Peter Goldstein writes in response to me:

>>I would prefer Schoenberg's Moses und Aaron to Mozart's Don Giovanni
>>any day.  I especially like the acceptance of the Wagnerian abolition
>>of the whole silly aria-recitative thing.  I demand visionary depth and
>>profundity from art.  Light and love are just not enough for me I am
>>afraid!
>
>As a dedicated Mozartian, I can say that although I frequently disagree
>with Satoshi Akima, he has never offended my sensibilities.  I find his
>comments generally intelligent and well-thought-out, and always worth
>reading.  But I have to take issue with his characterization of the older
>form of opera as "the whole silly aria-recitative thing."

Very well - I think I asked for that.  As usual Peter Goldstein has made
the sort of typically interesting and highly intelligent comment we have
come to expect of him (and I mean that honestly without the slightest hint
of irony).  He usually has the most interesting things to say precisely
where he disagrees with me most.  I must say when I used the expression
"the whole silly aria-recitative thing" it was somewhat with
tongue-in-cheek.  I am surprised that I haven't had it pointed out to
me that it was of course Wagner who spoke of the "zarten Licht- und
Liebesgenius Mozarts" (Mozart's tender genius of light and love).  In
fact I must say that Schoenberg himself would have protested bitterly
at my comments.  He even once wrote:

   Analysts of my music will have to realize how much I personally owe
   to Mozart.  People who looked unbelievingly at me, thinking I made
   a poor joke will now understand why I called myself a ' pupil of
   Mozart,' must now understand my reasons.  This will not help them to
   appreciate my music, but to understand Mozart.  And it will teach
   young composers what are the essentials that one has to learn from
   masters and the way one can apply these lessons without loss of
   personality.  (From "Brahms the Progressive").

On another occasion Schoenberg wrote:

   My teachers were primarily Bach and Mozart, and secondarily Beethoven,
   Brahms and Wagner.

The things he writes he learned from Mozart were:

   1. Inequality of phrase length.
   2. Co-ordination of heterogeneous characters to form a thematic unity.
   3. Deviation from even number construction in the these and its
       components parts.
   4. The art of forming subsidiary ideas.
   5. The art of introduction and transition.

>The reason free verse developed in the early 20th century is that the
>early 20th century is when God died.  Free verse is perfect for a society
>that sees no transcendent order in the universe.  Fixed poetic forms tend
>to suggest a universe in which there is an ultimate order--of course, they
>can be used ironically, but that's precisely the point.  These days, when
>you use fixed poetic forms, you are deliberately invoking an archaic view
>of the universe.

Here I must strongly disagree that it is necessarily so.  And here
Schoenberg's 'Moses und Aaron' is a supreme example.  Schoenberg's
text is in free form, yet its Old Testament wisdom mixed with elements of
Schopenhauerian and even Nietzschean thought (never mind that it was he who
declared the death of God) which at times comes astonishingly close in its
thinking to that of Heidegger while anticipating Camus.  Indeed it presents
a very much existentialist interpretation of Judaism of extraordinary
beauty.  By comparison Mozart seems too naive and frivolous to be taken too
seriously.  Here it is Mozart who is lacking in spirituality - the music of
the Stone Guest with its use of a text in fixed poetic form and all.

But Schoenberg has his successor in Stockhausen.  In particular I refer
to his 'Licht' cycle.  Each part of the cycle is named after a day of the
week starting with 'Montag aus Licht' and ending with 'Sonntag aus Licht'.
The choice of the Archangel Michael as the chief protagonist reflects
awareness of much that has been soul destroying about the 20th century for
according to legend Michael was both protector of the Jewish and German
people.  Indeed Stockhausen is so convinced that a divine order rules over
everything that he believes that there is grand order and meaning hidden
within even stochastic events - which is what his aleatoric music is all
about.  Again the text of 'Licht' is in free form.

>There are some really dull moments in the Ring, precisely where
>the story requires low intensity rather than high.  That doesn't mean
>thorough-composed opera can't handle the prose too --both Wagner and later
>Verdi manage it quite well at times.  But the form in which they work is
>not ideally adapted to that particular effect, and both composers have
>their longueurs.

Here once again I beg to disagree.  The more the years go by the clearer
it becomes to me that there are no 'dull moments' in the Ring.  None at
all.  I love the synthesis of aria and recitative (where one is the thesis
and the other its antithesis) that Wagner achieves.  The result has the
best of both while offering more than either in isolation.  Of all examples
I can offer few better examples than Amfortas' monolog in the first act of
Parsifal.  It is a synthesis of so many things - of aria, and recitative,
while simultaneously functioning as a form of symphonic development
section.  Similarly Bruennhilde's final Immolation Scene is neither aria
nor recitative but a synthesis of both.  This is why I find those parts of
the Ring which never appear in 'highlights' discs or concert snippets often
the most fascinating, because it is often there that the subtleties of
Wagner's DEVELOPMENTAL handling of Leitmotivs is most telling.  I have
stressed before the importance of listening to Wagner symphonically, and
the reason why these development sections of the Ring never appear in those
'highlights' discs or in concert snippets is for the same reason that in
compiling similar 'bleeding chunks' of the Beethoven symphonies one might
similarly crop out the 'dull' development sections to get to the 'juicy
bits'.  That of course is also to miss the whole point of the
argument-as-a-whole.

And just as a symphonist such as Beethoven can accommodate moments of
great tension and repose within the space of a single movement so too
is the durchkomponierte ('through-composed') operatic form taken up by
a Wagner or Schoenberg not in any way lacking in contrast.

Of course I too can enjoy listening to the older operatic form (especially
as found as its very inception in Monteverdi) with its aria-recitative
distinction but it is too disruptive to allow the sort of larger
structural-symphonic unity of the post-Wagnerian idiom as typified
by Schoenberg's 'Moses und Aaron'.

Satoshi Akima