Mûhelybeszélgetés

”It Teaches Us to Live Our Life as a Whole” Zoltán Kocsis talks about Schönberg’s Moses and Aron and the third act composed by him Tünde Szitha   In the summer of 2009 Zoltán Kocsis completed Arnold Schönberg's unfinished opera Moses and Aron with a third act, closely following the libretto the composer had left behind. This completed version was premiered by the National Philhar­monic Orchestra and Chorus featuring Wolfgang Schöne as Moses and Daniel Brenna as Aron) on 16th January, 2010 in Budapest, conducted by Zoltán Kocsis. This interview is focused on the motivation and compositional methods of his work. Kocsis accepts the general judgement of the musical world, which regards Moses and Aron as one of the most complete „unfinished works" of music history. However, in the course of the Hungarian premiere of the original form at the Miskolc National Opera Festival (2009) he experienced the theatrical and musical absurdity of performing the third act in prose form. Although Schönberg had authorized the staging of the third act in this way, according to Kocsis the speech mode equalizes the role and dramatic power of the personalities of Moses and Aron, firmly distinguished by Sprechgesang and bel canto singing in the first and second acts. This was the first motive that prompted him to write a score. The other was his desire to find a strong musical reply to the fiasco of Moses, to answer his open-ended sentence „O Wort, du Wort, was du mir fehlst..." and to expand the two dimensions of the first two acts (Moses: canon and discipline – Aron/people: pragmatism, caducity and outrage) with a third one (God: trans­cendency and judgement), which can be detected in the libretto. The most important task for Kocsis was to compose the third act to Schön­berg's music as coherently as possible from the distance of almost eight decades. He made use of the three fragments of sketches preserved in the Arnold Schön­berg Center in Vienna; he composed his own inventions as well in the system of consequent dodecaphony; he maintained the twelve-tone Reihe of the opera as a basic structural and melodic principle; he quoted the six-chord opening phrase of the first act in several forms of variations as the icon of the divine canon; and at several points he used quotations, allusions and paraphrases from the first two acts. Nevertheless he considers the third act as his own music with strong re­ferences to Schönberg. He invented a number of illustrative instrumental inter­ludes to depict the visual element of the libretto, included a passage of jazz cross­talk in Moses' last scene (which has more connection with contemporary jazz style, than with Schönberg's era), and - by giving a central role to F sharp almost throughout the act - he effected a melodic and harmonic release at the end of the opera: as a symbol of God this motif leads the marching people forward to the desert and affords resignation to Moses.