Homecoming for ‘Moses and Aron’

Sunday night, Los Angeles Opera took a break from holiday frivolity for something altogether serious.

Midway through its run of “The Merry Widow” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, it gave the local premiere of Schoenberg’s opera, “Moses and Aron,” in a concert performance by the German Symphony Orchestra and Radio Chorus, both of Berlin, conducted by Kent Nagano.

It was the first performance in Los Angeles of one of the 20th century’s greatest and most imposing operas, one that has an intimate connection to this city.

Schoenberg began “Moses and Aron” in Berlin in 1930, shortly after he had invented his 12-tone system. By 1932, he had composed the first two acts to his own libretto liberally based on Exodus, but composition of the third act was interrupted by his own exodus from Germany after the Nazi rise to power in 1933.

The next year he settled in Los Angeles, where he remained until his death in 1951 and where he fully intended to finish the opera. Teaching duties at USC and UCLA, commissions for other works and poor health diverted him. His application to the Guggenheim Foundation for financial help to complete “Moses and Aron” was famously rejected.

The Guggenheim probably did us a great favor, as the magnificent and altogether satisfying performance on Sunday indicated. This is an extraordinary philosophical opera whose very essence is its incompleteness. What Schoenberg called his “tremendous subject” was inexpressibility.

Inarticulate Moses has no words for the profound otherness of religious wonder; sweet-talking Aron, Moses’ brother and mouthpiece, has too many words. Truth and artistry are in conflict; each alone is incomplete, yet Moses and Aron cannot come to terms. Neither achieved ultimate enlightenment, nor will he.

This struggle was also Schoenberg’s private and unending one. He saw himself as a prophet who laid down musical laws but had no intention of giving up his own artistic fancy. Indeed, for all the philosophy in “Moses and Aron” and for all its complicated music, it is also extraordinary theatrical.

Berlin’s lasciviously decadent Weimar Republic cabaret sensibility allied with a dose of Cecil B. DeMille spectacle seems to have inspired what was, at the time, the wildest orgy scene in all of opera. The frenzied dance around the Golden Calf calls for, among other things, the slaying of four naked virgins. Following Schoenberg’s specific stage instructions actually got the New York City Opera in trouble with the National Endowment for the Arts when the company presented the first New York production in 1990.

Still, there are advantages to hearing “Moses and Aron” in concert. It was initially conceived as an oratorio, and it has such a difficult chorus part that exceptional singers and an extravagant number of rehearsals are essential for any staging. A concert performance, of course, draws closer attention to the sheer immensity of this music’s intricacy.

Schoenberg’s score is based on an underlying (but imperceptible) single row of 12 pitches that serve as symbol for a god ever present but unseen. Twelve is such a magical number that the composer (superstitious about the number 13) shortened the biblical name of Aaron by a letter to have a 12-letter title. From this 12-tone row, the opera opens with a mystical chord that flowers into extravagant ever-changing variations that can be bewilderingly elaborate, with many things going on at once, but that nevertheless has an intense dramatic fervor. It daunts the first-time listener (a stage performance, ironically, can seem less a sensory overload simply because one listens less), but the unique sound of the opera is nonetheless unmistakable.

The musical difficulty is similarly daunting to performers. Fifty years after Schoenberg’s death in Los Angeles, his most ambitious work is, frankly, thus far beyond the musical resources of the city’s opera company. (Someday, perhaps, the company might try Schoenberg’s Hollywood-inspired notion that animation can enhance the orgy.) Now, at least, we know what we might strive for.

The “Moses and Aron” concert performance was the highlight of Nagano’s first season as music director of this Berlin orchestra last spring, and he was, upon being appointed principal conductor of Los Angeles Opera, determined to bring it overseas and make it the highlight of the ongoing Schoenberg festival in Los Angeles this season.

At that he has succeeded. His command of the score is compelling. His orchestra did not give the impression of playing with effortless ease, and not all details came out clearly. But Nagano produced a sense of grand dramatic sweep, of rhythmic vitality and of lyrical elegance. Most important, I think, he brought out the sheer color in this music.

The opera has two major roles. Franz Mazura was a majestic Moses who does not sing but delivers his lines in speech-song. Schoenberg made Aron a lyrical tenor, his music flamboyantly ornamented. Donald Kaasch was unusually heroic in the role, which did not make the contrast between the brothers ideal but did make their arguments all the more frighteningly powerful.

The singers of the small parts of youths, maidens and virgins were placed with the chorus behind the orchestra and all were delivered expertly, adding to the impressiveness of all the singing.

An unusually interesting and original essay about the overlooked mystical side of Schoenberg’s opera by a UCLA musicologist, Mitchell Morris, in the program booklet indicates the seriousness with which the company approached this important project. But then it neglects to list the names of the orchestra and chorus it went through so much trouble and expense to bring to Los Angeles.

Also missing was the name of the chief conductor of the Radio Chorus, Simon Halsey, who surely shares much credit for its outstanding and essential contribution to the evening’s success.