Loss and mystery as a source of meaning

Arnold Schonberg: Moses und Aron

Stage Director Romeo Castellucci has turned the fact that Schoenberg's final work Moses und Aron is unfinished into a major source of imagery and narrative drive for the two acts that remain. Mystery becomes a source of meaning, much as it does for other visionary artists like Cocteau and David Lynch. Moses's last words, the final ones in the opera, are "Oh word, thou word, that I lack." "More than a limit", Castellucci says, "it seems to me that the unfinished state of this opera is a clever philosophical strategy meant to overthrow the linear perspective of the path, of the exit." We begin on a gauze-covered stage with Moses (Thomas Johannes Mayer) speaking with the Burning Bush, now a Kubrick-style tape recorder spewing magnetic tape in which he becomes entangled. Soon he begins the opera-long dialectic with his brother Aron (John Graham-Hall). Once the gauze is lifted things really become interesting.

Musically this is an exemplary performance. Mayer's Sprechgesang (speech-song) is contrasted with the lyrical and very musical tenor of Graham-Hall, while the chorus plays a central role in the music and the drama. Philippe Jordan keeps the action flowing, making sure that Schonberg's musical ebbs and flow, and not Castellucci's stage business, moves the entire theatrical experience forward. One must mention the shameless scene-stealer in the cast, however. It's the very large live bull, playing the Golden Calf, who brings immense dignity to his role. A star is born!

This short trailer gives you a good idea of the images Castellucci brings to the stage.

Brisk Franz

Portrait of Franz Schubert, oil on wood by Gábor Melegh, 1827; in the Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

There’s so much pity and sentimentality built-in to the stereotype of Franz Schubert as the short, sad, socially-awkward fellow who died too soon. It blinds us to the passion and vigour and intellectual depth which fills his best music. And these two symphonies undoubtably represent a great achievement, the finest symphonies between Beethoven’s and those of Brahms and Bruckner.

There’s lots to like about Philippe Jordan’s version of this music with his fine Viennese players. The string sound of the Wiener Symphoniker is as silky and sensuous as their colleagues in the Philharmonic. The brass and woodwinds are more than solid, and the rhythmic pulse in both works is strong and alive. But this nimble, agile performance has a bit too much day-at-the-office routine about it. I want more mystery in my Unfinished, and The Great is only Great when it expresses more tension and power. I was coincidentally listening to Giuseppe Sinopoli’s Unfinished (with the Philharmonia Orchestra on a DGG disc from 1994) when the new Jordan review disc arrived in the mail. It has a layer of dramatic tension missing in the new recording. Schubert never got the experience and feedback he needed to develop his operas into masterpieces, but in this symphony he comes up with slow burns and climaxes that would kill on stage. Sinopoli’s mastery in the opera pit gives him a better line on those dramatic impulses than is evident in this highly competent but ultimately unsatisfying recording from Vienna.

A note on numbers: The Unfinished was written in 1822, while The Great was started in 1825 and finished in 1827, the year before Schubert died. So the old-fashioned European numbering as #7 and #8 doesn't make too much sense. We know them over here as #8 and #9, which at least has them in the right order. But I know: it's complicated.