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Home , Moses und Aron, Wozzeck

Class 11: Two Towering Masterpieces

A. Music Without a Key

1. Title Slide 1 ( in Geneva) 2. Berg and Schoenberg

I make no secret that the music in this class is the most difficult of any in the course, but I hope that the two I am going to show will engage you because of their stories and moral relevance. They are Wozzeck by (1885–1935), which premiered in 1925, and und Aron by (1874–1951), which the composer stopped working on in 1932. I shall show them in this order, although Schoenberg was the older composer by nine years, and Berg was in fact his student.

Both operas are atonal, which simply means that they avoid conventional harmonies based on key. Previously, when presenting works by these composers, I have done little demos to try to explain what that means. But this is supposed to be a class on Production, and as the staging I am going show for the most part is probably the most straightforward of any in the entire course, I want to leave time to at least sample some of the more extreme productions out there.

3. Wozzeck poster and Lotfi Mansouri production

So I am just going to ask you to take the music for granted, treating it as a highly dramatic emotional sound-track. Berg was writing in the aftermath of the First World War (in which he served), and at the height of German . Despite quiet moments like Marie’s Bible reading, this is an opera in which everything is pushed to extremes, and emotions, where they are not dangerously bottled up, are allowed to flow in full spate. There are few productions that do not have their lurid moments, and many which abandon realism almost entirely.

B. Wozzeck, the Inarticulate Soldier

Nevertheless, I am going to do something that is unusual for me in this course. Rather than showing the most innovative production I can find, I am going to stick with one of the most conventional ones, hailing from Vienna in 1987. The director, Adolf Dresen, works mainly with small units of more or less realistic scenery within a bare stage. For, despite its Expressionist extremes, Wozzeck is essentially a story about common people and the way they are ground down by those above them in society. [On the website, I shall post a link to a film version made in 1970. I won’t show it here, since this course is about stage production, but it gains immensely from being set in a real German village. Watch it if you can.]

4. Georg Büchner and .

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Berg’s source was the unfinished play Woyzeck by the German Romantic—and indeed revolutionary— poet Georg Büchner (1813–37). Looking at his few portraits, you could scarcely imagine that such a meek young man could write such searing drama, but he did. His play was left unfinished at his death at the age of 24, existing only as a large number of short scenes. It was first performed only in 1913 in Munich and in Vienna the following year, a performance that Berg attended. Its themes of militarism and social injustice reverberated intensely in the years surrounding the First World War, and Berg’s own experience gave him the blood with which to follow Büchner’s vitriol. He made his own selection of the scenes and wrote the himself.

5. The Characters in Wozzeck.

I shall show seven excerpts from the opera. First four scenes from the Act I exposition, giving glimpses of the other major figures in Wozzeck’s life: the Captain and Doctor who patronize and exploit him, Marie whom he loves, but who will betray him with the fifth character, the Major. I am going to play these more or less continuously, with just part of each scene except for the last, which will be complete. By starting in the middle of the Captain scene, however, I am distorting the overall effect. For the first four minutes of the opera, Wozzeck says nothing at all except the subservient “Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann.” But when the Captain says that he should have some morality, and not father a child out of wedlock, Wozzeck is compelled to speak up, beginning with the words Wir arme Leut’…. “We poor people do not have the money or the time for luxuries like morality.” I am starting here, however, because whatever else it is, Wozzeck is very much a moral document—a fact that links it strongly to .

6. Some Questions about Wozzeck

You might want to think about these questions as we go.

7. Berg: Wozzeck (Vienna, 1987). Act I, scene 1, Wozzeck and the Captain (part) 8. Berg: Wozzeck (Vienna, 1987). Act I, scene 3, Marie and her child (part) 9. Berg: Wozzeck (Vienna, 1987). Act I, scene 4, Wozzeck and the Doctor (part) 10. Berg: Wozzeck (Vienna, 1987). Act I, scene 5, Marie and the Drum Major (all) 11. — still from the above

From there, we will look at how all this coalesces into his jealousy of Marie. First, the scene in Act II where he confronts her in the street, and she says she would rather have a knife in her belly than submit to violence, an idea which lodges in Wozzeck’s tormented mind. Note the onstage chamber ensemble, whose elegance is in stark contrast to the tension in the scene.

12. Berg: Wozzeck (Vienna, 1987). Act II, scene 3, Wozzeck and Marie (all) 13. — still from the above

Then the murder scene in Act III, followed by the final sequence in which Wozzeck, now completely out of his mind, returns to find the blood-stained knife and drowns himself, the overwhelming orchestral interlude that follows—as though a drama this powerful can only be resolved through pure music—and

— 2 — finally the epilogue in which a group of children (including Wozzeck’s own son) hear about a body being washed up, and go off to see:

14. Berg: Wozzeck (Vienna, 1987). Act III, scene 2, Wozzeck and Marie (all) 15. Berg: Wozzeck (Vienna, 1987). Act III, scene 4 to the end 16. Some questions about Wozzeck, repeat

Does anyone want to suggest some answers to my questions?

17. Extras: all

If we have any time, I would like to look at some very short scenes from the last act in one or more of the productions shown here. They run the gamut from brutal and grotesque to eerie and internal.

18. Extras: Homoki 19. Homoki: murder scene 20. Extras: Mussbach 21. Mussbach: Captain and Doctor 22. Extras: Warlikowski 23. Warlikowski: orchestra and final scene 24. Extras: Loy 25. Loy: final scene 26. Title Slide 2 (Marie’s child)

There is also a magnificent staging of the final interlude in the Calixto Bieto Barcelona production, in which human beings slowly emerge from some kind of industrial underworld, totally naked, clean, and innocent. I shall post it on the website.

C. Moses: the Inarticulate Prophet

27. Title Slide 3 (Moses und Aron)

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) wrote two of the planned three acts of his Moses und Aron [the unusual spelling is because the composer was triskaidekaphobic] between 1930 and 1932, but wrote only sketches for the third. Because he always intended to finish the opera, though, it was never performed in his lifetime. Its first staging was in in 1957, six years after the composer’s death. This was in the two-act version. Although another composer, Zoltán Kocsis, eventually set the missing third act, this “complete” version has never been staged. The two acts that Schoenberg wrote have a logical unity of their own, and there is some evidence that he thought so too. They are often considered the composer’s masterpiece.

Schoenberg wrote his own libretto, based on the Book of . It covers the calling of Moses at the burning bush, the deliverance from captivity in Egypt, and the wandering of the Israelites in the desert. Not all of this is told in normal dramatic form, and indeed the composer originally planned the work as

— 3 — an . As an opera, it has only two leading characters, only one of whom (Aron) actually sings; Moses, who claimed he was tongue-tied, speaks only in Sprechstimme; he needs his half-brother Aron as his mouthpiece. The chorus, however, plays a major part in the drama.

28. as Moses

There had been operas about Moses before, of course, most notably Rossini’s Italian and French versions of the story. But these treated the character as a hero in the Charlton Heston mold. Schoenberg, on the other hand, makes him tormented, obsessive, consumed by an idea that nobody else understands. More than any other I can think of, Moses und Aron is an opera of ideas, whether an overt part of its plot, or hidden within the psyche of its composer: • The main idea is that God is unknowable, indescribable, and irreducible. By taking Moses’ thoughts and turning them into language and symbols the people can understand, Aron is both fulfilling his mission and betraying it. • The opera marks an important stage in Schoenberg’s struggle with his Jewish identity. He had converted to Christianity in 1898, but nonetheless suffered from the growing anti-Semitism of the interwar years. The ideas in Moses und Aron derived in part from a political play he wrote in 1928, called The Biblical Way. He returned to in 1933. • One might also see a reflection of Schoenberg’s struggles as a pioneer of in those of Moses to express divine truth in a language that no one around him understands. Perhaps he saw the dapper Alban Berg, who always maintained a more popular appeal, as his Aron?

29. Centennial Hall, Bochum 30. — ground plan of the above

I have shown some scenes from early in the opera in various other classes; I shall have to repeat one five-minute segment, because it is a key to all the rest. But mostly, I shall be concentrating on the long sequence in Act Two. The production is from the Ruhrtriennale in 2009, and has some claim to be a landmark in 21st-century opera staging. The director, Willy Decker (known over here by his red- sofa Traviata for the Met), uses a converted industrial building, with the audience seated on steep bleachers. At the start, one half of the audience is face-to-face with the other half; there is no stage. Moses himself is seated among the audience, in ordinary clothes. But as he accepts the command to enter the presence of God, the two halves of the audience separate to make an acting area. Later the orchestra will move in on its own platform, and at one point intersect with the actors on the stage floor. You could not have a more powerful expression of the opera’s ideas posing a challenge to ordinary people like ourselves, while at the same time transcending all accepted boundaries (and not merely the Red Sea). Let’s watch the moment when the floor first moves:

31. Schoenberg: Moses und Aron. The calling of Moses 32. — still from the above

Does anybody have any questions about the physical production? If not, here are some other questions to think about as we go through our main excerpts:

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33. Some questions about Moses und Aron

My first real excerpt is the one we have seen before. It is the first encounter between the inarticulate Moses and the smooth-tongued Madison-Avenue , who immediately attempts to put God into symbols. Moses has the pure idea; Aron puts it into pictures and stories; it is the basic conflict of the entire opera.

34. Schoenberg: Moses und Aron. Moses meets Aaron in the desert 35. — still from the above

All the rest of what I shall play comes from Act Two. Moses has gone up Mount Sinai and the people are restless. Aaron realizes that they have difficulty relating to a god they cannot see, so he takes up a collection and makes the Golden Calf. In Willy Decker’s production, it is actually pure white, I think because he wanted a tabula rasa onto which the people can project their own religious impulses. These, however, soon turn irreligious, with violence against a young man who protests the idolatry, and the blasphemy of words, epithets, and graffiti to reduce God to catchphrases. Looking at it just now, I was struck by the how acutely Schoenberg has caught the way religious beliefs are conceived, and then almost as quickly split apart. I was struck also by how much this scene is a political document. The Nazis have not yet come to power, but Schoenberg has seen enough Fascism in the making to know how it begins. The full scene is almost half-an-hour long, but I shall stop just after the sacrifice of the Four Naked Virgins (Schoenberg’s invention, I think; I can’t find the reference in the Bible). At that point, the worship turns into a blood-smeared orgy that is hard to watch. See if you can distinguish the stages that lead up to this point.

36. Schoenberg: Moses und Aron. Worship of the Golden Calf _NO LATER THAN 11:30_ 37. — still from the above

How did that work for you? What relevance does it have for life and faith, then or now? I’ll finish with two short clips from the end of the opera. The first is when Moses returns, bearing the , which Decker interprets as a huge sheet of paper, covering the entire stage.

38. Schoenberg: Moses und Aron. The return of Moses 39. — still from the above

The ten-minute scene between Moses and Aaron that follows is an extension of the one I showed at the beginning, and is really the philosophical heart of the opera. But it is too long to show. Instead, I shall go on to the very end, where the Israelites depart into the wilderness. Decker chooses not to show the pillars of cloud and fire that go ahead of them in their wandering. Instead, he focuses on Moses and his last despairing utterance: “O Word, word that I lack!” I find it very poignant, especially in the mouth of an ill-understood composer. And it makes me understand why Schoenberg went no further. Any answers to those questions?

40. Schoenberg: Moses und Aron. Ending 41. Some questions about Moses und Aron, repeat 42. Title Slide 4

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