Quote of the Day: Beccaria on the ‘Vast Sea of Errors’

"[T]he history of mankind gives us the impression of a vast sea of errors, in which a few confused truths float about with large and distant gaps between them."

Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments (1764), Section XVIII, 'On the Death Penalty'

Moses und Aron in Duesseldorf

Schoenberg began composing Moses und Aron in the 1920s, and finished the first two of a projected three acts by 1933. He then hit a block, and never finished the third act. Nevertheless, he thought enough of the unfinished project to permit its performance. Since then, it's enjoyed a somewhat uncertain place in the repertory, respected more than it's loved. Moses und Aron is composed in the serial technique Schoenberg pioneered in the early 20th century. That is, Schoenberg selected a "tone-row" of twelve notes — unrelated to each other by conventional harmony — and built the entire harmonic and melodic structure of the opera from various inversions and permutations of that series. The result is, of course, atonal — that's the entire point of serial composing — but Schoenberg spins moments of lyricism, shimmering otherworldliness, and sharp drama from the seminal tone-row.

Schoenberg himself wrote the libretto, which is a very loose adaptation of the episode of the Golden Calf in Exodus. Schoenberg highlights the dynamic between Moses and his brother Aron — Moses is more Hamlet than Charlton Heston. He is a solitary thinker, hesitant and not given to preaching or wonder-working. The Lord reveals himself to Moses and commands him to order the Israelites to worship Him, the single, unknowable, invisible, unimaginable, omnipresent Creator. Moses is frightened and intimidated by this impossible demand — the Israelites want a god they can see and feel, a god whom they can offer sacrifices to and make demands on, a god that lets himself be seen. Moses thus enlists the help of his brother Aron. An expert promoter, Aron beguiles the Israelites with flattery (stressing that God has "chosen" them), and wows them with miracles. The Israelites are temporarily convinced to turn away from their idols, and place their trust in this new, difficult deity. Nevertheless, the conversion is fragile. After Moses ascends Mt. Sinai to commune with the Lord and stays there for 40 days, the Israelites grow impatient, and threaten Aron unless he gives them idols to worship.

Schoenberg greatly embellishes the Biblical armature for the story. Moses and Aron have a symbiotic and uneasy relationship, with Aron usually in the lead role. But that's not the only unorthodox interpretation of the source. For one thing, the chorus of Israelites complain that the new, invisible God — despite his well-known fondness for laws — will himself bring about lawlessness. At least the old, tangible, familiar gods enforced a detailed and enforceable — if bloody — code of conduct. Who will obey a God who refuses to even show himself to his people? Moses himself is more Hamlet than Heston — he spends much of the opera worrying about how to fulfill his divine mission, or communing with the Almighty on Mt. Sinai. It's hard not to see Moses as a commentary on Schoenberg's own situation: the Muse (God) commanded Schoenberg to develop a complex, atonal composition technique (monotheism), thus condemning him to a life of unending struggle against the philistines (the recalcitrant Israelites, who want to hear pretty music).

The choir of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein started practicing for Moses und Aron a year and a half ago, according to a report I heard. No wonder: the choir is onstage for almost the entire opera, and has a fiendishly difficult singing part. But it's not just the singing: in Christof Nel's staging, the fickle Nation of Israel must transform itself, within minutes, from vengeful mob to chaotic orgiasts to stumbling zombies. This they did, convincingly. The set design, by Roland Aeschlimann, is muted and sober: the stage is dominated by a large, curving staircase, and the choir dress in everyday, slightly outdated clothes. The staging team wisely refrained from self-indulgent auteur-theatre gimmicks — in a score which calls for orgies and blood sacrifices onstage, understatement is the order of the day. Nevertheless, the Israelites' unhinged veneration of the Golden Calf — which includes murders and blood sacrifice — builds to a very disconcerting frenzy, as celebrants begin beating each other senseless on the stairs while the orchestra's percussion section fires away.

All in all, a courageous programming decision leading to a fine performance of a difficult but fascinating work. If you're interested, there are still plenty of performances left (g)!

Ever Drifting, Drifting, Drifting

Pure loveliness, found at a train station in Duesseldorf. You can almost hear the waves caressing the tendrils of seaweed this way and that:

Note the balding egghead to the right of the graffito with the question mark over his head. You see him everywhere — does anyone know his story? 

There seems to be a lot of outstanding graffiti street art in Germany. Has anyone written a book about it that one of my good-looking, cultivated readers can recommend?

The Polish Losers’ Club Comes to Duesseldorf

Next Thursday, the men behind the Polish Losers’ Club, which I fondly reviewed here, come to zakk for their Leutnant Show. I command all readers of this blog to buy tickets now.

Glam-Rock, Mannerism and Jobriath

Yesterday I dropped by Salon des Amateurs (g) a laid-back bar/club loosely associated with the Duesseldorf K20 Museum. The occasion was a lecture by Oliver Tepel on Mannerism in Pop Culture (g). Tepel is a sort of freelance art critic/art historian who also doubles as a DJ once in a while. He had shoulder-length brown hair and wore a long-sleeved shirt covered by a gauze-thin white sweater, all tucked into his pants. He read a few comments from notes, but most of the lecture consisteed of slides and videos projected from Tepel's Mac onto a wall of the club. The hipster audience was generally quiet and focused — especially when Tepel played glam-rock videos.

Tepel's began by placing Mannerism in its historical context — long held to be an embarrassing and inexplicable footnote to the High Renaissance, but then re-discovered in the early 20th century. Tepel chose Parmigianino's Madonna with the Long Neck as a suitable example: the elision of the classical foreground — middleground — background structure; the odd, unrealistic poses of the subjects, the exaggerated proportions (such as the ludicrously oversized Christ Child); disorienting tricks with perspective and lighting – shown here by the oddly undersized figure in the background and the mysterious, single pillar, which Tepel compared to a factory smokestack. Tepel also played excerpts from this lively discussion of Pontormo. There are as many answers to the question where mannerism came from as there are art historians, but Tepel suggested that the Sack of Rome by Charles V's troops might have played a role, by flooding the city with exotically-clad, dangerous foreigners and by shattering the soothing assumptions of High Renaissance Classicism.

We then leapt rather abruptly into the 20th century, and the "lecture" became disjointed observations interspersed with long music videos played in their entirety. We heard from Elvis, the Beatles (singing "She Loves You" in German), some groovy tracks from the Jefferson Airplane and Tim Buckley, among others. Tepel's thesis was that rock & roll was the Mannerism of contemporary pop culture: clashing colors, hallucinatory experiments with perception, subversion of accepted pop-song conventions, extravagant self-expression, and erosion of accepted gender categories. Modern Mannerism reached its apex in glam rock, which provided a pretext for showing an excerpt of Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine and a Bowie video or two.

As for the lecture, there were interesting ideas scattered about, but it was nowhere near a coherent argument. Presumably Tepel was showing us a work-in-progress; the lecture was free, after all. The unforgettable highlight, though, was Tepel's screening of I'maman, by one 'Jobriath' (no, I'd never heard of him before either). Don't Google anything yet, just watch the video:

This was one of those delightful cross-cultural moments in which you realize that a trivial cast-off piece of flotsam from your own culture has found a loving home somewhere else. Granted, Jobriath doesn't seem to have made much more of a mark in Germany than he did in the U.S., but at least one German hipster thought he was important enough to the history of glam rock to be worth showing an entire video — an honor not accorded to Mott the Hoople, Alice Cooper, Roxy Music, or dozens of other potential candidates.

The odd story of Jobriath can be read, in all its sad, twisted glory, here.