On Saturday, February 20, most of the usual weekly listeners to
the Texaco-sponsored broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera
cannot have been pleased by the sounds emanating from their radios.
For the first time, Arnold Schoenberg’s opera Moses und
Aron was broadcast to an audience noted for their decades of loyal
and fervent support of operas like La Traviata or La Bohème.
True, a surprising number of seats at the Met had been sold for a
prior performance on February 11 and the ovations on that occasion
had been
hearty and vociferous, but one can wager that many listening to the
Saturday matinee broadcast quickly voted with their fingers and
moved to another location on the dial.

Sixty-seven years after its composition, Moses und Aron is still a barrage of
sound, a sonic avalanche.
The spelling of both names in the title is unusual.
As the annotator Michael Steinberg has pointed
out, “Moses” is “Mose” in German, “Aaron” is “Aaron,” as in English.
The two a’s in Aaron’s name have been shortened to one a, while an
additional s, borrowed from the English spelling of “Moses,” has been
added, making both spellings foreign to the German reader,
unsettling and perhaps alien to those used to Martin Luther’s version. In any
case, the resulting twelve letters
match, at least numerically, the twelve-tone row that governs the
permutations
of the whole opera. The fact that
Schoenberg was born on September 13, 1874 and was fervently
triskaidekaphobic must