Schönberg: Moses und Aron (DVD) – Paris Opera

Composer: Arnold Schönberg
Artists: Thomas Jonannes Mayer, John Graham-Hall, Julie Davis, Catherine Wyn-Rogers, Nicky Spence, Michael Pflumm, Chae Wook Lim, Christopher Purves, Ralf Lukas, Orchestre et Chœurs de l’Opéra National de Paris
Conductor: Philippe Jordan
Director: Romeo Castellucci
Format: NTSC
Language: German
Subtitles: English, French, German, Spanish
Region: All Regions
Number of Discs: 1
Studio: BelAir Classiques
DVD Release Date: May 12, 2017
Run Time: 113 minutes

A profound, powerful and yet unfinished opera, Moses und Aron ends with an admission of defeat: “O word, thou Word that I lack!,” Moses’s last cry, is also the last phrase the composer was able to set to music.

Moses und Aron recounts the story of Moses, who has experienced the immensity of God, and of Aron, who tries to speak of it; in so doing, Schönberg casts doubt, with dodecaphonism, upon the adequacy of tonal and traditional musical language and questions the possibility of a True Speech. Following in their wanderings the children of Israel, a stateless people lost in the desert and looking for signs and images, Moses un Aron symbolizes the challenges encountered by a community looking for her own identity, torn between spiritual ideal and material needs. The opera thus reveals, in Romeo Castellucci’s spectacular and poetic staging, a tragic divide between what can and cannot be represented, between God and idols, between endlessness and constriction, between the realm of intuition and the realm of language.

The Paris Opera Chorus and Orchestra, who, thanks to musical director Philippe Jordan’s work, has pierced all the secrets of Schönberg’s audacious score, reveal with grace and accuracy all the emotion contained in this anxious, overwhelming and unforgettable masterpiece.

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