Out of the Wilderness

"Now, in the crowd, destruction, self-immolation. Everything that can be is hurled around: swords, daggers, axes, lances, jars, tools, etc. Some, frenzied, fall upon swords; others leap into the fire, then streak burning across the stage. An orgy of sexual excess. A naked youth darts forward, seizes a girl, rips the clothes from her. Many men do likewise, stripping themselves, stripping women, bearing them off."

As orgies go, it is a humdinger; but as opera, it presents certain problems of staging. No one realized this more than Composer Arnold Schoenberg, who wrote the directions for the orgy as a climax to the second act of his twelve-tone masterpiece Moses and Aaron. Rightly convinced that just recognition for his music would never come in his lifetime, Schoenberg was supremely indifferent about whether his works were performed or not. Thus, giving free rein to his imagination in Moses and Aaron, he called for herds of live camels and asses, horses and sheep to be slaughtered on stage, and "bloody lumps of meat" to be thrown to a chorus of 600 voices. After he finished the first two acts in 1932--a projected third act was never completed--he admitted that it was probably "undoable." And so it was for the next quarter of a century.

Now, Berlin's Deutsche Oper and Conductor Hermann Scherchen have brought Moses and Aaron out of the wilderness. Last week the Deutsche Oper's 318-member traveling company performed it for the first time in Rome. The staging, obviously, was an unrealistic but no less gripping realization of Schoenberg's directions. The orgy scene was a stylized ballet danced against a crazy-quilt backdrop of emotionally escalating designs beamed from a dozen slide projectors. The tragic conflict between Moses--who, unable to articulate his spiritual vision, symbolically chants rather than sings his role--and the worldly, silver-tongued Aaron was portrayed with spare, stabbing precision. Schoenberg's monumental, jaggedly atonal score was a sometimes overly complex but always searing testament to the spiritual quests that divide mankind. "Stupendous," "Authoritative," "Memorable," raved the Rome critics.

So far, the Deutsche Oper has performed Schoenberg's three-hour epic 45 times in six European cities, which makes it one of the most frequently performed of all modern operas. This April --though the staid burghers may not be ready for an orgy scene--the enterprising Boston Opera will give Moses and Aaron its long overdue U.S. premiere.

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