Chicago Symphony Orchestra
The second-to-last concert of his season was an all-reef evening. Three items were on the bill: Stravinsky’s Song of the Nightingale, Debussy’s Sacred and Profane Dances, and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. For any other conductor, this would have been an adventurous program–all three works are beautiful, exotic, and odd. But Boulez is truly at home only with the freakiest excesses of modernism, such as the gorgeous cataclysms of Elliott Carter or the eerie interstellar transmissions of Anton Webern. The best he could muster for the old relics on this program was tepid respect. All through the evening you could sense him chafing–surely there was something in them, some fractured rhythm or incipient dissonance, that he could break apart into fascinating fragments.
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Boulez’s conducting had a lot of precision and clarity, which always works well with Stravinsky. But it had no atmosphere, no playfulness, and no charm. It was tough and analytical, an examination of the whirring parts inside the lacquered music box. That kind of an approach isn’t wholly without interest, since Stravinsky’s craftsmanship, even in a lesser piece, is worth an admiring look–there’s the jagged rhythmic structure that somehow meshes perfectly, the peculiar harmonic materials that underlie the exotic surface. The performance even had a kind of picturesqueness; it was as though the nightingale were perching not in a Chinese tapestry but in a Max Ernst dreamscape. But it was all so abstract that there was nothing to respond to. Stravinsky is cold enough at the best of times; he’s a lifeless bore when treated to this sort of dissection.
The big calamity of the evening was the Symphonie fantastique. I still don’t know why Boulez played it. You can see why he would try to take an interest in Debussy and Stravinsky, who are at the boundary between Romanticism and modernism, right where the music he hates turns into the music he loves. But Berlioz is Romanticism in its purest form, with its grand humanist ambitions, its fascination with irrational states of being, its emotional richness, and its democratic accessibility. For Boulez, this puts it at the heart of enemy territory.
That’s not surprising: Moses und Aron is a point-blank attack on the Romantic sensibility. Its particular target is Romanticism’s drive toward totality, its attempt to assimilate the whole of experience into a single work of art. Moses und Aron counters with an image of life as profoundly discontinuous. The subject is Moses’s direct encounter with God–an experience that cannot be described, paraphrased, or translated. Moses’s brother Aron is the one who tries, and his version, hoked up for the uncomprehending masses, is necessarily a betrayal of everything Moses knows to be the truth.
This makes the opera a perfect cliche of the modernist masterpiece–a kind of prefab ruin, a doomed and fragmentary gesture at the ineffable. A lot of critics who ought to know better (including George Steiner, who’s quoted in the CSO’s program) claim that Schoenberg’s failure to complete the opera is a symptom of a generalized 20th-century cultural paralysis: he couldn’t write the third act without somehow confronting the horrors of the modern world, which render any affirmative statement about God and humanity impossible. Well, maybe so. But this rationale seems pat. The modernists’ supposed spiritual agonies and creative impotence seem just as facile as the world-comprehending visions of the Romantics.
