TY - JOUR
AU - Pourciau, Sarah M
AB - Arnold Schoenberg’s unfinished twelve-tone opera Moses und Aron, composed between 1930 and 1932, has had a somewhat peculiar reception history. On the one hand, despite widespread consensus that the two scored acts represent Schoenberg at the pinnacle of his powers, this most important composition by one of music history’s most important composers has received astonishingly few actual performances. Schoenberg himself never heard it, nor did he compose as though he expected to: “Since I can't reckon on a performance of the work over the next decades,” he wrote in 1931, “I didn't place any constraints on myself with respect to the difficulties for choir and orchestra.”1 And it has never entered the standard repertory of the world’s major opera houses (due in part to the extraordinary difficulty of the choral writing) in contrast, for instance, to the atonal operas of his student, Alban Berg.2 On the other hand, the work has entered the canon of modernist scholarship, both within the field of opera studies, where it often plays the role of paradigmatic twentieth-century opera for scholars surveying the expanse of post-Wagnerian forms,3 and within the field of European intellectual history, where it not infrequently plays the role of paradigmatic modern artwork per se.4 Even all but unstaged, in other words, the idea of the opera continues to cast a long shadow, and this disjunction seems particularly relevant in light of the fact that the shadow it casts has everything to do with the problem of “staging” the Idea for the senses. Schoenberg’s Moses seeks to convey the idea or thought (Gedanke) of a radically transcendent God to the Jewish people, who believe exclusively in what they can see and touch. His failure to do so, at least in the manner he initially envisions, has almost universally been construed as the fulcrum of the opera, which is correspondingly presumed to be “about” the problem—grown particularly pressing under modern, materialistic conditions—of representing the unrepresentable to the skeptical. Moses’s inability to impose his defiantly un-modern vision of timeless truth on his people is thought to mirror the predicament of modern artists and philosophers, among them Schoenberg himself, who seek in vain to articulate an escape from the stifling immanence of a post-theological, post-geschichtsphilosophical ever-same. The opera thematizes, in such a reading, the implacable march of secularization, and the result is a quintessentially modernist work about the impossibility of traditional opera, with its claims to mediate, generically, between the extremes of music and language, emotion and intellect, noumenon and phenomenon, Idea and world.5Moses und Aron is an “anti-opera” (Herbert Lindenberger), “an opera directed against the very principle of opera” (Slavoj Žižek), an “anti-Parsifal” (Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Žižek, and many others),6 which succeeds precisely to the extent that it stages the limitations, and ultimate breakdown, of its own musical-dramatic genre. The difficulty with this line of approach is that the plot of the opera, as set out in the libretto composed by Schoenberg himself, does not actually revolve around a failure. Whatever else Schoenberg changes about the biblical text he adopts as his substrate, his text remains unambiguously faithful to the Exodus account’s central themes of accomplished liberation and binding nation-formation, which come together in Moses und Aron to yield the unity of a traditional dramaturgical event. The creation of a new, independent political entity, loyal to the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” rather than to Pharaoh, as foretold in the opening scene of the opera, gets realized over the course of act 1, put into question in act 2, and reaffirmed in act 3, in perfect accord with the conventional dramatic model of task-struggle-triumph, thesis-antithesis-synthesis, exposition-crisis-denouement. To ignore or deny this aspect of the work’s construction, as readings founded exclusively on the thesis of Mosaic (and operatic) failure invariably must, is thus to evade the particular challenge it poses to our received ideas about both modernism and music drama. Moses und Aron does not perform the modern impossibility of its genre’s historical claim to mediate between two extremes—a claim radicalized to the point of apotheosis by the music-language fusions of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk—nor does it lament the modern lack of authentic channels for accessing transcendence. It asks, rather, if this very impossibility or lack, when allowed to operate at and as the boundary of a successfully accomplished political or aesthetic whole, might not push us to imagine an entirely different mode of modern Oneness, whether in the form of the nation or the artwork. I The peculiar structure of the required unity principle, which will succeed in gathering the recalcitrant Israelites under the banner of a singular God, is the explicit topic of the opening scene. The work begins with Moses, alone on stage, encountering a “Voice from the Burning Bush,” which commands him—in the operatically unprecedented, singular-yet-plural form of “6 solo voices” plus a speaking chorus—to “proclaim” (Verkünde!) God’s promise to the people of Israel.7 When Moses protests that no one will believe him because he “can think, but not speak” the (multiple) Voice(s) respond(s): “I will enlighten [erleuchten] Aron. He shall be your mouth; your voice shall speak out of him as mine does out of you.” Moses understands this arrangement to mean that his idea of God as “sole, eternal, all-powerful, omnipresent, invisible, unrepresentable” (I:1, 225). —the idea or Gedanke he articulates in the very first words of the opera8—will be transmitted to the people with Aron’s help. The voice(s) of an unrepresentable, invisible, unimaginable Other is to be made audible to Israel’s ears by virtue of a double modification in the original signal, which adapts the form of the message to the capacities of the listener without essentially altering its content. Once Aron actually assumes his duties, however, it becomes clear that a very different dynamic is in fact at work, and Moses soon begins to despair that the chain of transmission has broken down. The promise that becomes audible in Aron’s prophetic words, and visible in his miraculous acts, bears no meaningful resemblance, on Moses’s construal, to the unpronounceable truth the two have pledged to translate. The discrepancy between Aron’s inclination to sensualize the God-idea, in order that the people might better “grasp” it, and Moses’s refusal to countenance all “images” of the unimaginable, reaches its climactic fulfillment in act 2, where Moses’s long absence atop Mount Sinai propels the people to demand, and Aron to bestow, an alternative deity in the form of the golden calf. When Moses returns from the mount, he banishes the idol, chastises Aron, and smashes the tablets, but the end of the act finds him alone on stage—Aron having marched off, still half-defiant, at the head of the wandering Volk—bemoaning the failure of their partnership and his inability to communicate the idea. In the libretto’s brief third act, for which Schoenberg never composed the music, Moses returns to power to preside in judgment over Aron, who is now reduced to arguing his case in chains. The libretto concludes with Moses’s only monologue, which charges Aron with having betrayed the idea and exhorts the Israelites to remain desire-less in the desert, as Aron, now freed of his chains, spontaneously falls dead. Commentators, on the whole, have tended to agree with Moses about the dubious value of Aron’s contribution; the Mosaic perspective is presumed to resemble Schoenberg’s own, and with it, that of the opera itself. The plot kernel, therefore, from which nearly all interpretive approaches take their point of departure, and to which they ultimately circle back, concerns the irreconcilable opposition between transcendence and immanence, spirit and world, eternity and time, infinitude and the image, as experienced by the dramatic “hero,” Moses, in the context of his conflict with Aron.9 This conflict is tragic, in the traditional sense, because it involves a clash between two binding ethical commitments; it is also tragic in a modern sense—a “tragic paradox,”10 in the words of George Steiner—because it makes no attempt to point the way toward a concluding reconciliation or resolution. Schoenberg’s opera, in the dominant view, drives the traditional dynamic of tragic conflict to a self-reflexive and genre-undermining extreme by pitting the principle of reconciliation itself, in the person of Aron, against the relentless rejection thereof, in the person of Moses. And it is this rivenness, in turn, that allows the work to operate, for so many, as a paradigm of “properly modern radicality.”11 The depth of the chasm separating the efforts of the two central characters—one loyal only to the “ideal” of an otherworldly essence, the other only to the “reality” of worldly appearances—and their failure to find common ground in the “third term” of an idealizing aesthetic bridge, becomes, here, the measure of the work’s success, since it corresponds to the rigor with which the truth of the modern disenchantment gets acknowledged. In Adorno’s oft-cited words: “Yearning, even need, do not suffice: a secular world can scarcely tolerate sacred art. Schoenberg’s greatness is that he faces this fact squarely and refuses to smooth away the contradiction.”12 And more generally, on the category of modern art to which the opera consequently belongs: “Important works of art are presumably the ones that aim for an extreme, that are shattered in the process and whose shatter lines remain behind as ciphers of the unnamable highest truth.”13 The result is an interpretive tendency that prioritizes indications of the opera’s irremediable brokenness, at the formal level, and its irreconcilable conflict, at the thematic one, over any and all indications to the contrary—including, most notably, the indication of the ending Schoenberg actually wrote for it.14 This ending, which would appear to drive toward a traditional-style resolution quite at odds with the work’s presumed message of modernist despair, has never been popular among commentators. The third act of the libretto, published as an appendix to the official edition of the score, portrays the embattled Moses emerging victorious from the turning point of his act 2 crisis, transformed according to seemingly conventional drama-theoretical principles, into a higher, stronger, more sovereign version of himself. The most common approach to the interpretive dilemma thereby posed, pioneered by Adorno in the German-language context and David Lewin in the English one, has been to ignore it entirely, on the tacit assumption that only the composed acts truly “count.” Adorno can thus follow up his definition of “significant artworks,” cited above, by declaring Moses und Aron to be inherently rather than accidentally fragmentary, and as such, a legitimate member of the category in question: “It is in this positive sense that Moses und Aron is a fragment and it would not be extravagant to attempt to explain why it was left incomplete by arguing that it could not be completed.”15 Lewin, in turn, can dismiss as “unconvincing” the text of the third act, which “Schoenberg evidently meant to decide … in Moses’s favor,” because it conflicts with his sense of the work’s emphasis on the “tragic breakdown” of the God-Moses-Aron chain.16 Later interpretations, drawing on one or both of the above, have made the tacit assumption of non-belonging explicit, arguing that the third act falls short aesthetically—Moses’s sudden transformation remains “dramatically unconvincing” and “emotionally unsatisfying,”17 as though “tacked on”18—because the proposed resolution runs counter to the work’s internal logic.19 An unconscious awareness of this discrepancy, on Schoenberg’s part, is then posited as an explanation for his inability to finish composing the opera. An interpretative position that can only be maintained by amputating the work under investigation should clearly inspire some suspicion. The widely held assumptions that undergird this position, however, are important because the binary alternatives around which they revolve—either the opera thematizes the irreconcilable contradiction of transcendence and immanence, or it forfeits its status as a paradigmatically modern work; either it displays and performs the failure to mediate between God and world, or it displays and performs a regressive commitment to the fantasy of traditional resolution—make the stakes of an alternative reading very clear. Commentators who reject the third act of Schoenberg’s libretto do so on the basis of two premises they implicitly consider unassailable: (1) Moses und Aron is an emphatically modernist work, which transcends the confines of the musical tradition to confront the predicament of modernity as such; and (2) emphatically modernist works of this kind, which treat the broader concerns of their own riven epoch, must ultimately come down on the side of rupture rather than wholeness, at the level of both theme and form. It is the second of these premises that I wish to dispute here, which means that my analysis of the opera’s dramaturgical arc also aims to trace out a different, and perhaps even uniquely Schoenbergian way for a work to be emphatically modernist. Moses und Aron, I will argue, exceeds the reach of the familiar rupture/wholeness binary, which encompasses so much of the European modernist canon, by setting in scene a new model for the construction of a One-over-a-Many: a model that seeks to preserve rather than resolve the opposition of its two constitutive poles. II I begin by accepting the third act as Schoenberg wrote it, and by asserting that the libretto as a whole, from the opening lines until the end, tells the story of a success rather than a failure. It may well be the case, as Moses believes, that he has failed to transmit the “true” idea of God accurately to the people. (It may just as well also not be the case: neither the libretto nor the score gives us any tools for pinpointing a definitively “true” idea of God among the widely differing representations offered up by the various characters—including the divine voice itself!—or for determining what, exactly, it might mean for the idea of God to be “accurately” transmitted.) But transmitting the true idea of God to the people is not, in any event, what Moses has been asked to do. The Voice from the Burning Bush says to Moses, in the opening scene: “You have seen the horror and known the truth: therefore you can do nothing else: you must free your people from it!” And in act 1, scene 4, Moses, with Aron’s help, frees his people. The Voice says: “Before their ears you shall do miracles, which their eyes will acknowledge.” And in act 1, scene 4, Moses, with Aron’s help, performs miracles, which the people acknowledge. The Voice says: “And your people will be blessed, because this I swear to you: This people is chosen (auserwählt) above all peoples to be the people of the one God, that it may recognize (erkenne) him and devote itself to him alone…. And now go! … Prophesy! (Verkünde!)” (I:1, 225). And in act 1, scene 4, Moses, with Aron’s help, prophesies to the people, who acknowledge the one God as their own, pledging devotion to him alone. Schoenberg underscores the legitimacy of this promise-fulfillment dynamic, in the fourth and final scene of act 1, with a reprise of the music that accompanies God’s initial pronunciation of the covenant (from the opening of the opera), followed by a triumphal march celebrating its as-yet still partial realization. The people lapse, of course, in the opera as they do in the Bible—the entire second act revolves around their orgiastic worship of an idol, for whom they explicitly, if temporarily, cast off their allegiance to God and his promises—but this lapse does not abrogate the covenantal contract, or brit, that established their national identity in act 1. They remain, even after the golden calf incident, the one chosen people of the one God, as Schoenberg takes pains to make clear in the final measures of the composed score. While Moses, at the front of the stage, is busy lamenting his failure to articulate, the nation he and Aron have successfully established processes off in the background, following the miraculous pillars of fire and cloud that attest visibly to God’s presence among them. Their song of praise reprises the triumphal march music from the end of act 1, reminding the audience, if not Moses, of their unalterably privileged covenantal status. The One-over-Many of national sovereignty, in other words, has been accomplished in act 1, scene 4, and will endure through act 2 and beyond. The prophetic task with which Moses was charged gets performed, in the story as on the stage. But the real question is, of course, how this performance occurs. And the answer, I submit, lies in the peculiar nature of Aron’s “help,” which means also, in the peculiar nature of the relationship between the two media, or Vermittler, of God’s word. The dualism that counts, in Schoenberg’s rewriting of the Jewish national origin myth, is not the dualism of God and world, idea and reality, truth and image, transcendence and immanence, meaning and matter. Rather, it is the dualism—named in the very title of the work—of two different approaches to the prophetic task of negotiating, or mediating, between these other dualisms.20 Moses and Aron together, yet separately, establish the oneness of Israel by proclaiming the oneness of its God; their approaches are fundamentally at odds, but equally necessary. Two acts of creation, two principles of sovereignty, two methods of mediation, two visions of the whole: one people. This irreducible twoness of incompatible positions, which cannot be synthesized away by transitioning, dialectically or dramatically, to a higher-level of awareness—what level of awareness, after all, could be higher than God’s, who ordains the arrangement?—and which nonetheless does not result in the dead end of a “tragic paradox”—since the nation comes to be and persists—is in my view the signal conceptual contribution of Schoenberg’s opera. It is the contribution that differentiates Moses und Aron both from other, thematically related modernist works, which grapple with similarly intractable opposites, and from other, earlier Schoenberg works, which have the dilemma of the Bilderverbot at their heart. And it is also the contribution that turns the opera into the primary place where Schoenberg’s radical, but otherwise inchoate thoughts about a uniquely modern concept of Oneness get articulated.21 To comprehend the generic implications of this contribution, with its counterintuitive structure of broken unity, requires analysis. The brothers meet for the first time in scene 2 (“Moses encounters Aron in the Desert”), as ordained by the Voice in scene 1 (“The Calling of Moses”), and from the moment of their greeting, they fail to converse. The two sides of their “dialogue,” which neatly lay out the two poles of the dualism they represent, take place simultaneously, except for a handful of brief places where Aron (and, once, Moses) sings alone. Almost nowhere do they engage in the consecutive “back and forth” of an actual interchange, nor do their synchronous contributions ever rise to the level of a synchronized, cohesive duet.22 Indeed, the possibility that their opposing interpretations of the prophetic task could find resolution in the higher-level harmony of an operatic “number” is precluded in principle by the fact that they do not even speak the same musical language. Aron sings mellifluously (if twelve-tonally), in the virtuosic style of the classical bel canto tenor, while Moses declaims his baritone line according to the explicitly un-lyrical principles of the Schoenbergian Sprechstimme, or “speaking voice.” The technique, developed by Schoenberg during his atonal expressionist period, and elucidated in the preface to Pierrot lunaire, op. 21, involves observing rhythmic dictates and pitch notation while in essence refusing to actually sing: The melody indicated in the Sprechstimme by means of notes is not meant for singing (with the exception of isolated, specially-marked exceptions). The performer has the task of transforming it, with due regard for the preordained pitches, into a speech melody [Sprechmelodie]. This occurs when he: I. maintains the rhythm precisely [haarscharf], as though he were singing, i.e. with no more freedom than he would allow himself with a song melody [Gesangsmelodie]; II. becomes acutely conscious of the difference between singing tone and speaking tone: the singing tone holds utterly [unabänderlich] fast to the pitch, whereas the speaking tone indicates the pitch only to immediately leave it again by falling or rising. The performer must, however, be very careful not to fall into a “singing” way of speaking. That is absolutely not intended. While a realistic-natural way of speaking [Sprechen] is definitely not the goal—on the contrary, the difference between ordinary speaking and one that contributes to a musical form [in einer musikalischen Form mitwirkt] should become clear—it should also never be reminiscent of song.23The important point, in this account, is that the qualitative difference between singing and not singing, between music and the refusal of music, should become audible without exploding the parameters of the musical form. Aron, as the representative of the operatic tradition—with its commitment to an agenda of music-language synthesis that culminates in the Wagnerian ideal of total fusion (Verschmelzung)—sings every syllable. Moses, as the representative of opera’s Other, sings (almost) nothing at all, but neither does he simply speak. Instead, he produces a “speech melody” that “contributes” (mitwirkt) to the lyrical medium of the opera even as it eschews this medium’s defining characteristics.24 Schoenberg’s chosen notation could hardly be clearer, in this respect, since it maintains all the features of conventional pitch designation while simultaneously placing these features, typographically speaking, under erasure: in Pierrot Lunaire he draws an x through each of the relevant note stems; in Moses und Aron he replaces Moses’s note heads with xs. The result is a kind of “zero degree” participation in the operatic genre of conventionally pitched or sung speech, which calls into question the priority of other, fuller, participatory modes from inside the boundaries of the generic space.25 This basic structure of “differing from the inside,” irreducibly yet non-destructively, reappears at the level of dramatic function as well, where the “genre” it bifurcates is that of prophetic mediation, or Verkündung. Schoenberg’s Aron arrives on the stage in act 1 citing the vocabulary of Pauline Christianity: “My brother, did the almighty give me to you as his vessel, that from it be poured forth onto our brothers the grace of the eternal?” (I:2, 226). And he returns in act 2 with the tenets of a transcendence-avoiding, difference-abolishing, self-and-Stoff-worshipping pantheism: “This image [the calf] attests that in everything that exists, a god lives…. Revere yourselves in this symbol [Sinnbild]!” (II:3, 233). He champions a logic of reward and punishment, offers to bestow upon the people a catalogue of commandments, and performs miracles like the biblical Moses—but also, in the latter case, like a Wagnerian god.26 He sings like an opera star, orates like a demagogue, schemes like a politician, seduces like a woman, guards the interests of his people like a sovereign. And he can perform all these different personae, some of which would appear to conflict with one another, not because his character is incoherent, but because it is indiscriminate in its pursuit of successful transmission or Vermittlung. Aron does not care what models and methods of mediation he employs so long as the end result is, in fact, the bridging of a gap between two poles. The categories of Kantian beauty, Pauline vessel, pantheist facilitator, biblical prophet, Wagnerian hero, and all the rest have in common that they serve to bring heterogeneous domains into contact, binding together opposites like spirit and flesh, transcendence and immanence, intellect and passion, language and music, masculine and feminine, leader and people, into the higher unities of theological, political, aesthetic, erotic, or dramatic wholes. By thus generalizing the prophetic propensity for facilitating connection, such that the question “what kind of bond?” becomes irrelevant, Schoenberg turns Aron into a representative of modern relativism, for which one source of value, one unity principle, one “glue” is as good as another. Aron equates the tablets with the golden calf, spiritual devotion with carnal desire, the promise of election with material rewards, because they all serve his goal of forging a nation—and national unity, for him, is the endgame. From this vantage point, which takes seriously the integrity of Aron as a character rather than simply as the locus of a lapse, the opposition between Moses and Aron turns out to correspond less to the aesthetic dichotomy of beauty and the sublime, with which it is often compared27—or to the equally traditional theological agon of the immanent with the transcendent—than to the ontological binary of some mode of connection vs. none. If Schoenberg’s Aron is Every Medium, in other words, then Schoenberg’s Moses is the “other” thereof.28 And indeed: the Moses of the opera actually does not mediate at all, albeit in precisely the same way that he does not sing, which is to say, without ever leaving the “genre” of prophetic mediation behind. Not only does his prophetic rhetoric work to “take back” every positive element of Aron’s account, both in their opening encounter and when prophesying to the people. Not only does he speak instead of sing, and seldom alone, such that Aron’s voice nearly always overshadows his in the presence of the people, even to the point of cutting him off entirely. Rather, and perhaps most significantly: every major change made by Schoenberg to the plot of his biblical template serves primarily to strip the biblical Moses of his indisputably effective mediating powers—which is to say, to subtract the prophecy from the prophet—just as the Sprechstimme strips music of its musicality. The biblical Exodus tells the story of how Moses, alone, founds the Jewish nation. At God’s behest, he leads the Israelite people out of Egypt, performing miracles with his staff to persuade them to follow him into the desert, where he actively prepares them for their first and only direct encounter with God. This formative event of Jewish history, commemorated in the liturgical tradition by the prayer of Shma Yisrael (“Hear, O Israel”), is the one in which the Israelites officially accept the mantle of divine nationhood: God appears atop Mount Sinai and speaks the Decalogue to all the people simultaneously, establishing the Oneness of his chosen Many on the firm footing of a communal revelation. The people, upon hearing God’s voice, almost immediately beg Moses to intercede for them (“Then they said to Moses, ‘Speak to us yourself and we will listen; but let not God speak to us, or we will die’”29), which he does. And he then goes on to relay to them orally, at God’s behest, several chapters-worth of extremely detailed laws. There follows the giving of the tablets upon which those laws are to be written; the falling away of the Israelites into idol worship while Moses is off receiving the tablets; Moses’s intercession on Israel’s behalf, which prevents God from destroying His new nation; Moses’s rage, which results in the breaking of the tablets; the giving of a second set of tablets, which definitively “ratifies” the original aural-oral contract; and Moses’s triumphant, literally glorious return with these tablets from the mount: “So when Aaron and all the sons of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him” (Ex. 34:30). Schoenberg’s libretto excises every one of these components except for the golden calf episode. The acceptance of God’s covenant in act 1, scene 4, and the concomitant establishment of the nation, takes place not at Mount Sinai, via a communal revelation mediated by Moses, but in Egyptian captivity, via miracles that are exclusively performed by Aron. These miracles, as foretold to Moses by the Voice from the Burning Bush, “prove” the power of God indirectly to an otherwise skeptical people (“The hand that changes from healthy to sick is a sign of the essence [Wesen] of a God who does not want to show himself to us!” [I:4, 230]), who thereafter accede to Aron’s rather than Moses’s version of God’s promise (“He has chosen us above all other peoples…. He will lead us into the land where milk and honey flows” [I:4, 231]). The divine Voice returns twice in this scene in order to directly sanction this version of the contract, framing the spectacle of the miracles with appellations of “Aron!” and “Behold!” (Seht!). Taken together with the reprise of the covenant music, and the triumphal march with which the scene concludes, these interjections effectively eliminate the possibility that Aron’s actions, unbiblical and anti-Mosaic as they clearly are, could reasonably be dismissed as a kind of hubristic mistake, which would yield a nation somehow less truly bonded or divinely consecrated than its biblical counterpart. Schoenberg’s Moses himself, meanwhile, contributes nothing to this unambiguously successful event of nation-formation, which is stamped as such by so many different signals from the score, beyond allowing Aron to seize the miracle-facilitating staff of leadership from his hands: Moses (having withdrawn far into the background): All-powerful one, my strength is at an end. My idea is powerless in Aron’s word! 6 Solo Voices: Aron! Aron (with raised arms and clenched fits, moving threateningly toward Moses): Silence! I am the word and the act! (tears the staff away from Moses). Chorus: Aron, what are you doing? Aron: This staff will lead you…. (I:4, 229).With one brief exception, these are the last words Moses speaks before he disappears from the stage entirely, as though in the course of receding ever further into the background he finally evaporates into full-fledged nothingness. Schoenberg’s unconventional interlude (“Zwischenspiel”), which falls between the two composed acts but places a chorus of Israelites on the stage before a closed curtain, takes this nothingness as its focal point. The chorus sings and speaks a polyphonic ode to the vacuum opened up, at the diegetic level, by Moses’s forty-day retreat atop Mount Sinai (“Where is Moses? Where is the leader? Long has it been since he was seen! Never will he return! Abandoned are we! Where is his God? Where is the Eternal One?” [Interlude, 231]), while inhabiting the structural vacuum of the act 1-act 2 interstice. Act 2 then opens with the Israelites’ increasingly urgent demands for some legal content to fill the Mosaic hole. It is into this prophetic breach that Aron jumps by offering up the “placeholder” content of the golden calf. (“The people waited a long time in vain for the word of your mouth, from which justice and law spring forth. I had to give them an image to gaze upon” [II:5, 236].) When Moses returns with the tablets and rejects the calf, on the basis that it seeks to impose limits on the infinite (“Begone, you image of the inability to enclose the boundless in an image!” [II:4, 235]), Aron is therefore quite right to point out that the tablets, too, constitute an image in Moses’s own sense, since they, too, work to visibly (de)limit the unimaginable (“They are also only an image, just part of the thought” [II:5, 237]). Both idol and inscription hold out the promise of a specifiable theological substance, which can be framed, touched, comprehended, possessed, and the Moses of the opera, unlike the Moses of the Bible, feels compelled to reject this dynamic of materialization entirely. Like Aron, he refuses to draw a hard line between “right” and “wrong” kinds of representation because he believes—in direct contrast to Aron, for whom any mode of embodiment is better than none—that every incarnation irrevocably falsifies the God idea. He acknowledges the truth of Aron’s comparison between the two different numinous objects, and the depth of his own commitment to not mediating between spirit and matter, by destroying God’s writing along with Aron’s statue: “Then I will smash to pieces both these tablets, and ask God to remove me [mich abberufen, literally: “to un-call me”] from my post (Amt)” (II:5, 237). In the same breath, however, he also acknowledges the crucial difference between not prophesying and not being a prophet, for although he can choose to abstain from individual prophetic actions, like handing over the tablets, he cannot unburden himself of his formal prophetic function so long as God refuses to nullify his calling. Schoenberg’s Moses still acts as a prophet even, or in his case especially, when he refuses to prophesy, and the gap opened up by the disparity between form and content, task and performance, expectation and fulfillment exercises its own kind of imagistic power, namely: the power of a force suspended or denied. The composed portion of the opera ends, accordingly, with a crisis that definitively does not signal the breakdown of the two prophets’ joint project of nation-founding—as already noted, the song of praise with which the Israelites exit the stage reprises the triumphal march music that marks the successful establishment of their divine nationhood30—but rather the breakdown of Moses’s misplaced faith in the exclusive priority of his own approach. His crisis is a crisis of singular, self-consistent truth, which means also, of the quest to reduce two opposing alternatives to one, which means, finally: of the category of “crisis” itself, conceived drama-theoretically as the moment when the plot finally “decides” (“crisis,” from Greek krinein = to decide, separate, judge) on the resolution of the drama-propelling conflict: “Inexpressible, multifaceted [vieldeutige] idea! Do you allow [Aron’s] interpretation? Then I have made myself an image, false as only an image can be! Then I am defeated! Then all was madness that I thought, and can and may not be said! Oh word, you word that I lack!” (II:5, 237). Within the world of Schoenberg’s opera, zero-degree mediation represents one of the two divinely sanctioned options for relating to, which means also for picturing or imagining, the divine. Moses thus “errs” less by engaging in the dynamic of negative representation, and in doing so unwittingly making pictures, than by fetishizing this dynamic as the only legitimate prophetic mode. His fantasy of a singular representational principle denies the divine idea’s demonstrable doubledness, and in the process turns his iconoclasm into idolatry, comparable in kind if not in degree to Aron’s transgression with the golden calf. III From the perspective of an opera about the fraught but necessary coexistence of an all and a nothing prophet—rather than a battle between the idea and the senses—the libretto for Schoenberg’s planned third act, so seldom analyzed, could hardly appear less “tacked on”: the entire final exchange revolves exclusively around the question of the Jewish nation’s relationship to the Moses-Aron dyad, and the historico-philosophical implications of that relationship. True, the act depicts Moses in a newly ascendant position, presiding in judgment over Aron before an audience of Israelite elders; it shows him finding his voice over the course of his only monologue of the opera; and it gives him, after Aron falls dead, the work’s final words. What Moses actually performs in his new position of power, however, and what he articulates in his first sovereign speeches, are deeds and concepts fully commensurate with his previous passivity. As Aron continues to advocate, now somewhat less volubly, for his guiding strategy of mediation at any cost (“I was supposed to speak in images, you in concepts!” “I was supposed to do visible miracles, when word and image from your mouth had failed!” [III:1, 238]), Moses continues to reject all such arguments, using the same logic he has employed all along. Just as he marked the Israelites’ passage out of Egypt by not founding a nation, just as he testified from the mount of revelation by not bestowing any divine laws or dicta, so he here presides over a tribunal by not passing judgment on Aron. When asked point blank what to do by the warriors who hold Aron prisoner (“Should we kill him?”), Moses effectively decides not to decide, electing instead to leave Aron’s destiny up to the accident of his individual capacities and the inherent uncertainty of the special subjunctive mood: “Set him free, and if he is able, may he live [so lebe er]” (III:1, 239).31 Of all the many things Moses doesn’t do, this decision not to decide is the most loaded, both politically and dramatically. The event of the Israelite liberation, combined with the threat of chaos that accompanies the abolition of an older order (here represented by Egypt), calls forth various different opportunities for the exercise of a new, order-bestowing force or violence [Gewalt], on the part of the prophets, and the opera, in my reading, explores each one of these opportunities in turn. The creation of a nation where previously there was none requires an act of foundation [stiftende Gewalt], which is what Moses refuses after the exodus, an act of law-giving [gesetzgebende Gewalt], which is what he refuses at Sinai, and an act of law-adjudication or execution [richtende, vollziehende Gewalt], which is what he refuses in act 3. The unique demands of each of these situations remain utterly clear even as Moses neglects to fulfill them, because they belong to the very “genres” of sovereign activity in which, like an opera star who takes to the stage and then refuses to sing, he so ostentatiously participates by not participating. The difference between the case of the court and the others—the reason the court comes at the end—is thus not one of structure or thrust, but of scope and level: The court functions, according to the established conventions of a traditional “theater of sovereignty,” like a microcosmic emblem of the opera’s driving conflict, and as such, its outcome provides a referendum on the entire arc of the politico-dramatic project. It is as though, having come through the crisis of his own desire for a specific decision against Aron, at the end of act 2, Moses can now, for the first time, fully acknowledge his role as the decision-withholding half of Israel’s doubled principle of temporal being. The referendum is couched in the terms of the biblical promise-fulfillment dynamic, which stands in for the arc of promise-fulfillment dynamics more generally. Moses’s refusal to pronounce on Aron’s fate is preceded and followed by his only actual prophecy of the opera, in which he “predicts” the continual abrogation of Aron’s promises: Moses: Always, when you mingle among the peoples and use your gifts--which you have been chosen to possess in order to fight for the divine idea [den Gottesgedanken]—and you use your gifts for false and worthless [nichtigen] purposes, in competition with foreign peoples in order to participate in their base joys; always, when you leave behind the desire-lessness of the desert [Wunschlosigkeit der Wüste] and your gifts have led you to the highest heights, always you will be tossed down again from the success of misuse, back into the desert. (To the warriors): Set him free, and if he is able, may he live. (ARON, free, stands up and falls over dead.) Moses: But in the desert you are insurmountable and will reach the goal: United with God. Curtain (III:1, 239).Prior to this moment, the opera’s libretto has offered several hints that the Moses-Aron dyad entails contrasting temporal perspectives, at the level of both history and theater. The two prophets, approaching the people together for the first time, are said to have diametrically opposed relationships to movement—the people comment that Moses appears to be standing still, while Aron rushes forward with light steps, as though on wings—despite the fact that they still somehow manage to remain side by side (I:4, 228). And in the midst of the golden calf orgy, a young disciple of Moses laments the turn toward immediate, present-tense satisfaction at the expense of an attitude he pronounces “future-at-hand” (zukunftsnah): “Thought-high [Gedankenhoch] were we upraised, present-afar [gegenwartsfern], future-at-hand! Life-deep [Lebenstief] have we been brought low. May this image of the temporal be destroyed!” (II:3, 234). The above passage, however, is the only place where the work explicitly explores the implications of this binary—and the uncomfortable coexistence of its representatives—for the time of the nation, in toto, as of its theater. The question posed by the court scenario is how a divided temporality like the one established in act 1 can ever come to a definitive conclusion—a decision or judgment—like the one required in order for the opera to end in act 3. And Schoenberg’s by now predictable answer is unambiguously: “equivocally.” On the one hand, the desert does operate, here, as a figure of Jewish time’s “terminus,” in a traditional geschichtsphilosophical sense. The empty, unsettled space between nations, which abrogates all wishes and goals, is for Moses the only legitimate end for Jewish means, the only permissible telos, the only true “promised land.” It is therefore appropriate that its articulation as end also occurs at the end, where dramatic convention has prepared us to expect the resolution of the work’s central conflict, the “unknotting” (desis) of its plot-structuring entanglement (lysis). The Moses of the opera wants the plot of the opera to conclude by deciding against Aron’s version of mediation-as-mixture, along the model of the Aristotelian “reversal of fate” or “turning point” (peripeteia), which leads the dramatic personae, together with the audience, toward the higher truth of self-recognition (anagnorisis) and purification (catharsis). And at some level, of course, the work complies. By taking stereotypes about Jewish separatism to historically unprecedented extremes, Schoenberg effectively eliminates the possibility that Moses’s zeroed-out model of mediation will ever simply be “overcome,” over time—the way the figure of Jewish prophecy gets subsumed into its fulfillment within Christian conceptions of history—on the path to a fuller, more Christian (or Hegelian, or Wagnerian) capacity to connect. Where the trope of Jewish refusal has been pushed to its limits, well past the point of all familiar, “Old Testament”-style rigor, no common ground remains from which the dynamic of sublation could “take off.” And since the opera also empties the dynamic of sublation of all ethico-philosophical priority, in the entirely-too-pliable person of the relativist, Christian-Hegelian-Wagnerian Aron, this inflexibility would appear to redound to Moses’s credit (he gets to live, after all, past the curtain’s close32), even as it turns him into a kind of ghost at the outer reaches, or upper boundary,33 of the work. On the other hand: the denouement Schoenberg provides quite emphatically resolves nothing at all, for the conflict between Moses and Aron survives Aron’s death (just as, presumably, it will also survive Moses’s) in the form of a nation that continues to embody both poles. The point of Moses’s final monologue is clearly not that Aron’s temporal perspective can be expected to die with him, or be subsumed into Moses’s own (no matter how much Moses himself might subjectively prefer this outcome), such that the Jewish people would come to represent only the “higher” temporality of stasis, permanence, and fixity in a world full of unending Christian flux.34 The point is rather that the future nation will move through history in a manner structurally analogous to the way Moses and Aron, together, move through space, which is to say, by simultaneously progressing and refusing to progress. “Always,” Moses says, when the people have gone out into the world to pursue the base goals of other peoples; always when they have exploited their gifts to propel themselves upward in worldly stature; always when they have participated in the temporal arc of a worldly project (project, from Latin projacere = to throw forth), the forward trajectory of their activity will “yet again” be broken, suspended, deformed, and perverted, leaving them “tossed down,” thrown “back,” into the “wishlessness” of the desert: Into a space, in other words, from which the very structure of trajecting, aligned here with the very structure of desiring—of going out toward the Other of an external wish or goal—has been subtracted instead of sublated, hollowed out instead of fulfilled.35 Such a space cannot possibly function like a telos in the maximalist sense of an ending that completes by in-gathering, since it does not synthesize opposites, incorporate differences, or negate negations. But it can and does function like a telos in the more minimalist sense of an ending that delimits or bounds. The desert exists in order to constantly interrupt the intentional arcs that saturate the world of ordinary activity—whether political, economic, social, erotic, artistic, or religious—along whose borders it runs and, according to Moses’s vision, will run in perpetuity. Its historical-philosophical and genre-theoretical equivalent, therefore, is less the all-encompassing perfection of the eschaton (whether conceived as the entelecheia or the Absolute), than the all-excluding purity of the epoché, which requires the continuing presence of what it brackets—here, goal-oriented time—to stay in force. Moses’s zero, by the end of act 3, is still and always only half of Schoenberg’s utterly unconventional Jewish whole, which remains capacious enough to encompass—though precisely not in the sense of a Christian incarnation, a Hegelian Aufhebung, or a Wagnerian Verschmelzung—Aron’s Christian-Hegelian-Wagnerian model of historical and operatic temporality. The libretto of Moses und Aron thus insists to its conclusion, against the dictates of dramatic convention and the weight of the entire geschichtsphilosophical tradition, on the possibility of a singular, self-consistent “work,” whether national or musical-dramatic, that could come to be and persist on the basis of an untranscended, unsublated, unreconciled contradiction. The traditional poles of stasis and flux, separation and mixture, wall and window, Moses and Christ, Jew and Christian come together, here, in greater proximity than ever before (because One), yet without merging into a higher third (because Two), to produce a composition that mirrors the structure of the opera’s one-yet-dual God, and thus also, of His chosen nation: the clearest indication that Moses plus Aron is the point of the opera, rather than a tragic conflict to be hypostatized or an intermediate hurdle to be surmounted, can be found in the bifurcated form of Schoenberg’s God and Israelite choruses, which combine Aron’s musical language with Moses’, twelve-tone singing with Sprechstimme, to yield the broken unity of a new kind of operatic medium. Notes Sarah Pourciau is currently an IPODI research fellow at the Technical University of Berlin, after seven years teaching at Princeton University. She is the author of The Writing of Spirit: Soul, System, and the Roots of Language Science (Fordham University Press, 2017), and is currently completing a monograph entitled The Broken Medium: Art and Time after the Fall of the Double Monarchy. She has published articles on Hofmannsthal, Kleist, Kant, Schmitt, Heidegger, and others. 1 Letter to Hans Rosbaud, cited in Hans Rosbaud, “Die Musik,” in “Zu Arnold Schönbergs Oper Moses und Aron,” Die Tat, May 4, 1957. 2 The opera received its first full-stage performance in 1957 at the Stadttheater in Zürich, under the direction of Hans Rosbaud. (The “Dance Around the Golden Calf” was performed separately in 1951, in Darmstadt, and a concert hall performance of the entire score took place in Hamburg, in 1954.) There followed a German premiere in 1959, at the Städtische Oper (Berlin), an English premiere in 1965, at Covent Garden (London), and an American premiere in 1966, at the Opera Company (Boston). Between then and now, the opera has been performed only eight more times in German-speaking countries (including the Salzburger Festspiele) and once each in Spain, Israel, France, and Argentina. It received its Metropolitan Opera House premiere in 1999, under James Levine and Graham Vick, and has not been performed there since. 3 For a diverse and representative sampling, see Mark Berry, “Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘Biblical Way’: Toward Moses und Aron,” in After Wagner: Histories of Modernist Music Drama from Parsifal to Nono (Rochester: Boydell, 2014), 66–98; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Caesura of Religion,” trans. Adam Bresnik, in Opera Through Other Eyes, ed. David J. Levin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 45–77, which also appeared as the chapter “Adorno,” in Musica Ficta: Figures of Wagner, trans. Felicia McCarren (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 117–45; Herbert Lindenberger, “Moses und Aron, Mahagonny, and Germany in 1930: Seventeen Entries,” in Opera in History: From Monteverdi to Cage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 191–239, and Lindenberger, “Anti-theatricality in Twentieth-Century Opera,” in Situating Opera: Period, Genre, Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 196–218; Michel Poizat, “Between Speech and Silence: Moses and Aron,” in The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera, trans. Arthur Denner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 107–12; Gary Tomlinson, “The Sum of Modernity,” in Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 147–56; and Slavoj Žižek, “Why Is Wagner Worth Saving?” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture 2:1 (2004): 18–30. In Poizat’s study, Moses und Aron shares its emblematic significance with Berg’s Lulu, which is in many ways the far more obvious candidate for the title of paradigmatic modern opera. 4 All such treatments follow in the footsteps of Theodor W. Adorno, “Sacred Fragment: Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron” (1963), in Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London/New York: Verso, 1992), 225–48. See also Jan Assmann, “Die Mosaische Unterscheidung in Schönbergs Oper Moses und Aron,” Musik und Ästhetik 33 (2005): 5–29; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Caesura of Religion”; Carl E. Schorske, “Explosion in the Garden: Kokoschka and Schoenberg,” in Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 322–64. An important subset of this avenue of reception treats the opera specifically in the context of its contribution to the European modernist discourse surrounding Jews and Judaism. See, among many other examples, Leon Botstein, “Arnold Schoenberg: Language, Modernism, and Jewish Identity,” in Austrians and Jews in the Twentieth Century: From Franz Joseph to Waldheim, ed. Robert S. Wistrich (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 162–83; Bluma Goldstein, “Word, Image, Idea: Schoenberg and Moses—A Tragic Coexistence?” in Reinscribing Moses: Heine, Kafka, Freud, and Schoenberg in a European Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 137–63; and Klara Moricz, “Torsos and Abstractions: ‘Music in the Promised Land’,” in Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 222–54. 5 For a recent treatment of opera history that focuses on the implications of this claim, see Tomlinson, Metaphysical Song. 6 Lindenberger, “Arnold Schoenberg’s Der biblische Weg and Moses und Aron: On the Transactions of Aesthetics and Politics,” Modern Judaism 9:1 (1989): 55–70, here 65; Žižek, “Why Is Wagner Worth Saving?” 21; Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Caesura of Religion,” 64. 7 Arnold Schoenberg, “Das definitive Texttyposkript,” in Moses und Aron. Oper in drei Akten, in Schoenberg, Sämtliche Werke, III B 8/2, ed. Christian Martin Schmidt (Mainz: Schott Universal Edition, 1998), 225–39. I will cite throughout from the definitive typescript of the libretto, which was prepared by Schoenberg between 1932 and 1934, and which includes all three acts. Parenthetical citations will follow the format: act number, scene number, typescript page number. All translations are my own. 8 In what follows, I will use the word “idea” to refer to what Schoenberg, in the opera and elsewhere, calls Gedanke. Though Gedanke is more commonly (and more accurately) translated as “thought,” Schoenberg himself most often used “idea” when writing or speaking in English, and the bilingual publication of his 1930s Gedanke manuscripts under the English title, The Musical Idea, has made “idea” the standard choice. Arnold Schoenberg, The Musical Idea and the Logic, Technique, and Art of Its Presentation, ed. and trans. Patricia Carpenter and Severine Neff (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Carpenter and Neff treat the terminological complex of Gedanke, Idee, and Einfall—albeit without thematizing their decision to render Gedanke as “idea”—in their excellent and extensive commentary to this edition: Carpenter and Neff, “Commentary,” in The Musical Idea, 1–74, here 17–18. 9 The decisive influence, here again, is surely Adorno, who opens his essay with a rumination on the paradox of an Absolute that demands to be named and thus circumscribed, an infinitude that insists on being rendered finitely graspable. Adorno, “Sacred Fragment,” 225–27. For a sampling of interpretations that remain in close contact with the Adornian tradition, across a wide variety of different emphases and concerns, see Berry, “Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘Biblical Way’: Toward Moses und Aron”; Constantin Grun, “Moses und Aron (1930–32)—ein (Anti-)Ring des 20. Jahrhunderts? (Schönbergs Oper im zeitgenössischen Kontext),” in Grun, Arnold Schönberg und Richard Wagner: Spuren einer außergewöhnlichen Beziehung (Göttingen: V&R, 2006), vol. 1, 557–682; Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Caesura of Religion”; Lindenberger, “Anti-Theatricality in Twentieth-Century Opera”; George Steiner, “Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron,” in Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 127–39; Stefan Strecker, Der Gott Arnold Schönbergs: Blicke durch die Oper Moses und Aron (Münster: Lit, 1999); and Tomlinson, “The Sum of Modernity.” Even those treatments of Schoenberg’s opera, however, that depart sharply from Adorno’s in style and substance, or that explicitly take issue with his approach, would appear to agree with him that “the insoluble conflict between finite and infinite” is indeed the work’s primary concern. For examples from the former category, see the close musical analyses of Jack Boss, “Moses und Aron: An Incomplete Musical Idea Represents an Unresolved Conflict between Using Word and Image to Communicate God,” in Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Music: Symmetry and the Musical Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 330–94; Michael Cherlin, “The Tone Row as the Source of Dramatic Conflict in Moses und Aron,” in Schoenberg’s Musical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); David Lewin, “Moses und Aron: Some General Remarks, and Analytic Notes for Act I, Scene I,” Perspectives of New Music 6:1 (1967): 1–17; and Pamela C. White, Schoenberg and the God-Idea: The Opera Moses und Aron (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983). For an example from the latter category, see Richard Kurth, “Immanence and Transcendence in Moses und Aron,” in The Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg, ed. Jennifer Shaw and Joseph Auner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 177–90. 10 Steiner, “Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron,” 136. 11 Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Caesura of Religion,” 46: “the style of properly modern radicality, the style of violent rupture and incompleteness, of ‘failure’.” 12 Adorno, “Sacred Fragment,” 228. 13 Ibid., 226. Translation modified. 14 To my knowledge, the only treatments that do not participate in this tendency are Goldstein, “Word, Image, Idea: Schoenberg and Moses—A Tragic Coexistence?” and Odil Hannes Steck, Moses und Aron: Die Oper Arnold Schönbergs und ihr biblischer Stoff (Munich: Kaiser, 1981). I will have more to say about both of their approaches below. A third outlier, which maintains the commitment to the Adornian ideal of representing rupture while insisting that the third act, precisely as uncomposed, actually fulfills this task—since it interrupts the music, and in doing so, shatters the confines of its own genre—can be found in Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Caesura of Religion.” Since Lacoue-Labarthe makes no attempt to actually read the text of this part of the libretto, however, and since the purpose of his reading is to strengthen rather than alter the standard understanding of the opera as modernist fragment or “anti-opera,” his treatment of act 3 falls for my purposes within the boundaries of the rubric outlined above. 15 Adorno, “Sacred Fragment,” 226. 16 Lewin, “Moses und Aron: Some General Remarks, and Analytic Notes for Act I, Scene I,” 2. Lewin’s rigorous, nuanced, and detailed analysis of the opera’s opening compositional syntax operates as a model for all subsequent attempts to understand the dramatic significance of the score. 17 Cherlin, “The Tone Row as the Source of Dramatic Conflict in Moses und Aron,” 234. 18 Boss, “Moses und Aron: An Incomplete Musical Idea Represents an Unresolved Conflict between Using Word and Image to Communicate God,” 331. 19 The most interesting versions of this position do not ignore the third act entirely; rather, they read it in order to highlight the ways in which Schoenberg’s unrealizable Wunschbild fails to provide an adequate ending to the opera, while yielding insight into the contours of his deepest desires. See Assmann, “Die Mosaische Unterscheidung in Schönbergs Oper Moses und Aron”; Berry, “Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘Biblical Way’: Toward Moses und Aron”; Grun, “Moses und Aron (1930–32)—ein (Anti-)Ring des 20. Jahrhunderts? (Schönbergs Oper im zeitgenössischen Kontext)”; Michael Mäckelmann, Arnold Schönberg und das Judentum: Der Komponist und sein religiöses, nationales und politisches Selbstverständnis nach 1921 (Hamburg: Karl Dieter Wagner, 1984), 167–90; Schorske, “Explosion in the Garden: Kokoschka and Schoenberg”; Strecker, Der Gott Arnold Schönbergs, 79–86; and Matthew R. Shaftel, “Translating for God: Arnold Schönbergs Moses und Aron,” in Arnold Schönberg und sein Gott: Bericht zum Symposium 26.–29. Juni 2002 (Vienna: Arnold Schönberg Center, 2003), 311–31. Such an approach frequently goes hand in hand with an emphasis on the ostensibly “provisional” nature of the libretto text, for which, however, there is no real evidence in the manuscript drafts. Schoenberg did indeed make several changes to the text of act 3, along with the rest of the libretto, over the course of the early 1930s; after the completion of the definitive typescript in 1934, however, the only changes Schoenberg contemplates are minor ones designed to facilitate a new staging concept. The process of composition, had it occurred, would surely have led to additional modifications, but there is no reason to suspect that these would have been particularly drastic, and Schoenberg himself quite clearly considered the libretto to be finished. For a systematic, chronological overview of the various drafts and revisions of the libretto material, see Arnold Schoenberg, Sämtliche Werke, III B 8/2. 20 Several recent readings of the opera have attempted to rehabilitate Aron, against the grain of the older reception tradition, by pointing to his theatrical and conceptual significance, and by reflecting, in this connection, on the indispensability of an “Aronic” element for every transmission project (including, paradigmatically, the project of art) that seeks to move from the realm of the “ideal” to the “real.” My own reading is deeply indebted to this productive shift of emphasis. In my opinion, however, it has not yet gone nearly far enough. My goal here is to introduce an alternative understanding of the Moses-Aron dualism, which moves entirely beyond the familiar “additive” (or perhaps better, “subtractive”) model of a pure Mosaic signal plus Aronic “friction” or “noise”—since, even where this “noise” receives a more affirmative interpretation than Moses’s (or Schoenberg’s) own, the model as a whole still fails to capture, in my opinion, what makes the conjunction of Moses and Aron so powerful. See, in particular, Joseph Auner, “Schoenberg as Moses and Aron,” Opera Quarterly 23:4 (2007): 373–84; Berry, “Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘Biblical Way’: Toward Moses und Aron”; Shaftel, “Translating for God: Arnold Schönbergs Moses und Aron”; and Strecker, Der Gott Arnold Schönbergs: Blicke durch die Oper Moses und Aron. For an early version of this position, see Lewin, “Moses und Aron: Some General Remarks, and Analytic Notes for Act I, Scene I.” 21 Given the complexity of the issues at stake in Schoenberg’s libretto, it cannot be the purpose of this study to unfurl the full implications of the unity principle in question for Schoenberg’s theory of the musical work—as this theory begins to appear, for instance, in the published writings and manuscript notes of the late 1920s and 30s—or for an analysis of the particular compositional techniques that shape the opera. I do believe, however, as I hope to demonstrate elsewhere, that such an expansion can be productively undertaken, with important consequences for our understanding of both the philosophical underpinnings and the music-theoretical results of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone methodological innovations. The peculiar oscillation between organicist and anti-organicist conceptions of the musical whole, which runs through the entirety of the manuscripts on the musical idea, could thereby presumably find an illuminating recontextualization, as could the various structural “dualisms” that shape Schoenberg’s compositional style. On the latter, see Cherlin, “Dialectical Opposition in Schoenberg’s Music and Thought,” Music Theory Spectrum 22:2 (2000): 157–76; and Robert Fleisher, “Dualism in the Music of Arnold Schoenberg,” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 12:1 (1989): 22–42. 22 A sensitive and detailed analysis of several Aron-Moses exchanges is provided in Elliott Gyger, “Speech, Song, and Silence: Modes of Utterance in Moses und Aron,” Opera Quarterly 23:4 (2007): 418–40. 23 Arnold Schoenberg, “Vorwort,” Pierrot lunaire, op. 21 (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1914). Translation mine. On the role of the Sprechstimme and the history of its performative realization in Pierrot lunaire itself, see Phyllis Bryn-Julson and Paul Matthews, Inside Pierrot lunaire: Performing the Sprechstimme in Schoenberg's Masterpiece (Scarecrow Press: Lanham, MD/Toronto, 2009). On the development of Schoenberg’s notion of Sprechstimme over the course of his career, against the historical backdrop of the development of Sprechstimme concepts more generally (the technique was first employed by Engelbert Humperdinck in his 1897 “melodrama” Königskinder), see Julia Merrill, Die Sprechstimme in der Musik: Komposition, Notation, Transkription (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2016), 54–64. 24 The relationship of Schoenberg’s opera to its genre is famously complicated: the libretto picks up, quite literally, where his earlier spoken drama, Der biblische Weg, leaves off (the hero of the latter, a modern-day Moses-Aron amalgam, dies pronouncing the very same words with which the Moses of the former begins), and the work started out as an oratorio—initially planned as a cantata—for which Schoenberg completed a text and several musical sketches. Such generic complexity, however, merely renders Schoenberg’s final decision to compose the work as an opera all the more significant, since it makes clear that the problem of genre was of pressing interest to him from the outset. The relationship between the opera and the play is discussed at length by Bluma Goldstein, “Word, Image, Idea: Schoenberg and Moses—A Tragic Coexistence?”; Lindenberger, “Arnold Schoenberg’s Der biblische Weg and Moses und Aron: On the Transactions of Aesthetics and Politics”; and Mäckelmann, Arnold Schönberg und das Judentum: Der Komponist und sein religiöses, nationales und politisches Selbstverständnis nach 1921 (Hamburg: Karl Dieter Wagner, 1984), 70–138 and 157–67. 25 For a diametrically opposed interpretation of the function of the Mosaic Sprechstimme, which locates its significance in a musical surplus of expressive energy vis-à-vis the conventionality of ordinary speech (“ein Über-Setzen in der eigentlichen Bedeutung dieses Wortes, ein Mehr, als es das gesprochene Wort bieten kann”), and which accordingly emphasizes its proximity to the Wagnerian notion of Sprachgesang, see Karl Heinrich Wörner, Gotteswort und Magie: Schönbergs Moses und Aron (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1959), here 72–73; and, citing Wörner, Grun, “Moses und Aron (1930–32)—ein (Anti-)Ring des 20. Jahrhunderts? (Schönbergs Oper im zeitgenössischen Kontext).” The more standard approach aligns Moses’s speech-style with the impossibility of communicating the divine idea, which is to say, with a kind of insufficiently realized silence, whose most appropriate expression can consequently be found in the breakdown of Mosaic language (“Oh word, oh word that I lack!”)—and in the ostensibly connected breakdown of musical composition—at the conclusion of act 2. See Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Caesura of Religion”; Lewin, “Moses und Aron: Some General Remarks, and Analytic Notes for Act I, Scene I”; Poizat, “Between Speech and Silence: Moses and Aron”; and Steiner, “Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron.” For a particularly intriguing spin on this approach, which suggests that Moses’s Sprechstimme might actually be silent, at least to the other characters of the opera, see Gyger, “Speech, Song, and Silence: Modes of Utterance in Moses und Aron.” 26 Christian Martin Schmidt has pointed out that Schoenberg makes use of a “citation-like relationship to the spear or contract motif in the Ring des Nibelungen”—a motif associated with Wotan—at the moment when Aron tears the miracle-producing staff from Moses’s hands (“This staff will lead you,” I:4, 229, mm. 642–44 and 656). See Christian Martin Schmidt, Schönbergs Oper Moses und Aron: Analyse der diastematischen, formalen und musikdramatischen Komposition (Mainz: Schott, 1988), 116. 27 For the most extensive and explicit discussions in this vein, see Assmann, “Die Mosaische Unterscheidung in Schönbergs Oper Moses und Aron,” and Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Caesura of Religion.” The categories are frequently also operative, however, even where they remain implicit, as in the treatments by Adorno, Schorske, and several others. 28 Daniel Albright’s provocative suggestion that Moses be seen as a Pierrot-style buffoon, who would operate in his impotence like “a sort of metaoperatic phantom,” comes very close to my interpretation of the Mosaic role, despite the fact that I see little of the buffoon in Schoenberg’s characterization. Daniel Albright, “Butchering Moses,” Opera Quarterly 23:4 (2008): 441–54, here 443. 29 Ex. 20:16 (NASB). 30 For an analysis of the ways in which the score underlines the legitimacy of Aron’s position in this scene, see Boss, “Moses und Aron,” 381–90. 31 Moses’s formulation here also curiously recalls the traditional European formula for proclaiming a new king: Der König ist tot, es lebe der König! Le roi est mort, vive le roi! 32 It is of course important to note, however, in assessing the significance of Moses’s survival, that he, too—biblically speaking—must ultimately die without entering the promised land. The text of the planned oratorio, out of which the libretto for the opera emerged, thematizes this symmetry explicitly. Schoenberg, Sämtliche Werke, III B 8/2, 93–95. 33 The idea of Moses as upper bound comes from a fascinating 1935 note in which Schoenberg lays out an elaborate staging proposal for act 3. In this version, Moses’s prophecy regarding the future of the Jewish nation would be accompanied by a synoptic vision of world history in its entirety, conceived as a revelatory apparition made available to Aron in the moment right before he dies. Schoenberg specifies that this apparition is to occupy the entire middle height of the stage. Aron, figured here as the Jewish nation’s lower bound, would thus die gazing up at it “deeply moved” from below, while Moses, in clear reference to Wagner’s staging notes for Parsifal’s final apotheosis, would speak his final words from a position of “the highest height,” bathed in a light that appears to emanate upward from the tablets. Schoenberg, Sämtliche Werke, III B 8/2, 258. 34 In its most interesting form, this understanding of Jewish temporality would be the one outlined by Franz Rosenzweig, in direct polemical opposition to the Pauline-Hegelian notion of a Christian teleology that subsumes (aufhebt) Jewish stasis. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). 35 This is why I ultimately do not find the approaches of Goldstein and Steck to be persuasive, despite their exceptional sensitivity to the presence of a traditional dramatic arc underlying Schoenberg’s opera. Both of their readings argue that Moses undergoes a traditional dramatic transformation, via the “turning point” of his act 2 crisis, toward a higher-level understanding of his mediating task, which allows him to perform in act 3 the traditional gesture of reconciliatory “synthesis” on the “antithesis” of the Aron-governed middle section. Both readings therefore miss the crucial set of gestures by means of which Schoenberg ironizes, or perhaps better, “breaks open” (in the sense of the German Brechung), the entire idea of such a dialectical-dramatic telos. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. 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TI - God’s Broken Medium: On Genre and Geschichtsphilosophie in Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron
JF - The Opera Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/oq/kbx023
DA - 2017-11-08
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/god-s-broken-medium-on-genre-and-geschichtsphilosophie-in-schoenberg-s-uFacQpA0ga
SP - 140
EP - 160
VL - 33
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -