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Staging a masterwork
Sir John Tomlinson as Moses with cast members of Welsh National Opera. Pictures: Bill Cooper Moses und AronWelsh National Opera***** WELSH National Opera’s three annual
visits to the Hippodrome amount to one of the most important and
beneficial cultural events in Birmingham’s cultural calendar. WNO has since its inception proved itself a
company of European quality and standards. Now, under the leadership of
Artistic Director David Pountney and German conductor Lothar Koenigs
(Music Director since 2009), it is proving itself not just a cracking
company but a masterly one. WNO’s current ‘themed’ seasons are not just an
audience/ticketing hit: they are major artistic happenings, centred on
Cardiff and Birmingham and a few other centres (Llandudno, Southampton,
Bristol; Oxford again this autumn) – rather than London. (WNO sometimes
presents major productions there).
A trail of ‘British Firsts’ - operas by composers
such as the late Jonathan Harvey and, in the current summer season,
Gordon Getty (Usher House) continue a bold tradition of
commissioning seen in – for instance - John Metcalf’s Tornrak and
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s The Doctor of Myddfai (to a
politically knockout, almost Verdian libretto by Pountney himself), both
of which Pountney should seriously consider reviving. But when one looks at both pre-Pountney (Gloriana,
The Queen of Spades, Hänsel and Gretel (both Richard Jones
stagings), Katya Kabanova, Dialogues of the Carmelites
(with ENO), Pelleas and Melisande and perhaps above all, Billy
Budd), and now Pountney-era operas (Henze’s Boulevard Solitude,
Berg’s Lulu, the current Schoenberg masterpiece Moses
und Aron), one is abruptly reminded that here we hear not some
Celtic fringe troupe, but a genuinely international company (publicity,
programmes and surtitles in Cardiff - or north Wales - are resolutely in
the Welsh language): an ensemble of truly world class standing and
world-beating talents. David Pountney calls Moses and Aaron (to
give it its English title – although WNO sings operas in the original
language, making it by far the most important company of its kind in
Britain outside the Royal Opera, which it sometimes surpasses, and
perhaps Glyndebourne) ‘Schoenberg’s masterpiece and his testament’. Is
he right? Well yes, on both counts, to judge by this
musically terrific, though – because in a way it’s a semistaging
approach – rather less visually impacting production by Stuttgart-
(south German-based) joint directors Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito. One should emphasise, however that the very well
concentrated, untired-looking WNO revival of the historic Baden-Württemburg
capital’s original was
Behr holds the Götz Friedrich award for best
emerging (stage) director. In opera terms, you don’t go much higher than
that (Friedrich being a legend, for his 1960s-80s left-leaning Wagner
productions at Bayreuth and elsewhere). The opera’s first part consisted mainly of bass
Sir John Tomlinson mooching around what looked like a cross between a
clutter of schoolroom desks and the debating chamber of the Reichstag or
(say) Scottish Parliament, a Moses who is reaching out to an elusive,
unseen God represented by no idols (Moses in a sense anticipates the 9th-10th
century Ikonoclast movement, and indeed the spirit of Islam in regarding
depiction of the deity as untenable); then wandering off to seek the
tablets of the Law on Mount Sinai, leaving the rest in the Negev desert
– a real wasteland between the Red Sea and Gulf of Eilat – while Aaron (Aron,
tenor), his brother, first mollifies the restless Israelites and then
throws in his lot with the grumblers, and allows the notorious Golden
Calf to be cast and worshipped (it’s gratifying how close this
essentially modern text sticks to the Exodus original).
Schoenberg makes sure we get the full works –
there’s a massive party and orgy which outdoes the lecherous scenes in
Vaughan Williams’s The Pilgrims’ Progress, or indeed anything in
Berg’s Lulu. It’s great fun – a burst of sunshine, and rather
well controlled by Wieler/Morabito/Behr. Aron’s role is to contrast, graphically, with
Moses’ rather limp glad-handings and mopings and occasional ravings.
Tomlinson, moody, articulate and less gruff than sometimes, gives us the
classic case of ‘a prophet not without honour except [not quite yet] in
his own land’ - which is one of the things that has made people many
times speculate that Arnold Schoenberg is partly writing about himself. Here was an Expressionist artist (he exhibited
with, occasionally mixed with, the Die Blaue Reiter Modernist
movement), and a composer seven or so years on from first deploying
openly his 12-tone or 12-note compositional scheme. Schoenber was
indeed, as Thomas Mann saw, a kind of Adrian Leverkühn (the aloof
composer-hero from Doktor Faustus), who has a language that
speaks forcibly to himself, and to his sympathetic friend/interlocutor
(Berg? Like Mahler’s friend in Visconti’s Death in Venice), but
not to many others. Schoenberg played these parallels down without
quite expressly denying them. But the fascination of this libretto (the
composer’s own) – for Pountney surely, as well as us – is that what we
have (two acts) of this truncated, passionate opera about the Jewish
Volk, its wanderings in both senses (escape, meanderings, errors and
perplexities – Verwirringunen - but implicitly its thwarted
potential) was ready by 1932; which might have suggested a premiere
in 1933 – in Hitler’s Germany. What a time it would have been to be presenting,
so articulately on stage, in the Vaterland, the
monotheistic/momentarily animistic aspirations and internal tensions of
the cleverest race on the planet. Which brings one to WNO’s commendably detailed
programme and the fact that it first saw light, or impacted, in concert
at Hamburg in 1954 – still the Fürtwangler era; and got its first
staging at, amazingly, Covent Garden in 1965, the Solti era (although
remember that Adrian Boult conducted the first UK reading of Wozzeck,
in the 1930s). It reminds me of a perhaps even greater
masterpiece, Simplicius Simplicissimus, by German 20th
century master Karl Amadeus Hartmann, written by the composer in
internal exile in Germany but not seen till 1948. Its subject? The
futility of war and aggression. Its setting – the 30 years’ war,
witnessed by a boy simpleton (female soprano, thought to see it with a
Brittenesque boy of Westminster Cathedral/Trinity
There is a real feeling, as in Simplicius,
of as new era, a new millennium dawning that may – or may not – lead
mankind forward. Schoenberg’s focusing on Moses and Aaron produces the
simplest kind of dualism, a kind of Hegel-Nietzsche-Schopenhauer
dialectic, and it’s just as gloomy as the last both in its debate and in
its conclusions, One of the odd paradoxes is that listening to much of
this semi-chanted, only occasionally spoke opera, some of the German (of
course) sounds like Hitler ranting. How could it not? But the
effect is disconcerting and rather nastily surreal. What about the music? My companion, vastly
informed about classical music and the arts, left after half time
because, while interested, he ‘could not take another hour of utterly
tuneless music’.
I, by contrast heard nothing but melodies, tunes,
albeit angular ones, and long - almost Bachian - lines, worked out with
scrupulous and energising (rather than tedious) thoroughness. Some of is
no more complicated than, say, Hindemith. Aron’s appeals to his brother
– a different view of the use of graven images, iconongraphy, which
eventually prevailed not in Judaism or Mohammedanism, but in
medieval/Renaissance Christianity (to which Schoenberg was gradually
being drawn), are not just intellectually articulate; they are also
musically so.
The hero (not quite villain) of this whole
scenario and shenanigans is actually not Moses but Aaron. Pountney’s
company produced a major coup in signing up (from the Stuttgart staging)
the utterly wonderful tenor Rainer Trost. Before the crisis while Moses
is absent, it is even Aron who pumps the party line: ‘Close your eyes:
open your ears. There is no other way to see him, no other way to
perceive him. When as chief spokesman and articulator he – as it were –
changes sides, blowing to popular urging, there is a strange consistency
in the clarity of the thinking. WNO chooses its casts carefully, and almost everyone did his or her job well. Elizabeth Atherton was superbly enticing as the Young Maiden who keeps cropping up in various pink guises. The sextet of well-balanced solo voices (3 female, 3 male), which impacted quite early on, was beautifully calibrated.
Richard Wiegold, a famously fine Sarastro, King
Mark and Commendatore, brings magnificent gravitas to his roles –
here, as the Priest, deciding which wind to blow with. he sang in
WNO’s recent staging of Jonathan Harvey’s Wagner Dream. Finally
he was Snug (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) - slow of study and quite
marvellous. Wiegold is one of the big, characterful assets of numerous
of London – and metropolitan - opera companies. The other treats of this tense, passionate
Moses und Aron included, predictably, WNO’s chorus, which many
consider Britain’s most stylishly appetising (just witness the two
magnificent, catastrophic Welsh choruses in The Doctor of Myddfai,
or hear their input on Mackerras’s landmark Argo recording of
Gloriana). Sometimes they, en masse, sing the voice
of God (compare Britten’s eerie yet reassuring duet in his canticle
Abraham and Isaac).There are echoes of the Turbae from J. S.
Bach’s two main Passions. Some of the early writing clearly foreshadows
Stravinsky’s 1960s spare form of Serialism; in other places, we can see
where Harrison Birtwistle’s music is coming from. The orchestra under Koenigs was full of nice,
shivery instrumental touches: a cello solo here; what sounded like a
contrabassoon; a passage for double basses and attendant bass clarinet,
then oboes vibrant but clarinets demurely whispering. It’s all as lucid
as the orchestration of that other occasional musical pariah, Webern.
The fugal writing – and here, WNO’s playing and the chorus’s singing of
it – was quite superb. Top ensemble, top-class stuff. But also, less obviously, Daniel Grice, the
vocally attractive,, well-travelled pupil of Robert Lloyd - a baritone
of striking weight, intensity and poignancy. Grice’s ‘Ephraimite’ was –
for all his modest contrary interjections – something special. As for Trost, he’s just off the scale, or off the
planet - as Aaron is, in moody brother Moses’ view. It’s almost a
generation problem. Elsewhere, Trost is Tamino, and a Schubertian of
elegance and eminence. But such is his delivery that composers – the
Mozarts and Schuberts and Webers of today - should be writing roles for
him like mad.
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by
revival director Jörg Behr, now just in his forties but one of the most
travelled of all directors helping re-enliven the middle-rank opera
houses scattered across Germany. 
Boys’
Choir standard might be interesting) who is inarticulate to grasp any of
it but becomes our eyes, our ears.