Magicians in the Wilderness

The idea of a single, eternal and all-powerful god, who also happens to be invisible, was always going to be a hard sell. Say what you will about the Egyptian gods, but they were easy to recognise and easy to venerate; their physical form, whether an asp or an ibis or a dog, was an essential part of their appeal. In Schönberg’s Moses und Aron, it is this difficult task of convincing the children of Israel to embrace a deity they can not see that forms the dramatic crux of the opera … and in Barrie Kosky’s gloriously over-the-top new production at the Komische Oper, the long journey toward monotheism proves to be as dangerous as the Sinai desert itself. If Schönberg’s operatic fragment – he wrote no music for a proposed third act – has largely failed to gain a foothold in the standard repertoire, it may be due less to the technical…