Perhaps New York audiences got the better deal with the
near-simultaneous performances of Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und
Aron
that took place at the Met and in Chicago. At the concert
performances of Schoenberg’s opera, Chicago audiences missed out on
the Met’s cable-version debaucheries in the Golden Calf scene and
other stage business that can enliven—or divert one from—the
gnarled, less-than-tuneful score. Certainly, the pristine objectivity
of Pierre Boulez and the turn-on-a-dime virtuosity of the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra and Chorus heard at Symphony Center
allowed one, for better or worse,
to concentrate on
the Austrian composer’s music.

Schoenberg’s star ascended when the postwar Darmstadt musical
leaders took up serialism as their god, and it has largely stayed there
since due to
their advocacy. Yet even today, while
the composer enjoys the support of all the “important” musical
people and his works are semi-regular fare with the major
orchestras, Schoenberg’s music remains more respected than liked,
noted more for challenging innovation and ingenuity than for
intrinsic musical and expressive depths.

To many of the younger
generation of audiences, musicians, and critics, there is something a
little quaint about the espousal of Schoenberg’s serial works by
former musical revolutionaries now in their sixties and seventies.
One sometimes gets the impression of serialism being a
kind of musical Nehru jacket, donned with great ceremony by the
Darmstadt grandees believing themselves to be hip and cutting edge,
when in fact they are fighting a war long since
ended by attrition,
with younger