Moses und Aron

During the summer break, we offer our readers a retrospective glaze on Stéphane Lissner’s first season at the Paris Opera. Singers, stage directors, stage designers… The season 15/16 hosted the debuts at the Paris Opera of numerous acclaimed artists. Looking back on a season-manifesto.    

This production of Platée directed by Laurent Pelly must be a timeless classic: season after season, it conveys an ever renewed pleasure. Furthermore, it still succeeds to surprise us and make us burst into laughter. One must admit that this time, the show could rely on the presence of Julie Fuchs, soprano of a rising generation, who was making her debut at the Paris Opera and enchanted the audience with her interpretation of La Folie.

The inaugural event of this season unquestionably was Arnold Schönberg’s Moses und Aron given for the first time at the Opera Bastille. Stage director, creator of shows for theatre and opera that are as many visual shocks, the Italian Romeo Castellucci confronted himself to this biblical tale about a people’s wandering and the limits of speech. The term “confrontation” isn’t an overstatement when considered the importance of image in Castellucci’s aesthetic, importance that is precisely questioned by Schönberg in his opera. From this dialectical opposition between a major contemporary artist and one of the 20^th century’s most fascinating works emerged a memorable artistic gesture, an aesthetic manifesto : on the vast stage of the Opera Bastille, a desert stretched itself out – firstly white then painted black – until ironing out the chorus, while Schönberg’s notes resounded relentlessly.

Another high point of the season was the dual evening bringing together Béla Bartók’s Le Château de Barbe-Bleue and Francis Poulenc’s La Voix humaine in a production by Krzysztof Warlikowski. This wasn’t the Polish stage director’s first experiment at the Paris Opera. Among his various productions, one remembers Iphigénie en Tauride (which will be revived next season) L’Affaire Makropoulos or Le Roi Roger… For his anticipated comeback, he attempted creating close dramaturgical links between Bartók’s opera and Poulenc’ lyrical tragedy. The result of this double bill is a strange and fascinating theatrical and musical object, an intense experience for the audience. Under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan made her Paris Opera debut and offered an incandescent performance in the role of La Voix humaine’s passionate and suicidal lover: she literarily self-consumes on stage with a fire that doesn’t burn out until Poulenc’s last chords.

For his Paris Opera debut, Latvian stage director Alvis Hermanis took over the myth of Faust and turned it into a very contemporary re-envisioning: basing himself upon the “Mars One” project which intends to colonize the planet Mars, seeing in cosmologist Stephen Hawking the scholar’s rightful heir, he imaged a production where the pact between the scholar and the Devil becomes a one-way ticket to the Red Planet. Under the musical direction of Philippe Jordan, Jonas Kaufmann, Bryan Hymel, Bryn Terfel and Sophie Koch were an outstanding vocal cast. 

Rarely had a show gathered such a perfect cast: on the occasion of Il Barbiere di Siviglia’s revival in Damiano Michieletto’s electrifying staging, Lawrence Brownlee and Pretty Yende lent their voices to Count Almaviva and to Rosina. The South-African soprano, who was making her Paris Opera debut, composed on stage a powerful Rosina, whom her old fogey of a guardian had a hard time keeping captive… She’ll be back on the Opera Bastille’s stage in the title-role of Lucia di Lammermoor next season while Damiano Michieletto returns for a new production of Samson et Dalila to be discovered from the 4^th of October.

Unanimously acclaimed from New York to Salzburg, stage director Claus Guth hadn’t yet had the opportunity to direct a production for the Paris Opera. It now has been done with Rigoletto, for which he offered, as always, a chilling a chirurgical vision turning Gilda, the fool’s daughter, into the object of every fantasy: the opportunity for Olga Peretyatko to make a remarkable debut alongside Quinn Kelsey. A production that will be revived as soon as next season. 

Last new operatic production of the season, the representation of Aribert Reimann’s Lear based on Shakespeare for the first time in its original language at the Palais Garnier, was one of the high points of this season. On the occasion, stage director Calixto Bieito offered a breathtaking show, living up to the Shakespearian drama. So as to make us eager to discover his Carmen programmed next season… Remembering Bo Skovhus’ stunning interpretation of this king at death’s door still sends shivers down one’s spine…

“O word, thou word that I lack!” These words, uttered by Moses in the face of his inability to convince the Israelite people, could also be taken as a metaphor for all a stage director's work: to create a production, stage directors have purely theatrical means of expression at their disposal, namely, movement, space and silence… But not words. They must give up their own words to use another's words: words which may have been written centuries before them.

It’s been five weeks since rehearsals for Moses und Aron began and the presentation of this monumental work on the Bastille stage is "the" event of the beginning of the new season. A five-week-long artistic journey which Romeo Castellucci, the soloists, the Orchestra and Chorus—conducted by Philippe Jordan and José Luis Basso respectively—together with all the teams of the Opera have embarked upon, drawing them ever closer to the Première. Five weeks during which, far from the shock images with which his name is usually associated, the director patiently endeavours to construct his production from rehearsal into dialogue and from dialogue into rehearsal. The photographer Elena Bauer has captured the atmosphere of these sessions and transposed Romeo Castellucci’s intentions to images.

Inspired by Exodus and the Book of Numbers, Schönberg’s opera recounts Moses’ vocation, and how he is entrusted by the Burning Bush with the mission of freeing the people of Israel. However, given the prophet's inability to communicate, his brother Aron becomes his voice. The two brothers' opposition lies at the very heart of the work: Moses is able to understand divine thought but can neither express it nor pass it on. Aron has mastered the art of speaking but he adulterates the idea as soon as it he expresses it. There is a conflict between mind and matter, idea and its representation, thought and word…

Collectively, the people constitute the third character in this drama: the uprooted Israelites represent the human community. As a result, the opera calls for an exceptional number of chorus members—88—who play a leading dramatic role throughout the work. Directing the 88 Chorus members on stage is certainly one of the challenges of this production. In rehearsal, Romeo Castellucci explores the effects the sheer size of the chorus offers him: sometimes forming them into a geometric square advancing in tight formation, sometimes into the shape of a needle moving across the dial of time. In the second act, when Moses has gone off into the wilderness and rebellion is growling, the director creates some unnerving effects by positioning the mass of people at the front of the stage like a reservoir of water behind a dam. Ultimately the dam gives way, unleashing a violent torrent of people into the theatre.

“It’s as if I’m in a sculptor’s studio. I have to work the material in order to give it constantly changing form, just like this people which is forever changing.” From this point of view, Romeo Castellucci might seem closer to Aron: the man who fashions the people. But he is also Moses: in rehearsal, he listens more than he talks. The teams of the Opera have noticed his unique way of working: he starts with an idea – often an image – and then confronts it with its realization on stage. But in the end, he always comes back to the idea.

“Above all, I wanted to avoid being trapped by the scenography. So I thought of something which doesn’t exist, a non-place that would follow the movements of Moses for whom the idea takes precedence over all else. In the first act, the space does not exist: the desert has invaded our very perceptions of the set. Then, when Moses goes up the mountain to receive the Tablets of Law, something happens: the world, which until then has existed deep in his mind, becomes real. This reality scandalises Moses for in it he sees the corruption of the idea of God: For him, the body itself is a stain. The second act is thus about destroying the purity of the first”.

The desert that the people of Israel must cross is first and foremost a linguistic one: “The language of a people is like a refuge, a shared house. When people can no longer communicate with each other, when a gulf develops between them, language becomes a desert”.

“It's a work that questions the need for the image, the need to abandon the image, to go beyond the image”.

Schönberg never wrote the music for the third act: Moses und Aron remains an unfinished work, amputated of its end which should have recounted the death of Aron and the triumph of the idea over its adulteration. But for Romeo Castelluci, this was not by chance. The director sees it as a Freudian slip rather than a missing act, which brings the question of the unrepresentable, posed throughout the work, to a conclusion: “It is from the vantage point of this third act that we must contemplate the entire opera”.

Simon Hatab is opera dramaturg at the Paris National Opera.