Arnold Schoenberg's biggest work was an opera to his own libretto, Moses und Aron, of which he wrote the first two acts in 1926–32 and left the third, despite repeated promises and hopes, unset. Moses and Aron (i.e. Aaron) are the Biblical patriarchs, Moses being the visionary who cannot readily communicate his vision, Aron the spokesman inclined to sugar the message. Since its posthumous premiere, at Hamburg in 1954, the work has been one of opera's great challenges. So has the composer's short opera Erwartung (‘Awaiting’), whose sole character is a woman seeking her dead or departed lover.

Salzburg 1987

Salzburg has at last produced Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, and a mightily dramatic event it proved. In that heaven where perfect operatic performances exist this work is being played by the Vienna Philharmonic under Mahler, but if that maestro is beyond even Salzburg's means, the Vienna players are there, and show what abundant strengths and beauties this score contains, whether in the potency of its long melodies, in the freshness of the scoring for flutes and mandolin, or in the extraordinary mixture of snarl and seduction in the Golden Calf scene. And the force of James Levine's conducting is enough to overcome any misgivings about his concentration always on a single prominent line, even in a work which is so full of cross-currents, which exists so much under the sign of ‘but yet’.