Schoenberg's Moses und Aron

In a previous reading of Arnold Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron several years ago I understood the work as concerned generally with issues of representing what is inherently unrepresentable, specifically with the possibility of imparting the reality of a boundless, timeless God to his chosen people. ¹ Given the conflict between Moses’s uncompromising assessment of the inadequacy of language to communicate what was, for him, absolutely spiritual and Aron’s linguistic fluency and ability to construct images that function for the people as external evidence of divine presence and power, the opera attempted to resolve the communicative dilemma of language—of word, image, symbol—to transmit the idea of an “eternal, invisible, unrepresentable God.” In that reading I observed Schoenberg’s Moses’s unmitigated devotion to a metaphysical goal connected with the second commandment’s prohibition against making graven images of God and also his complete indifference to the broader ethical and social condition of the people, which is so prominent in the biblical narrative. In fact, completely absent from the Moses of the opera was the biblical concern with liberation from Egyptian bondage and with the creation of an exemplary nation through adherence to commandments and law for the governance of communal life. It had not occurred to me, however, that the absence, indeed the erasure, of nation and the historical process of nation building in Moses und Aron was the result not of casual selectivity or inattention to the biblical text, but rather of systematic editing, restructuring, and rewriting the record of Moses’s divine commission as liberator and architect of the nation Israel.