Supposedly, the title spells it "Aron" because of Schoenberg's severe triskaidekaphobia--he didn't want his opera to have a thirteen-letter title. How about just using an ampersand? For the record, the subtitles in this performance use "Aaron."
(Actually, at least according to wikipedia, this superstition may have lead to his death. It's a sad story: someone pointed out to him, at the age of seventy-six, that seven plus six was thirteen, and this realization led to some sort of breakdown. You'd think he could've taken comfort that he (and many others) had survived forty-nine, fifty-eight, and sixty-seven. But are phobias ever rational? Actually, maybe sometimes they are. It's worth pondering. But certainly not this one.)
So Schoenberg. Twelve-tone music. You know, I really just need to read a textbook or something on music theory, so maybe possibly I can really understand what terms like that MEAN. Is it different than atonal music? How? To me, this doesn't sound so different from Berg, but maybe an expert would scoff at that judgment. "Ha! They're nothing alike!" At any rate, I felt, let's say, a certain amount of foreboding going into this opera. Would it be an unlistenable cacophony that makes me think maybe I'm just not capable of appreciating music? That, while I thought music was good, it's actually...bad? Well, no. It's...okay? I don't know. I think it accompanies the action in a more or less appropriate way; I just don't know that I'd go out of my way to listen to it.
But it's not just the music that makes this a potentially difficult opera. The libretto is very abstract and cerebral. Obviously, it's about the Biblical characters and their flight from Egypt. It's an opera that's centered around semiotics, if you can believe: Aaron is trying to tell the people about God to make them understand, but Moses understands that there are no accurate signifiers: God can't be expressed in that way. The God that can be named is not the true God, it seems. So while Moses is up grabbing him some commandments, Aaron builds a golden calf so that there will be a god with characteristics that the people can understand. Moses comes back down, angry and despairing at this: that he can't convey God to the Israelites. "O word that I lack!" he laments, and that is the end of the second act and of the opera, which Schoenberg never completed. When Berg's Lulu is performed, it's always the version that was completed in 1979, but even though there is a "complete" version of this authorized by the Schoenberg estate, it's generally performed as he left it, and that seems like a good choice: it's a powerful non-ending, it must be admitted, and an obvious meta-commentary on Schoenberg's own writer's block.
This production is pretty odd. Difficult to wrap one's head around, as perhaps befits the opera. In the first act, the entire stage is shrouded in fog. It's impossible to get a clear look at the singers. There are things projected onto the wall, most notably a series of words (in French)--at first, they appear slowly and seem to have at least some relevance to the libretto, but at a certain point they go by so quickly it's impossible to catch most of them, and to the extent that you can, they seem completely random. This is obviously building on the idea of the inadequacy of the word. In the second act, the fog has lifted (though I'm not sure why, since the confusion certainly hasn't), but aside from that, it's still as strange as ever. One major element is people dousing one another with what looks like oil (ie, petroleum). Is this meant to convey verbal slippage between the kind of oil you would use for anointing and the other kind? Maybe I'm reading too much into this (but try and stop me!). Honestly, I was of two minds: on the one hand, the libretto is, as I noted above, vague enough that this kind of interpretation can work (and there are definitely striking moments). On the other hand, maybe it would be better to sort of let the text speak for itself by putting on a more restrained production? I don't know. I have to admit, the weirdness did get a bit wearing after a while.
I may not have loved this, quite, but the artistic commitment on on Schoenberg's part is undeniable. Definitely an opera that you must see if you are interested in the form.
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