This week, in our series in which critics tell us what they’ve been listening to at home, Andrew Clements shares Schoenberg, takes a seat at the Royal Opera House, and looks forward to a narcissistic fish
The words “unfinished” and “masterpiece” sometimes go together too easily where 20th-century operas are concerned. Few would quibble over that description of Puccini’s Turandot or Berg’s Lulu, but Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron is another matter. The two acts that he wrote were completed in 1932, 19 years before his death, which suggests that he was never sure how the opera could end. And, that uncertainty always seems to hover over the torso that’s generally performed today.
Barrie Kosky’s 2015 production for the
Berlin Komische Oper, available on Opera Vision, doesn’t completely dispel the feeling that it’s sometimes more theology than theatre, more oratorio than opera, but he makes it work on stage better than any other staging I’ve seen. Kosky approaches this wordy Old Testament drama through Beckett: quotations from Waiting for Godot are projected before each scene, with Moses and Aron themselves characterised as Estragon and Vladimir, while the Godot who never arrives, one assumes, is God. It’s musically superb, too, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, with Robert Hayward and John Daszak as Moses and Aron.