Morality and Art: ‘Roses’ Leaves the Issue Open

Rarely does music question the relationship of art and morality. Is music really the “holy art,” as Schubert hymned, that purifies and elevates, or is it just another commodity?

In his 1980 Holocaust music theater piece “Through Roses,” composer Marc Neikrug asks why a Jewish concert violinist should escape the Nazi slaughter simply because his concentration camp officers perversely appreciate his musicianship.

Monday evening at SummerFest ’97 in Sherwood Auditorium, the La Jolla Chamber Music Society presented the West Coast premiere of “Through Roses,” a prelude to tonight’s screening of a new German-made film version, directed by Jurgen Flimm and featuring actor Maximilian Schell and violinist Pinchas Zukerman.

The composer conducted Monday’s performance, which featured actor John Rubinstein in the role of the tormented Holocaust survivor whose sleepless nights relive the nightmare of concentration camp existence.

Neikrug’s unusual staging places eight musicians (piano, percussion, strings and winds) behind a black scrim. Their music stand lights give them a spectral presence behind the actor-narrator at the front of the stage. This spare scenario, combined with Neikrug’s constricted, post-Expressionist stylistic palette, narrows the audience’s emotional response to a respectful but sober pathos.

The dense, tightly crafted score--primarily accompaniment for the actor--admirably sustains angst throughout the piece but does not venture far from this emotional terrain. Neikrug’s idiom reveals debts to Bartok’s pointillistic “night music,” Schoenberg’s atonal string textures and even a touch of Ives in the chordal piano writing.

But inasmuch as librettist Neikrug has his protagonist unintentionally accompany the brutal murder of his lover at the hands of the camp guards, such a modest emotional and musical landscape is disturbingly understated.

Like playwright Donald Margulies in “The Model Apartment” (finishing a four-week run at the La Jolla Playhouse), Neikrug wrestles with the burden of survivor guilt. And like the Margulies play, “Through Roses” offers neither resolution nor hope.

Oddly, however, the longer (80 minutes as opposed to the 50-minute staged version) and “opened-up” film version of “Through Roses” adds the hopeful character of a promising young student violinist, to whom the protagonist symbolically passes his baton before dying.

Rubenstein’s sharp emotional focus and succinct dramatic gestures were convincing and more congruent to the role than the exaggerated, silent movie fulminations of Schell in the movie. Monday’s audience gave its warmest approbation to Rubenstein.

The concert opened with race-to-the-finish reading of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, with violinist Daniel Phillips setting the aerobic pace and overly vigorous interpretation.

* The Jurgen Flimm film of “Through Roses” screens tonight at 7:30, Sherwood Auditorium at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 700 Prospect St., La Jolla. $4. (619) 459-3728.