MOSES AT THE MET

...Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aron, based on passages in the books of Exodus and Numbers, was composed using the twelve-tone method he invented...

...A Viennese Jew reared as a Catholic, he converted to Lutheranism in his twenties, before returning to Judaism in 1933...

...In the following years, as prospects for its performance evaporated, the composer suggested that Act Three might be omitted or merely read aloud...

...Without that self-scrutiny, the dancing and cavorting before the Golden Calf— the entertainment for its own sake— proved thin gruel...

...Opera isn't usually an arena for hard thinking...

...butchers and leaders of the tribes of Israel and their followers have become fashion models and bulb-popping photographers, businessmen and politicians, gangsters, and teenagers chewing gum...

...In a peculiar variation on a song-and-patter routine (in this instance, an invention of the Met's), the compromised Elders of Israel drop their trousers and put shoes on their hands, so that they appear to dance, upside down, the old soft shoe...

...More than the Elders get stood on their heads...

...Act Two takes place in Moses' absence...

...To the end of his life, Schoenberg drew the fire of critics and a middlebrow public that went to concerts for reassurance and relaxation, to be lulled instead of invited to think...

...As the flashbulbs popped and cash was spread around, I wondered when they'd get to the naked virgins already, and would the Metropolitan Opera pull its punches...

...It is multimedia fairy-tale music videos for grown-ups...

...Last Monday, February 8, after more than forty years of wandering, Moses und Aron entered the promised land: a premiere production at the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center...

...In February 1913, his Gurrelieder was staged in Vienna to great acclaim...

...Moses und Aron offers a different kind of adult entertainment...

...In Moses und Aron, thought carries the day...

...One clear voice can carry over a chorus, and an evening of opera can stay in the head as something other than a melody and masquerade...

...No one left before the first act, and most of the audience stayed for the second...

...Besides strippers and naked dancers, it features stand-up comedians, tellers of quiet jokes...

...In 1912, Schoenberg finished Pierrot Lunaire, a song cycle that still sounds like the future...

...To say that Schoenberg was a Moses, emancipating dissonance and leading music toward a land he would not enter might be neat, but it doesn't answer why Moses und Aron, written explicitly as an invitation to think, is such powerful music theater, against commercial pieties and all the other odds...

...But something more set the wasps about Schoenberg...

...Or he could have assumed the legacy of Gustav Mahler, composing huge orchestral and choral works, as he did with the epic folk-song cycle Gurrelieder (1900...

...As choreographed by Ron Howell, the herds are gone...

...The huge chorus sustains the music and provides a context for the action...

...The Met production took some liberties with the libretto...

...high art and religion make livelier theater than do the staples of entertainment...

...Schoenberg wrote the libretto of his 1932 biblical opera in three acts, but he only set the first two acts to music...

...The renouncers give away what they don't have, or don't need, or don't want, in sacrifice to an inanimate object that can't use it anyway...

...Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Béla Bartók, and Richard Strauss exploited the new continent of dissonance opened by Schoen-berg and found themselves embraced by audiences...

...It is the uncomfortable intuition that people may choose freedom, but they desire bondage...

...Harmony signals resolution, a neatness in the packaging, a pat solution that could no longer claim to be more than a fiction...

...But with more and more insistence, "the dissonance" repressed inside the conventional language of music was clamoring for release from those harmonic rules that "required" music to end in the key in which it had begun...

...In the 1920s, Schoenberg constructed a compositional system to replace traditional key signatures with a series of twelve tones that defined and generated a musical piece...

...No New York audience would have been shocked by total nudity, and maybe if naked had meant naked, the New Yorkers might have actually felt rebuked by Moses' descent from the mountain...

...The tone row or series is no less arbitrary than traditional harmony, but it gave the composer's musical instincts a shield against the chaos implied by the fall of the old musical gods and a way of answering the critics who assailed him for his method even as they reviled his compositions...

...The people who followed their prophet into the wilderness in Act One, dressed like any prosperous crowd of upperWest Side Manhattanites, became overly specific, overly topical...

...The Met's virgins did peel, down to their undies...

...After an orchestral interlude, Schoenberg's libretto calls for the overthrow of the elders of Israel, the exaltation of the Golden Calf on the altar, the sacrifice of herds of animals followed by a dance of the ritual slaughterers, a faith healing, suicides, renunciation, murder, orgies of drunkenness and dancing, the sacrifice of four naked virgins, then a general stripping to shouted slogans praising creative power, fertility, and desire...

...Few lives in art were more dogged by contradiction and controversy than Arnold Schoenberg's...

...It referred as well to the moral uncertainty that accompanies the discovery that the world is not adequately described in terms of the self...

...It opened to a full house...

...Dissonance, for Schoenberg, meant more than music theory...

...First, it updated the dancing...

...Schoenberg uses the imaginative freedom granted by the operatic suspension of disbelief if not to justify then at least to engage God's ways to man...

...A poet living in Patchogue, New York, Laurance Wieder is co-founder of Chapbooks for Learning...

...This was itself a wonder, since the New York public customarily walks out of a concert hall at the first strange sound, the exodus from dissonance...

...The orchestra, directed by James Levine, plays Schoenberg's score as music rather than as a lecture or demonstration...

...The spare, expressive stage set designed by Paul Brown uses only blue and orange-red to relieve its black and white, and a few shapes—wedge, wave, and bowl—to suggest Mount Horeb, the desert, the sky, Egypt, and Sinai...

...as did all the other naked people called for in the stage directions...

...It is Moses' recognition that the Land of Milk and Honey doesn't exist except as a promise, and it is Aron's problem that when Israel hears the promise, they want it fulfilled...

...Or, should resources preclude a full production, Schoenberg wryly suggested that the "Dance Around the Golden Calf" in Act Two might be performed as a stand-alone piece...

...the poor donate their sad rags to the gods of self...

...Dissonance is embedded in the materials of language and art, because neither language nor art penetrates to reality, the thing-in-itself...

...He spelled Aaron with one "A" so his opera's title wouldn't have thirteen let-ters—though the plot summary provided by New York's Metropolitan Opera for its new production locates Act One of Moses und Aron in the "thirteenth century, B.C...

...The next month, a performance of his more recent works provoked a riot...

...In any case, the prophet of serial composition and model for the protagonist of Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus died on Friday, July 13, 1951—at thirteen minutes before midnight—having never witnessed a staging of his masterpiece...

...He was born on September 13, 1874, the day after Rosh Hashanah...

...Costumes are modern street dress: black and white suits and dresses, shoes, plus some hats, and furs, and watches and jewels...

...Schoenberg even composed naughty songs for the turn-of-the-century Viennese cabaret...

...From 1900 to 1913, Schoenberg's compositions (and those of his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern) grew stranger and stranger to Viennese ears...

...old people sacrifice the remainder of their lives...

...Act Two has much in common with cabaret or music hall...

...Moses und Aron is stronger than pleasure...

...It might have been the dissonance initially...

...Recognized as a genius from an early age, he could have fashioned success in the manner of Richard Strauss...

...Schoenberg, in a performance footnote, demanded nakedness "insofar as the law and the needs of the stage permit and demand...

...Moses, sung with clarity and conviction by British basso John Tomlinson in his Metropolitan debut, has a real beard...

...In the tradition of Bertolt Brecht's Berlin theater, each scene is identified by a caption printed on a piece of scenery...

...The virgins give their passion...

...Dissonance in Schoenberg's hands invokes a belief in meaning beyond the self, at the same time acknowledging it's just the self that knows...

...And that became intolerable to Schoenberg, who regarded music as a vehicle for truth and himself as its reluctant emancipator...

...Schoenberg's figurative witticisms are like the jokes in Freud's Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious: examples of behavior, pointed demonstrations or mild provocations to something other than laughter...

...It would be reasonable to expect that song and dance, orgy and riot, bloodshed and spectacle would be more of a show than the anguished and self-consuming philosophical and theological dialogue of two brothers, but they aren't...

...I found myself remembering the musical toughs in West Side Story instead of hanging on the action...

...Four more performances are scheduled, on February 17, 20, 23, and 26...

...It refutes the assertions that there's no such thing as art, that no thought is higher than another...

...His is the drama of monotheism, the song of the limited self in an infinite universe, of freedom and awe, bondage and security, the dance of the young who would be old and the old who would be young...

...It is typically loved for grand passions realized in gorgeous fantasy, for impossibilities enacted in librettoland...

...Schoenberg's representation of theology in word and music beggars everything else in the opera...

...On this stage, virtue plays better than sin...

...Made to wait, they seek refuge in the gods they know, gods like themselves...

...I'm not sure whose rules and needs were being heeded...