OPERA REVIEW : Germanic Daring in Long Beach

Never underestimate the power of a music critic.

“It would be nice if Los Angeles--Arnold Schoenberg’s final, longtime residence--were sufficiently proud and resourceful to arrange a performance of ‘Die Jakobsleiter.’ ”

The writer in question happened to be this writer. The work in question, also known as “Jacob’s Ladder,” represents a crucial if troubled milestone in the composer’s revolutionary output. The occasion for the wishful civic thinking was the U.S. premiere, ventured by the Santa Fe Opera back in 1968.

It only took a quarter of a century for Los Angeles to turn critic into prophet. Better late than. . . .

Oh, never mind.

The big local event occurred Thursday night in Long Beach. Michael Milenski, the ever-daring director of the modest Long Beach Opera, decided to fill the vast open spaces of the Terrace Theater with some pensive dissonances and religious musings imported from Germany. With a lot of help from the Bochum Symphony and the Dusseldorf Playhouse, he mustered an uncompromisingly complex, uncompromisingly cerebral, uncompromisingly dangerous double bill.

The first half involved Schoenberg’s unfinished scenic oratorio. The second, enacted on the same abstract set, introduced the U.S. to Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s “ecclesiastic action,” “Turning I Saw Great Injustice,” a.k.a. “Ich wandte mich und sah an alles Unrecht, das geschah inter der Sonne.”

This well-matched pair is not likely to displace “Cavalleria” and “Pagliacci” in conventional hearts and minds. Nevertheless, it did serve as a useful reminder that--for better or worse, irrational or not--opera still can function as a thinking-person’s art.

“Jakobsleiter” was conceived as the final part of a trilogy based on Schoenberg’s own convoluted theosophical poems. The text, inspired by Balzac’s “Seraphita,” was published in 1917, but some of the forbidding score remained incomplete at the time of the composer’s death in 1951. Winfried Zillig was elected by Schoenberg’s widow to fill in the blanks and polish the details in time for the first concert performance, in Vienna nine years later.

The music documents Schoenberg’s rather violent progression from over-ripe romanticism to liberal atonality. Strict serialism still loomed on the horizon. The characters indulge, sparingly, in nearly sentimental cantilena at climactic moments (everything is relative). Much of the vocal writing, however, suggests previews of coming Sprechgesang attractions, and even the great choruses are partly spoken, partly sung.

The essential trouble with “Jakobsleiter” is dramatic, not musical. The action, if it can be thus labeled, involves a series of philosophical exchanges between the Archangel Gabriel and a collection of souls suspended between death and transfiguration. Even with the crutch of supertitles, the spiritual arguments are a bit difficult to follow, much less process. And souls remain stubbornly resistant to literal embodiment.

The Long Beach production originated in Dusseldorf, where it received three performances last September. It offers a telling demonstration of the ponderous but picturesque, quasi-symbolic theatricality that is so trendy these days among avant-gardists in general, Germanic avant-gardists in particular.

For her low-tech set, Alberte Barsa has designed a heavy-metal network of scaffolding, ramps and ladders. The hard-working singers do a lot of climbing, clambering, posing and contorting in this oversize jungle-gym while attempting to articulate Schoenberg’s impossible intervals with proper urgency.

The chorus sports neutral black mufti. The principals try valiantly not to look silly in outfits that fuse the worst of outer-space comic book imagery, Eastern-priestly caricature and funny rabbit-ear ornamentation.

Werner Schroeter directs traffic resourcefully. Still, he cannot make the static seem vital.

At this, the first of three performances, Henk Smit brought rough baritonal authority to the presumably profound mutterings of Gabriel. A stratospheric soprano named Sharon Rostorf sang the terminal plaints of “The Soul” most affectingly (contrary to Schoenberg’s wishes, she ceded her spoken lines to an accommodating actress). The others tended to get lost in the passing parade.

Eberhard Kloke, the conductor, enforced reasonable accuracy and a modicum of expressive force with the big onstage orchestra (from Bochum) and the rather timid chorus (from Long Beach).

Zimmermann completed “Turning,” his free adaptation of the inquisition episode of “The Brothers Karamazov,” on Aug. 5, 1970, when he was 52. Five days later, he committed suicide.

The spare, percussive music for this affecting treatise on monastic withdrawal accompanies a fascinating verbal duel between Jesus Christ and the high priest of His church. A lone baritone (here the intensely committed Johannes M. Kosters) chants sometimes eerie, often passionate, frequently overlapping commentary.

At the climax, half ironic and half ecstatic, the choir breaks in for a crazed seven-bar benediction that is a variation on Bach’s chorale “Es ist genug.” It can be no coincidence that Alban Berg quoted the same strains in his own otherworldly valedictory, the Violin Concerto.

The Long Beach authorities decided wisely to perform the spoken dialogues, if not the baritone solos, in English. Then they compromised this advantage by casting German actors as the adversaries. One admired the heroism of Markus Boysen as Christ and, even more, the pathos of the celebrated Marianne Hoppe as the Grand Inquisitor. But one had trouble penetrating their accents.

The audience did not fill the 3,000-seat hall, and there were more empty seats after intermission than before. Still, Kloke and his allies received a deserved ovation at the end of the extraordinarily challenging evening.

Incidental intelligence: The rather skimpy house program--without which one could hardly tell the play, much less the players--cost a dollar. The price was low, but the precedent disturbing.

The scaffolding decors bore an odd resemblance to the all-purpose set used by Peter Sellars for “The Death of Klinghoffer.” Sellars, whose controversial, comparatively magnum opus seems to have been snubbed by the sponsoring Music Center Opera, admitted during intermission that “Klinghoffer” might, just might, turn up soon in Long Beach.

“There have been discussions,” he confirmed, in properly mysterious, mildly conspiratorial tones.