On Saturday, February 20, most of the usual weekly listeners to the Texaco-sponsored broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera cannot have been pleased by the sounds emanating from their radios. For the first time, Arnold Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron was broadcast to an audience noted for their decades of loyal and fervent support of operas like La Traviata or La Bohème. True, a surprising number of seats at the Met had been sold for a prior performance on February 11 and the ovations on that occasion had been hearty and vociferous, but one can wager that many listening to the Saturday matinee broadcast quickly voted with their fingers and moved to another location on the dial.

Sixty-seven years after its composition, Moses und Aron is still a barrage of sound, a sonic avalanche. The spelling of both names in the title is unusual. As the annotator Michael Steinberg has pointed out, “Moses” is “ ...

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