While the opera has its supporters and admirers, does anyone actually love Schoenberg's Moses und Aron? It's impossible to say for certain, but, forced to guess, one would have to say probably not. Certainly, Moses und Aron is an unlovely work. The story taken from the Bible's Book of Exodus is hard, harsh, and uncompromising. The music from the height of the composer's serial period is harder, harsher, and absolutely uncompromising. The combination is stiff-necked, thin-chested, and very, very angry, with jagged melodies, sharp-edged harmonies, an almost incomprehensible formal structure, and a libretto written that verges on the pathological. To make the work's aesthetic acidities endurable, Moses und Aron needs a conductor like
Solti to find human drama in its religious dialectics or a conductor like
Boulez to make compelling music of its compositional technique.
Unfortunately, Moses und Aron needs more than
Roland Kluttig brings to the podium.
Kluttig does successfully navigate the exceedingly complicated score, but his performance conspicuously lacks cogency, drive, and drama. The Stuttgart State Orchestra does a more than creditable job with the notes, but making music of them seems beyond its abilities. Most damagingly, the voices of Wolfgang Schöne and Chris Merritt, with their more often than not imperfect pitch and always too wide vibratos, would be unlovely in any repertoire, but as Schoenberg's tormented prophets they are simply excruciating. Technically, the rest of the cast ranges from the more than competent to the less than competent, but it almost always sounds as if everyone is in acute agony. Listeners looking for a convincing Moses und Aron are directed toward
Solti's or
Boulez's.
Kluttig's is much more painful than it needs to be. Naxos' composite live recording from the Stuttgart Opera is brutally honest.