of the Israelite redemption, and he's going to do it because God told him to, but he's very very clear that he doesn't actually like the Israelites. The Israelites think of God as something like the big white-bearded man in the sky, and Moses knows that God doesn't have any image. His opening line is a magnificent bellowing cry "Einziger, ewiger, allgegenwartiger, unsichtbarer und unvorstellbarer Gott" Which as far as I can tell is a long string of synonyms for the fact that nobody can understand God. Remember I mentioned forming a relationship with God without bounds? This is the first invocation of that idea. Moses has an I-Thou relationship with God. The Israelites have an I-It relationship, and he loathes them for it.
God says, "Don't worry. You're not going to have to deal with the Israelites. You have a brother who knows how to talk to them. Meet Aaron."
Meet Aaron. He was the cool kid in high school. Everyone loves him and he loves being the one everyone loves. He tells Moses "Don't worry, I got this." Then he starts telling Moses what he's going to say to the Israelites and Moses flips out. Aaron is able to make the Israelites listen because the God he describes has a visual component. Aaron believes in a God you can wrap your mind around. Moses is horrified. This cycle will repeat again and again, because it's the whole point of the opera. Moses believes in forming a relationship with an unknowable God. Aaron thinks the only way to explain the unknowable God to the Israelites is to make him seem knowable. Intriguingly, unlike the original Bible story where Aaron's main function is to intermediate between Moses and Pharaoh, Pharaoh barely figures here. Aaron's purpose is instead to intermediate between Moses and the Israelites.
Aaron sings a lovely tenor. Moses is a spoken part, what in musical terms is labeled 'sprechstimme' - speech-song. The idea is to reinforce that Aaron can communicate easily while Moses struggles. In opera, if you're not singing it's as if you're not being heard.
God is a six-part chorus. God only sings to Moses. God is strange and unknowable, with a sound unlike any operatic character you've ever seen before. God doesn't appear on stage, existing only as a voice. Appearing only as cryptic words that only Moses can interpret.
As I said, just as the opera opens with Buber, it closes with Buber. The final line, again Moses's bellowing sprechstimme, is "O wort, du wort, das mir fehlt." "Oh word, thou word, that has failed me." Thou word? What does that mean? It's from Ich und Du. God is the Word, and Moses has built an intimate relationship with the Word, a relationship that betrays him in the golden calf orgy. "Du wort", this impossible thing that Moses dedicates his life to, and his repayment is to live in a world that doesn't understand. The last line of Moses und Aron is a dagger strike right to my heart. I think it's the most powerful line I've come across in any opera, a perfect distillation of existential despair and doubt. (It has extra resonances if you translate it into Hebrew. Wort becomes Davar, as in: Aseret Hadibrot, the Ten Commandments. God and the Law become interchangeable. There's a reason John says "In the beginning was the word." In many forms of Jewish theology, God and the Bible are the same thing. It's been my observation that all of the truly deep literary explorations of Judaism begin with the fact that the very words of their stories are divine.)
Let's talk some more about the music. In some ways, 12 tone music is not for the meek. Melody has been redefined. Harmony has been broadened in scope. 12 tone music doesn't have a key the way traditional Western tonal music does. Instead, its structure is driven by the Tone Row, an arrangement of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale which provides the music with structure. You may listen at first and say "Wait a minute, what the hell is going on? Is this music?" But I said 'in some ways it's not for the meek' because in other ways, I think it's extremely accessible. Traditional tonal music built up a series of coded ways of conveying emotion. Use of different musical modes, contrasts between major and minor keys, arrangements of chords, all of these things had become, by Schoenberg's time, highly formalized. Atonalism throws all these out the window and just says to the listener, "Make your own determinations. How does this music make you feel?" So many of the manipulations that drive Schoenberg's composition only hit you subtly, repeated sounds that connect characters in ways less obvious than traditional musical themes and motifs. So many of the things Schoenberg discovered about music and dissonance are familiar to us as the tenets of punk rock and free jazz.
So Moses's tone row is different from Aaron's. I don't have the ear to tell you what the different notes are, but I can tell you that there's a difference in the way the music is written, that when Moses is talking everything feels very Moses-y, and the same is true of Aaron.
And one other note about the music: The trope about Schoenberg is that you play Schoenberg as if you were playing Brahms, while you sing Schoenberg as if you were singing Mozart. It sounds silly when you first listen to Schoenberg, but it's actually really important. If you treat Schoenberg with respect, try to hear the stories he's telling, you can hear in his orchestral music a reinvention of German High Romanticism. He's no less sentimental than Brahms, he's just speaking in a different vocabulary. A good interpreter of Schoenberg reveals this side of Schoenberg to you, doesn't let you wallow in sterile Modernism. The line about Mozart is a little more obscure, but I think something I heard Elena Goncharova say a whiile ago on the radio clarifies it, which is that every opera singer begins with the Mozartean repertory, before moving out and finding a niche. I think singing Schoenberg like Mozart means keeping a constant awareness of how Moses und Aron is situated within the operatic tradition, how Schoenberg is talking not only with Mozart but also with Wagner, Verdi, Strauss, Puccini, and the rest. But especially Wagner and Mozart, because there is something very German about Schoenberg's musical sensibility and I think he needs to be understood in that context.
Italian opera is about emotional spectacle. Deep, passionate emotional complexity is what makes Verdi so magnificent. German opera is about physical spectacle. Wagner's conception of the gesamtkunstwerk is a theatrical creation where every facet of the production design is geared toward making the maximum impact on the audience. If Schoenberg rejects Wagner ideologically, if Schoenberg pushes for uncertainty and questioning where Wagner seeks certainty, there is still in Schoenberg an appreciation for the power of stagecraft spectacle. Yet it's channeled very differently. The grand moment of spectacle in Moses und Aron is the orgy of worship for the golden calf. When I first saw the opera, I said, "What?" I then did research. There are other operas and theatrical works based on the Exodus story. Rossini wrote Mose in Egitto. Handel wrote an oratorio. Watch Prince of Egypt or The Ten Commandments. They all climax in the same place- the splitting of the sea. That is, if you are looking for spectacle in the Exodus story, THE place to go. The Biblical author knew it too- when you get to that moment in the Bible, the narrative pauses for an incredible song of thanks, an acknowledgment that this moment deserves more than mere narration.
Yet Schoenberg ignores it completely. He also only shows one of the ten plagues. He's not interested in the spectacle of God wowing the people. That's not his story. His story is about the people wowing the audience, with the depths of their passionate debauchery. The second act of Moses und Aron, focused on the golden calf, is a dizzying, chaotic maelstrom of constantly heightening tension. The people of Israel are in pursuit of something that they can't find, cannot access. And in particular, that access is something that Wagner hands to his characters in spades. The figures of the Ring cycle engage in deadly combats against the Gods. In "Parsifal", the protagonist is allowed to find the Grail. Schoenberg says no. He doesn't believe in a God who consorts with humanity. He believes in a God who holds back, and he despairs of us ever finding the relationship Buber describes.
But let us return to Moses and Aaron, the central figures of the story. The third act, whose libretto was written but whose music was never finished (Yes, my favorite opera is unfinished. How surprised are you by this shocking revelation?), is a return to dialogue between Moses and Aaron. This time, at last, Moses has the upper hand. He more or less banishes Aaron for his role in the golden calf fiasco. And again, I saw this for the first time and said "What? That's not what happens!" But that's what's so cool about this moment. I always struggled with the question of why Aaron not only wasn't punished for the Golden Calf but instead gained power as High Priest, but Schoenberg just tries it out the other way.
It's exactly like that game I was playing last week of writing characters out of the Bible. You penetrate deep into the mindset of characters and then you change something and see where it goes. Imagine a Moses and Aaron for whom ideas were more important than family and this is where you end up. Watching that little change taught me an incredible amount about Moses and Aaron, made it possible for me to write the characters my own way. When I write about their lives, family is everything, family is this glue they're constantly getting stuck in. That's because I saw what happens when that's not the case.
Aaron and Moses spend the whole third act talking past each other. They talk and they talk and they talk and at the end, Aaron still gets banished and Moses is anguished and alone and now he doesn't even have someone to intermediate between him and the people. All he has is his God, and he feels abandoned by God, because God was supposed to bring redemption and deliverance and instead has only brought estrangement. Poor Moses. But don't feel bad, Moses is still a huge asshole.
Moses und Aron is weird, frustrating, confusing. Its music is different and difficult and its plot so carefully distorts the Biblical story that its heresy is monumental. And its unmusical ending, incredibly difficult to stage, is easy to just seem bad. But I love this opera because I love Moses and I love Aaron and I inhabit the struggle between them so constantly that I savor every moment of it. It's a struggle between a religion that lets you live a comfortable, normal life without sacrificing your faith and a religion that demands you give up everything in service of an incomprehensible idea. Schoenberg says that the later value system has to win, and it is perhaps his declaration of a winner in the struggle that is most challenging about the opera. But in marking out his iconoclastic conclusion, Schoenberg emblazons the opera with the incomparable singularity of his genius.
And um... this is like... significantly more than 2000 words, so we'll stop here and I'll do another post later about different stagings and filmings.
Arnold Schoenberg was an early 20th century Austrian Jewish composer credited with the development of the 12 tone scale, and the earliest evolutions of atonal music, though he also created significant tonal compositions. He was an iconoclast who offered his new musical ideas as a revolution. His followers number among the most important musical innovators of the 20th century- Alban Berg, Anton Webern, John Cage, and numerous others.
As a Jew, I think his religious beliefs were reasonably comparable to those of German-language Jewry in his era. Of course, that was a quite wide swath of Jews, with key intellectual movements with influence including Chasidism, Haskalah/Enlightenment, (European) Reform Judaism, Secularism, Misnagdism, Communism, Biblical Criticism, Zionism, etc...Schoenberg was secular and in discourse with non-Jewish intellectuals, but he strongly identified as Jewish and found deep and powerful inspiration in his religion's ideas about faith and work. Narrowing it down a little bit, we look at figures like Martin Buber (who blended Enlightenment philosophy with Chasidism), Sigmund Freud (whose religious writings embodied a Biblical critical model that emphasized his psychoanalytic insights), Julius Wellhausen (the biggest name in Biblical criticism), Moses Mendelssohn (who encouraged the introduction of Western rationality into traditional religious approaches to Biblical study), and others among the baskets of ideas that seem to me to have driven Moses und Aron's creation.
So we have a text which for millennia was closed in certain senses to interpretation and which has just been reopened. In the era when Schoenberg wrote this opera, several 'biographies' of Moses had been recently published in German, including Freud's. These were attempts to take Moses the lawgiver and turn him into something else- often Moses the person in some sense, but in other cases into a metaphor for some new intellectual development.
Moses und Aron literally begins and ends with Buber, though, so it's worthwhile to spend a few moments on Ich und Du, Buber's seminal theological work which theorizes about the development of a personal relationship with God. Buber develops a distinction between two basic kinds of relationships a person can form: I-It relationships in which the I regards the partner in the relationship as a mere object it seeks to get something out of and the sublime I-Thou relationship in which the relationship is not bounded by needs but is instead an ends in itself. Obviously, Buber's point is to advocate for such an I-Thou relationship with God, to regard God as a partner worthy of developing a connection deeper than "If I pray, good things will happen." This notion of a relationship with God that is unbounded is the basic idea behind Moses's idea of God.
Meet Moses. He's a giant asshole. No, I dare you to show me a bigger asshole than Moses. God has told him that he has to be the leader of the Israelite redemption, and he's going to do it because God told him to, but he's very very clear that he doesn't actually like the Israelites. The Israelites think of God as something like the big white-bearded man in the sky, and Moses knows that God doesn't have any image. His opening line is a magnificent bellowing cry "Einziger, ewiger, allgegenwartiger, unsichtbarer und unvorstellbarer Gott" Which as far as I can tell is a long string of synonyms for the fact that nobody can understand God. Remember I mentioned forming a relationship with God without bounds? This is the first invocation of that idea. Moses has an I-Thou relationship with God. The Israelites have an I-It relationship, and he loathes them for it.
God says, "Don't worry. You're not going to have to deal with the Israelites. You have a brother who knows how to talk to them. Meet Aaron."
Meet Aaron. He was the cool kid in high school. Everyone loves him and he loves being the one everyone loves. He tells Moses "Don't worry, I got this." Then he starts telling Moses what he's going to say to the Israelites and Moses flips out. Aaron is able to make the Israelites listen because the God he describes has a visual component. Aaron believes in a God you can wrap your mind around. Moses is horrified. This cycle will repeat again and again, because it's the whole point of the opera. Moses believes in forming a relationship with an unknowable God. Aaron thinks the only way to explain the unknowable God to the Israelites is to make him seem knowable. Intriguingly, unlike the original Bible story where Aaron's main function is to intermediate between Moses and Pharaoh, Pharaoh barely figures here. Aaron's purpose is instead to intermediate between Moses and the Israelites.
Aaron sings a lovely tenor. Moses is a spoken part, what in musical terms is labeled 'sprechstimme' - speech-song. The idea is to reinforce that Aaron can communicate easily while Moses struggles. In opera, if you're not singing it's as if you're not being heard.
God is a six-part chorus. God only sings to Moses. God is strange and unknowable, with a sound unlike any operatic character you've ever seen before. God doesn't appear on stage, existing only as a voice. Appearing only as cryptic words that only Moses can interpret.
As I said, just as the opera opens with Buber, it closes with Buber. The final line, again Moses's bellowing sprechstimme, is "O wort, du wort, das mir fehlt." "Oh word, thou word, that has failed me." Thou word? What does that mean? It's from Ich und Du. God is the Word, and Moses has built an intimate relationship with the Word, a relationship that betrays him in the golden calf orgy. "Du wort", this impossible thing that Moses dedicates his life to, and his repayment is to live in a world that doesn't understand. The last line of Moses und Aron is a dagger strike right to my heart. I think it's the most powerful line I've come across in any opera, a perfect distillation of existential despair and doubt. (It has extra resonances if you translate it into Hebrew. Wort becomes Davar, as in: Aseret Hadibrot, the Ten Commandments. God and the Law become interchangeable. There's a reason John says "In the beginning was the word." In many forms of Jewish theology, God and the Bible are the same thing. It's been my observation that all of the truly deep literary explorations of Judaism begin with the fact that the very words of their stories are divine.)
Let's talk some more about the music. In some ways, 12 tone music is not for the meek. Melody has been redefined. Harmony has been broadened in scope. 12 tone music doesn't have a key the way traditional Western tonal music does. Instead, its structure is driven by the Tone Row, an arrangement of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale which provides the music with structure. You may listen at first and say "Wait a minute, what the hell is going on? Is this music?" But I said 'in some ways it's not for the meek' because in other ways, I think it's extremely accessible. Traditional tonal music built up a series of coded ways of conveying emotion. Use of different musical modes, contrasts between major and minor keys, arrangements of chords, all of these things had become, by Schoenberg's time, highly formalized. Atonalism throws all these out the window and just says to the listener, "Make your own determinations. How does this music make you feel?" So many of the manipulations that drive Schoenberg's composition only hit you subtly, repeated sounds that connect characters in ways less obvious than traditional musical themes and motifs. So many of the things Schoenberg discovered about music and dissonance are familiar to us as the tenets of punk rock and free jazz.
So Moses's tone row is different from Aaron's. I don't have the ear to tell you what the different notes are, but I can tell you that there's a difference in the way the music is written, that when Moses is talking everything feels very Moses-y, and the same is true of Aaron.
And one other note about the music: The trope about Schoenberg is that you play Schoenberg as if you were playing Brahms, while you sing Schoenberg as if you were singing Mozart. It sounds silly when you first listen to Schoenberg, but it's actually really important. If you treat Schoenberg with respect, try to hear the stories he's telling, you can hear in his orchestral music a reinvention of German High Romanticism. He's no less sentimental than Brahms, he's just speaking in a different vocabulary. A good interpreter of Schoenberg reveals this side of Schoenberg to you, doesn't let you wallow in sterile Modernism. The line about Mozart is a little more obscure, but I think something I heard Elena Goncharova say a whiile ago on the radio clarifies it, which is that every opera singer begins with the Mozartean repertory, before moving out and finding a niche. I think singing Schoenberg like Mozart means keeping a constant awareness of how Moses und Aron is situated within the operatic tradition, how Schoenberg is talking not only with Mozart but also with Wagner, Verdi, Strauss, Puccini, and the rest. But especially Wagner and Mozart, because there is something very German about Schoenberg's musical sensibility and I think he needs to be understood in that context.
Italian opera is about emotional spectacle. Deep, passionate emotional complexity is what makes Verdi so magnificent. German opera is about physical spectacle. Wagner's conception of the gesamtkunstwerk is a theatrical creation where every facet of the production design is geared toward making the maximum impact on the audience. If Schoenberg rejects Wagner ideologically, if Schoenberg pushes for uncertainty and questioning where Wagner seeks certainty, there is still in Schoenberg an appreciation for the power of stagecraft spectacle. Yet it's channeled very differently. The grand moment of spectacle in Moses und Aron is the orgy of worship for the golden calf. When I first saw the opera, I said, "What?" I then did research. There are other operas and theatrical works based on the Exodus story. Rossini wrote Mose in Egitto. Handel wrote an oratorio. Watch Prince of Egypt or The Ten Commandments. They all climax in the same place- the splitting of the sea. That is, if you are looking for spectacle in the Exodus story, THE place to go. The Biblical author knew it too- when you get to that moment in the Bible, the narrative pauses for an incredible song of thanks, an acknowledgment that this moment deserves more than mere narration.
Yet Schoenberg ignores it completely. He also only shows one of the ten plagues. He's not interested in the spectacle of God wowing the people. That's not his story. His story is about the people wowing the audience, with the depths of their passionate debauchery. The second act of Moses und Aron, focused on the golden calf, is a dizzying, chaotic maelstrom of constantly heightening tension. The people of Israel are in pursuit of something that they can't find, cannot access. And in particular, that access is something that Wagner hands to his characters in spades. The figures of the Ring cycle engage in deadly combats against the Gods. In "Parsifal", the protagonist is allowed to find the Grail. Schoenberg says no. He doesn't believe in a God who consorts with humanity. He believes in a God who holds back, and he despairs of us ever finding the relationship Buber describes.
But let us return to Moses and Aaron, the central figures of the story. The third act, whose libretto was written but whose music was never finished (Yes, my favorite opera is unfinished. How surprised are you by this shocking revelation?), is a return to dialogue between Moses and Aaron. This time, at last, Moses has the upper hand. He more or less banishes Aaron for his role in the golden calf fiasco. And again, I saw this for the first time and said "What? That's not what happens!" But that's what's so cool about this moment. I always struggled with the question of why Aaron not only wasn't punished for the Golden Calf but instead gained power as High Priest, but Schoenberg just tries it out the other way.
It's exactly like that game I was playing last week of writing characters out of the Bible. You penetrate deep into the mindset of characters and then you change something and see where it goes. Imagine a Moses and Aaron for whom ideas were more important than family and this is where you end up. Watching that little change taught me an incredible amount about Moses and Aaron, made it possible for me to write the characters my own way. When I write about their lives, family is everything, family is this glue they're constantly getting stuck in. That's because I saw what happens when that's not the case.
Aaron and Moses spend the whole third act talking past each other. They talk and they talk and they talk and at the end, Aaron still gets banished and Moses is anguished and alone and now he doesn't even have someone to intermediate between him and the people. All he has is his God, and he feels abandoned by God, because God was supposed to bring redemption and deliverance and instead has only brought estrangement. Poor Moses. But don't feel bad, Moses is still a huge asshole.
Moses und Aron is weird, frustrating, confusing. Its music is different and difficult and its plot so carefully distorts the Biblical story that its heresy is monumental. And its unmusical ending, incredibly difficult to stage, is easy to just seem bad. But I love this opera because I love Moses and I love Aaron and I inhabit the struggle between them so constantly that I savor every moment of it. It's a struggle between a religion that lets you live a comfortable, normal life without sacrificing your faith and a religion that demands you give up everything in service of an incomprehensible idea. Schoenberg says that the later value system has to win, and it is perhaps his declaration of a winner in the struggle that is most challenging about the opera. But in marking out his iconoclastic conclusion, Schoenberg emblazons the opera with the incomparable singularity of his genius.
And um... this is like... significantly more than 2000 words, so we'll stop here and I'll do another post later about different stagings and filmings.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-01 03:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-01 03:22 am (UTC)It is also such a monumental and complicated theatrical object that I have lots of difficulty talking about it coherently.
Also, an anecdote: In college I took an opera appreciation course and when it was time to write the first paper I went into my professor's office and told him I was going to write a paper on Moses und Aron and his jaw dropped and he looked at me like I was crazy. A couple years later I exchanged emails with him on an unrelated topic and he dropped a line in at the end about he was still amazed that I'd tried writing about Moses und Aron.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-01 03:28 am (UTC)And awesome anecdote, too -- I'm impressed that the prof remembered this years later. Clearly you made an impression on him
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-01 03:10 pm (UTC)Believe it or not, that also means "without undue bombast". If you sing Schoenberg like Mozart, you sing it with a certain lightness and rhythmic fidelity that projects the text almost more than the emotion behind it. In my experience with Schoenberg, you can't treat it vocally like Verdi or Wagner, where you're always saying more and thus singing more.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-09-06 02:59 am (UTC)Matthew