Wagner’s Ring, a
tetralogy – strictly speaking, three ‘days’ and a ‘preliminary evening’ –
containing, as he wrote to Liszt, ‘the beginning of the world and its
destruction!’ remains perhaps the greatest challenge, and the greatest reward,
for our opera houses to stage. It may
not be perfect; if any work by Wagner merits that epithet, it would surely be Tristan und Isolde. But its
monumentality sums up the aspirations and the conflicts of the nineteenth
century as no other artwork can. The need for a new theatre – and a new,
post-revolutionary audience – is not the least of its demands, and the Bayreuth
Festival has, over its history, set new standards and, latterly, theatrical
challenges to an operatic world always prone to treat musical drama as a
collection of museum pieces. No serious composer of opera, and indeed few
serious composers of any description, was unaffected by Wagner’s legacy, even
if some, such as Ferruccio Busoni, came to regard him as the end of a line
rather than a new dawn; Stravinsky’s anti-Wagnerism was just as much a
consequence as Schoenberg’s devotion.
Schoenberg’s own unfinished operatic masterpiece, Moses und Aron has as strong a claim as
any to follow in Wagner’s footsteps. It even employs compositional technique
directly descended from Wagner’s own motivic writing, albeit with more than a
little Brahms mixed in. Moses, as
befits Schoenberg’s post-Wagnerian vision of the composer as prophet, challenges
the audience, the performers, and indeed the very conventions of what might
actually be represented on stage. It asks difficult questions about the easy
idolatry of art and mass communication, symbolised by the contrast between
Moses, who may be right but whom his people cannot understand, and his brother,
Aron, whose twelve-note bel canto
leads them astray. The Orgy around the Golden Calf is a musical riot to rival
that of The Rite of Spring; it has
even been described, in knowing reference to one of Wagner’s greatest bêtes noires, as ‘twelve-note Meyerbeer’.
And yet, when it subsides, Moses having descended from Mount Sinai, the message
seems bleak: Moses lacks the ability to communicate. Does modernist opera too? Growing acceptance, even idolatrous following,
of Schoenberg’s work answers with a resounding ‘no’.
The same answer echoes perhaps more resoundingly still with
an heroic 2012 opera production in Birmingham: the first complete performance
of Stockhausen’s MITTWOCH (Wednesday)
from his vast LICHT cycle. That
series of seven operas stretched still further the bounds of the operatic – and
with unabashedly neo-Wagnerian ambition. Each of the seven works treats with
one of the days of Creation, though not as mere earthlings might know it.
(Stockhausen came to believe that he was of extra-terrestrial provenance.)
Lasting twice as long as the Ring, Licht’s equivalent to Wagner’s Nibelungenlied was the mysterious Urantia Book. Some find it difficult to
take the composer’s cosmogony seriously. However, the imagination that brought
extraordinary scenes such as ‘World-Parliament’, in which delegates from across
the universe debate in invented languages the meaning of love, and the
celebrated ‘Helicopter String Quartet’, the theatricality of the players’ four
helicopters perhaps obscuring the typically tight-knit musical ‘superformula’
organisation, let alone the appearance of Lucicamel, the dromedary ‘emanation’
of Lucifer elected as focus of cosmological solidarity…: that is an imagination
that demands our attention. Like most performances of the Ring, the premiere performances of MITTWOCH sold out
immediately, some Stockhausen disciples travelling across the world to attend,
in homage, conscious or otherwise, to the first, 1876 Bayreuth Festival, to
attend all four.
At any rate, I was delighted to be able to get some Schoenberg on air!
