Bold Dissonance at Santa Fe

By Christopher Porterfield

Triple bill reveals Schoenberg's recalcitrant beauties

In 1931 Composer Arnold Schoenberg spent a few months in Barcelona. It seemed only natural for a colleague to suggest that a composition by the revolutionary Viennese master should be played at a local concert. Schoenberg reacted with mock alarm. "I have made many friends here who have never heard my works but who play tennis with me," he said. "What will they think of me when they hear my horrible dissonances?"

Schoenberg's dissonances have long since become the common currency of 20th century music. No other composer of his time except Stravinsky has proved as influential, and even Stravinsky came around at the end of his life to his rival's method of composition. Yet today, nearly 30 years after Schoenberg's death, the question of what ordinary concertgoers will think of him remains unsettled. The music, like the man, is complex, uncompromising, obstinately single-minded in its innovative rigor. Audiences have felt, as many critics have, that Schoenberg put truth before beauty. They have often found him easier to take at second or third hand, as refracted through the more immediately appealing work of Student Alban Berg, for instance, or any of dozens of lesser figures.

For an opera company to present a triple bill like Santa Fe's current "A Schoenberg Evening" is thus fairly bold, even when the company has a distinguished history of staging new and venturesome works. Judging from the progressively thinning house on opening night, Santa Fe's gamble may not be paying off at the box office. But to listeners willing to endure a little heavy harmonic weather, the evening not only confirms Schoenberg's truth but reveals some of his recalcitrant beauties.

Oddly, the work that is relatively the most familiar, and historically the most significant, turns out to be the most disappointing. Erwartung (Expectation) is a half-hour Expressionist phantasmagoria in which a woman wanders a forest at night, yearning for a lover who has left her (or whom she may have killed), then finds his corpse (or imagines she has found it). The score, composed in 1909, broke down harmony until it had no real key, fragmented melody into an apparently unrelated succession of motifs and dissolved all structure by avoiding repetitions. It was as though Schoenberg felt a need to reduce and purify all the musical elements before seeking some new form that they could take.

Erwartung's nightmare ambiguities can have a haunting power. The Santa Fe production makes them rather tame, except in the astringent sonorities arising from the orchestra pit. Soprano Nancy Shade, as the woman, has command of Schoenberg's difficult idiom, but her voice lacks the dramatic weight for a role that, as Musicologist Wilfrid Mellers describes it, is essentially "Isolde in nervous disintegration."

Die Jakobsleiter (Jacob's Ladder) is a portion of a grandiose, uncompleted oratorio. A chorus of souls in limbo shuffles about the stage, awaiting reincarnation. Their doubts and frustrations are chastened by the Archangel Gabriel, effectively sung by Bass-Baritone William Dooley. The music, first sketched around World War I and completed later, has more lateromantic intelligibility than Erwartung, but it is so somber and static that one eventually wants to cry out with the chorus: "Is it really to go on like this forever?" Yet there is a moving finale. Soprano Janet Northway, as a soul who is dying into a new life, slowly ascends a series of platforms, singing an eerily ecstatic duet with a tape recording of her own voice.

The surprise of the evening is Von Heute auf Morgen (From Today Until To morrow), a one-act comic opera being given its U.S. stage premiere. Schoenberg had consolidated his epochal twelve-tone system by 1923, supplanting the traditional seven-note scale with all twelve chromatic tones, which, in various intricate arrangements, became a new basis for melody and harmony. Von Heute, composed in 1929, qualifies as the first twelve-tone opera. It shows off the range of effects that are possible within such a seemingly rigid system: singable lines, comic punctuation in the orchestra, a brief pastiche of Italian lyricism, even a gloriously jangling doorbell.

The libretto concerns a husband who becomes enamored of a swinging, unmarried friend of his wife's. Domesticity triumphs when the wife changes costumes, wigs and personalities to deflate the husband's romantic notions. Director Bliss Hebert wittily stages the action with an array of modish accouterments undreamed of by Schoenberg, including Visa cards and telephones with TV monitors; Maxine Willi Klein's sleek set looks like a sci-fi Better Homes and Gardens; and the cast, especially Soprano Mary Shearer as the wife, delivers a slyly spirited performance. Slight as it is, this is the kind of production that Schoenberg's reputation could use more of. Even the sort of people who only played tennis with him could warm to it.

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