Moses und Aron

Although Schoenberg never finished his opera Moses und Aron (Moses and Aaron), its two extant acts have such musical and dramatic power that together they amount to a modernist masterpiece. Schoenberg based the opera’s libretto on the biblical Book of Exodus, and by 1932 he had composed the first two acts, but only a few musical sketches for Act III were ever written. The work’s two-act torso was premiered in concert in Hamburg in 1954, three years after Schoenberg’s death, and the first staging was in Zurich in 1957. The two main roles are the prophet Moses and his brother Aaron, who are together guiding the Israelite people (represented by the chorus) from captive exile in Egypt towards the Promised Land. The visionary but inarticulate Moses has a speaking role; Aaron, a skilled and charismatic communicator, is a lyric tenor. When Moses climbs a nearby mountain to speak with God (symbolised by the Burning Bush), abandoning the Israelites for 40 days, Aaron responds to their mood of seething unrest by setting up a Golden Calf as an idol, round which they dance in orgiastic abandon. The returning Moses denounces Aaron for creating a false image, and the two remain unreconciled, with Moses in frustrated despair. The opera’s music is derived from a single 12-note row, out of which Schoenberg generated his spectacularly inventive score, with a large and demanding role for the chorus; the orchestral “Dance round the Golden Calf” is a set-piece virtuoso masterwork in its own right.