Moses und Aron (Schoenberg)
Jan. 1st, 2013 04:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahn[Note: This was written (though not posted) before seekingferret posted his guess, but I figured I might as well post it, what the heck. Because also: Moses und Aron!]
To tell you the story of how I came to watch this, I must tell you the story of the Extremely Non-Anonymous Yuletide Fic. So... on the yuletide brainstorming post, I meandered on, as I do, about wanting crack!Turandot. (The fic I got was not crack; was far better than crack; was the fic I would have requested if I had known it would be possible for someone to write it.) And a complete stranger,seekingferret, posted something very nice on that about Turandot in SPAAAAACE, and one thing led to another, as these things do, and before either of us knew what had happened he'd recced me Schoenberg's Moses und Aron.
So I watched it. I watched two versions. My favorite, the 2009 version, is available on youtube here. I do not think it is the best one musically or in terms of interpreting Schoenberg's original stage directions (both those honors go to the Straub version); however, I find it the most accessible of the available versions. The conflicted love Moses and Aron have for each other, the tension between the idea and the image, the misunderstandings Moses and Aron have, the "game of telephone" as seekingferret put it in one of his letters -- these all come across beautifully in this version. If you were in the market for a weird Schoenberg opera that takes the Exodus story and twists it around into a dialogue about the philosophy of God -- the tension between, on one hand, a God who is inherently abstract and unknowable, and on the other, the images we make to try to understand and imagine that which is incomprehensible and unimaginable -- well, anyway, if you were looking for a production that underlines and sells that, I think this is it.
However, this version does not contain the problematic unfinished third act (and for good reason; the third act does away with a lot of the relationship and tension between the two brothers/concepts, so it would not have suited the interpretation in the 2009 version), so I had to watch the Straub and Huilet version to get that. (Note: This is seekingferret's favorite, and the one he recommended to me.) This one has an Aron whose voice is quite a bit more suited to the role. It is a very spare, very -- I don't know how to describe it except in images of desert and purity and the idea of scouring away everything inessential. Which makes it exactly what Schoenberg was talking about in the opera. But which makes it, I think, somewhat less accessible to someone watching it for the first time. (Note: the Straub version comes with the libretto (Allen Forte translation, OMG DO I HAVE ISSUES with the translation, but anyway)! Also, um, I made a PDF copy so I could carry it around to write this thing, I KNOW I AM OBSESSIVE SO WHAT, so if anyone wants one, PM me).
(The third available version is apparently set during the Holocaust, and seekingferret warned me away from it. I did watch a five-minute clip of it just in case it might bother me less than him, but yeah, he was right.)
But oh, the FEELINGS I have about this opera. I felt very much the way I felt reading Jean-Paul Sartre in college, and for much the same reasons: it's fascinating stuff, really meaty fascinating stuff to think about and sink my teeth into, I totally enjoyed it, and gosh a lot of the time I felt like he was completely missing the point. I mean, really, Schoenberg?
Anyway. And then I was all agreeing with seekingferret that this HAS to have fic written for it. ...And then I found seekingferret had given up on fic for it and was not even going to nominate it, so I had to post anonymously on his DW to tell him he had to nominate/request it. I'm sure he just DIDN'T CONNECT THAT AT ALL with telling someone on the yuletide comm to watch it a week back, ha. Nor with the random person who popped up on his DW at around the same time, asking him random questions about Judaism and community (I'd already decided my "serious" fic had to be about community), at least one bit of which showed up in that fic because it was too good not to. So.
(...At least seekingferret probably didn't realize he'd be getting TWO yuletide presents, and that one of them would be total crack. But there, that's enough of that. More yuletide-reveal-ish-stuff here and here.)
Anyway, tl;dr version: This opera is so not for everyone, and I would not necessarily recommend it unless you are weirdly fascinated by early-20th-century music and religious philosophy. Like I apparently am. In which case, go for it!
To tell you the story of how I came to watch this, I must tell you the story of the Extremely Non-Anonymous Yuletide Fic. So... on the yuletide brainstorming post, I meandered on, as I do, about wanting crack!Turandot. (The fic I got was not crack; was far better than crack; was the fic I would have requested if I had known it would be possible for someone to write it.) And a complete stranger,
seekingferret, posted something very nice on that about Turandot in SPAAAAACE, and one thing led to another, as these things do, and before either of us knew what had happened he'd recced me Schoenberg's Moses und Aron.So I watched it. I watched two versions. My favorite, the 2009 version, is available on youtube here. I do not think it is the best one musically or in terms of interpreting Schoenberg's original stage directions (both those honors go to the Straub version); however, I find it the most accessible of the available versions. The conflicted love Moses and Aron have for each other, the tension between the idea and the image, the misunderstandings Moses and Aron have, the "game of telephone" as seekingferret put it in one of his letters -- these all come across beautifully in this version. If you were in the market for a weird Schoenberg opera that takes the Exodus story and twists it around into a dialogue about the philosophy of God -- the tension between, on one hand, a God who is inherently abstract and unknowable, and on the other, the images we make to try to understand and imagine that which is incomprehensible and unimaginable -- well, anyway, if you were looking for a production that underlines and sells that, I think this is it.
However, this version does not contain the problematic unfinished third act (and for good reason; the third act does away with a lot of the relationship and tension between the two brothers/concepts, so it would not have suited the interpretation in the 2009 version), so I had to watch the Straub and Huilet version to get that. (Note: This is seekingferret's favorite, and the one he recommended to me.) This one has an Aron whose voice is quite a bit more suited to the role. It is a very spare, very -- I don't know how to describe it except in images of desert and purity and the idea of scouring away everything inessential. Which makes it exactly what Schoenberg was talking about in the opera. But which makes it, I think, somewhat less accessible to someone watching it for the first time. (Note: the Straub version comes with the libretto (Allen Forte translation, OMG DO I HAVE ISSUES with the translation, but anyway)! Also, um, I made a PDF copy so I could carry it around to write this thing, I KNOW I AM OBSESSIVE SO WHAT, so if anyone wants one, PM me).
(The third available version is apparently set during the Holocaust, and seekingferret warned me away from it. I did watch a five-minute clip of it just in case it might bother me less than him, but yeah, he was right.)
But oh, the FEELINGS I have about this opera. I felt very much the way I felt reading Jean-Paul Sartre in college, and for much the same reasons: it's fascinating stuff, really meaty fascinating stuff to think about and sink my teeth into, I totally enjoyed it, and gosh a lot of the time I felt like he was completely missing the point. I mean, really, Schoenberg?
Anyway. And then I was all agreeing with seekingferret that this HAS to have fic written for it. ...And then I found seekingferret had given up on fic for it and was not even going to nominate it, so I had to post anonymously on his DW to tell him he had to nominate/request it. I'm sure he just DIDN'T CONNECT THAT AT ALL with telling someone on the yuletide comm to watch it a week back, ha. Nor with the random person who popped up on his DW at around the same time, asking him random questions about Judaism and community (I'd already decided my "serious" fic had to be about community), at least one bit of which showed up in that fic because it was too good not to. So.
(...At least seekingferret probably didn't realize he'd be getting TWO yuletide presents, and that one of them would be total crack. But there, that's enough of that. More yuletide-reveal-ish-stuff here and here.)
Anyway, tl;dr version: This opera is so not for everyone, and I would not necessarily recommend it unless you are weirdly fascinated by early-20th-century music and religious philosophy. Like I apparently am. In which case, go for it!
no subject
Date: 2013-01-02 05:34 pm (UTC)My audio recording is the Pierre Boulez-conducted version that also has Reich singing Moses, but has Richard Cassilly singing Aaron. The libretto translation booklet it came with also uses the Allen Forte translation, which I agree is sometimes unfortunate, but between the translation and my tiny amount of Yiddish and a German-English dictionary I've been able to reach an accommodation with the text.
The other thing I like about the Straub-Huillet version besides the sparseness and attention to Schoenberg's intent is the way it uses space and time. When I was first exposed to the opera I was also first being exposed via a roommate to the writings of Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who in the '50s and '60s was writing about a vision of Orthodox Judaism that encompassed 20th Century Physics. Heschel describes the Sabbath as 'a Temple constructed of Time', and his ideas in general about linking space and time through a space-time continuum seem to match in beautiful ways with the way the large spaces and the elongated timing of the Straub-Huillet film mirror each other.
A lot of Midrashic ideas about the Post-Exodus shape it as a time when the ordinary rules of physics were suspended so that God could temporarily provide for the people of Israel directly. Hence the manna, the Ten Commandments and everything at Sinai which hasn't been replicated since then. I feel like the Straub-Huillet movie embodies that idea.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-03 02:42 am (UTC)Hmm. That sounds worth thinking about. One of my friends in college had a lot to say about linking the divine with a particular point in space and time, with Sinai being one of those correspondence points (this friend being Christian, the life (birth/death) of Jesus was of course another correspondence point). I know that's not exactly what you're talking about, but it's what it made me think of.