Arnold Schoenberg - Moses und Aron
L'Opéra National de Paris, 2015
Philippe Jordan, Romeo Castellucci, Thomas Johannes Mayer, John Graham-Hall, Julie Davies, Catherine Wyn-Rogers, Nicky Spence, Michael Pflumm, Chae Wook Lim, Christopher Purves, Ralf Lucas
L'Opéra National de Paris, Bastille - 20 October 2015
You really shouldn't expect anything different from Romeo Castellucci directing Schoenberg's only opera, written in the difficult form of twelve-tone serialism, but apparently there were some people in the audience at this production's premiere in the Bastille in Paris who weren't too pleased with the staging and booed the director at the end. There very few admittedly and they were drowned out by the overwhelming applause, but really, what were they expecting here? Something traditional? Something biblical?
Schoenberg's Moses und Aron is by no means a straightforward telling of the biblical story of the Exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt, and it never has been. It's immediately apparent that Schoenberg is trying to deal with some very personal and artistic questions in the work, identifying to a large extent with Moses. He's not setting himself up as a God, but certainly as something of a prophet for a new gospel of dodecaphony, inventing twelve-tone serial music and giving it its greatest and most convincing expression in this opera. It's a gospel that had some notable disciples, and to a certain degree it still does have influence on the world of contemporary classical music.
As important as it would be on that experimental musical level alone, Moses und Aron would not be the great opera it is if it did not also connect in a meaningful way to the deeper human questions it raises and yes, some of those difficult issues that he is grappling with are to do with religion. For Schoenberg, the Jewish question was a very real issue that could be seen as instigating this musical epiphany. A convert to Protestantism, Schoenberg was unable to deny his Jewish roots and nature when he was still confronted with antisemitism in 1921 and attacked also when Hitler and the Nazis came to power. This had a profound impact on the composer and a great deal of soul-searching that he found himself impotent to articulate in words.
Words are the problem Moses has in the opera and he leaves it to his brother Aron to find a way of bringing God's word to the people without resorting to idolatry while he contemplates the "invisible, incommensurable, infinite, eternal, omnipresent, all-powerful" God who has revealed himself in the form of a burning bush. Language and expression to convey the infinite and indefinable without words or the use of image is a difficult concept. Even musical language has baggage associated with it, so Schoenberg invents a new way of composing music for Moses und Aron which involves serially playing every note in 12-note tone row, as well as pitching the work closer to oratorio than traditional opera, with the chorus taking prominence both as God and as the people.
Musically, Moses und Aron is extraordinarily difficult to interpret and perform (which accounts to a large extent for its rarity on the stage), but the effect is not at all difficult to appreciate. In live performance - judging by its Paris Opera production - it is also evidently a work of enormous power, certainly one of the most important works of the 20th century. And, like many of those important works, Berg's Lulu would be another, it's a work that was never finished by the composer. Following its first performance in 1954, three years after Schoenberg's death, Moses und Aron has been rarely performed and almost always in the form of the two acts written by Schoenberg with the unscored Act III omitted.
How then to interpret all of this in a stage production? Simply replaying a version of the biblical theme would undermine the importance of what is being said and how it is being said. At the same time, particularly in the unfinished version, there are irreconcilable contradictions in the work itself between form and representation that a director would be wise not to ignore. Romeo Castellucci is evidently a director who will provide a unique perspective on such matters, but that still doesn't entirely account for the spectacle that was presented on the stage of the Bastille in Paris in its première performance there.
Representation of the word and mistrust of the image is always going to be at the heart of Castellucci's production, and that's clear from the moment that Moses encounters God here not in a burning bush but in a tape recorder unreeling black tape. Moses's staff meanwhile doesn't transform into a snake exactly, but becomes a long spaceship like construction (worship of technology?). The first half of the production furthermore takes place behind a white screen that creates a haze of undefined shapes as Moses grapples with the infinite and his own personal conflict over being charged with delivering a message that he knows his people will find difficult to accept. He leaves those matters for his brother Aron to deliver, and this takes on a more concrete form in Act II, but the message is one that is inevitably corrupted in the telling.
In his 40 day absence while Moses taking to a Mount Sinai that looks like it is in the Alps, Castellucci finds increasingly strange ways to represent the rituals that Aron and the Jews enact in the licence of Act II's frenzy of sacrifice, murder, idolatry, drinking, dancing and orgy. A huge live yellow bull is led out onto the stage during the worship of the Golden Calf and tar-like black ink is poured over it. A river likewise opens up in a ditch on the stage into which the followers are bathed in black ink. The ink is also the blood of sacrifice of the four naked virgins, spread and smeared across the stage. There's little that could be said to be a literal enactment of the stage directions, but it very much adheres to the themes and to the intent of the libretto.
Adhering to the intent of the word rather than its literal depiction in untrustworthy images is evidently the key concept here, but the irony it seems is lost on a small proportion of the audience who didn't like what they saw. In such a work - unfinished and nearly impossible to stage - it hardly seems worth questioning whether Castellucci's concept bears any greater examination or analysis. What matters is whether it gets across the force and import of what is being expressed here in the music according to the intent of Schoenberg, and that it undoubtedly does.
I've seen Jordan explore the wonders of Lulu marvellously back in 2011 and he also gets a fine performance from the Paris Orchestra here. It flows beautifully as a whole but is also richly attentive to detail, even if at times Jordan seems a little less animated and confidently in control of the serial form here. Thomas Johannes Mayer's 'Sprechgesang' (sing-speak) Moses is perfect here alongside John Graham-Hall's impressive high lyrical tenor Aron, but it's in the remarkable chorus work that the true force and magnificence of the work is revealed.
Richard Wagner - Der fliegende Holländer
Royal Opera House, 2015
Andris Nelsons, Tim Albery, Bryn Terfel, Adrianne Pieczonka, Michael König, Peter Rose, Ed Lyon, Catherine Wyn-Rogers
Royal Opera House, Live Cinema Season - 24 February 2015
Wagner's operas are notoriously difficult to stage. Leaving aside the unique issues associated with putting on a Ring cycle, even the one-act version of Der fliegende Holländer presents its own challenges. And they are not just technical considerations. Although there might not appear to be much room for a director to manoeuvre a particular reading or concept into an account of ghost ships sailing on the seas, you'd be surprised at how the underlying themes can and have been developed. But do they really get to the heart of what Wagner intended to put across?
Tim Alberry's production for the Royal Opera House's production doesn't attempt anything too ambitious, unless you think that getting right back to the essentials of the work is ambitious, and I suppose when you're talking about Wagner, that might well be true. As tempting as it is to see Wagner himself at the centre of Der fliegende Holländer (his exile, his money problems, his belief in love and sacrifice) and as tempting as it is to apply these issues to modern-day concerns (globalisation, commerce, imperialism, asylum-seeking) - the most important thing about the work is the work itself. And I think even Wagner was aware of that in the first opera where he successfully found his own individual voice.
The Royal Opera House production, without getting too literal, period or traditional in terms of stage directions, makes a good case for Der fliegende Holländer working best when you simply let Wagner take over, when you let the orchestration and the singing carry the full weight and import of the score. The set and the staging don't work against this, nor do they attempt to enhance the impact or effects that can be achieved by the revolutionary score alone. The production design simply provides the necessary platform for all the mood, all the force, all the yearning, all the drama that is in the score itself to be expressed to its fullest extent. Even viewing the performance on screen in a live broadcast - I can only imagine what it must have felt like live - this was a spine-tingling production that just seemed to set Wagner's first true masterwork wide open.
And in the process, the ROH production reveals that spine-tingling is exactly what Der fliegende Holländer ought to be. That might not be revelatory, but the impact that Wagner is aiming for can sometimes get lost in the concept. There's no need to think too hard about it. It's a ghost story, a legend, a story of huge romantic passions. It's certainly informed by Wagner's own personal experiences, his own sensibility and beliefs, as well as by his extraordinary ability to translate those ideas into musical terms. The rush and the roar of those wild seas, the sweeping overwhelming passions, is all there in the music and expressed in Wagner's new approach to the flow of through composition in the music and in the singing. The impact is all the more effective in the one-act version, and the ROH production sustains that enveloping mood extraordinarily well in the staging, but even more so in the all-important musical performance.
The music is the largely left to work its own magic in the overture, and that's spine-tinglingly good on its own - but when it works hand-in-hand with the production, it's all the more effective. The main set - which only changes significantly for Act II's scene in the sewing factory - is a long bowed hull of a ship, with thick ropes and dripping water pooling at the front of the stage. It's chilling enough on its own and effective to support the haunting melodies that have been established in the overture and the Steersman's lament, but the musical motif announcing the arrival of the Dutchman's ship drops the temperature further. All it needs is a huge shadow to cross the set to match the enormity of the ship and the enormity of the intent and passions that lie within it. The set, along with Andris Nelson's wondrous management of the ROH orchestra, gives this impression of vast, mythological forces, and the trick of any production of Der fliegende Holländer as a music-drama is to harness those forces and get them across in human terms.
That's mainly a challenge for the singers, and I've rarely heard one that has been as consistently good across every single role - not forgetting the vital impact of the chorus either. Bryn Terfel certainly carried the world-weary demeanour of the Dutchman well, but the other facets of his personality were also well-characterised. A sense of hope struggling against near-desperation gives him a dangerous allure in his scenes with Daland, but his uncertainty and vulnerability in relation to love and the possibility of Senta failing him is all there too. It's there as much in the singing as the acting performance, and if there are one or two places where the full intensity isn't sustained (Tyrfel had withdrawn from an earlier performance, so might not have been on full form here), it's no less a strong, near-definitive performance.
Just how good the opera can be is shown when you have a Dutchman like this matched against a Senta like Adrianne Pieczonka. Not for a second does her performance waver from her character's dangerous obsession, but the depth of that obsession also extends to the depths of Senta's feelings for this lost man, making it warm and supremely human. It requires none of the shock impact of a grandstanding sacrificial death, the loss of the Dutchman's trust is enough to destroy her here. You really get a sense of that in her performance, which is outstanding on every level. If Michael König's Erik lacked a similar depth, it's only on account of his character's nature being dwarfed by those of Senta and the Dutchman. Peter Rose, announced as suffering a cold, nonetheless sang beautifully and lyrically with great sensitivity as Daland. Ed Lyon made a great impression as a luxuriously warm Steersman, and Catherine Wyn-Rogers was a fine Mary.
The singing was clearly in capable hands, but everything needs to work along with it and revival Daniel Dooner clearly had a good handle on Tim Albery's original stage directions, bringing it together to work as a whole. The importance of the chorus cannot be underestimated, particularly for the intensity they bring to the confrontation between the sailors, their wives and the Dutchman's crew and the Royal Opera Chorus brought this out with rising intensity. The man who really had to bring it all together was Andris Nelsons, and really with every side playing to the top of their game on a such a work as Der fliegende Holländer, that's a huge responsibility. It was more than just a question of marshalling the pace, rhythm and energy of Wagner's score however, and more than just working to the strengths of the singers. Nelsons also captured that spine-tingling edge to Wagner's mythological storytelling, and that indeed was revelatory of where the true greatness and character of the work lies.
