ABSTRACT
The development of Arnold Schoenberg’s religious thought, in the direction of an uncompromising ethical monotheism, is paralleled by gradual changes in his approach to composition, in the direction of conscious, rational control of the creative process. 1 This parallelism seems straightforward in one sense: as he moved towards an explicit and consciously articulated religious position, one deeply felt and self-generated but philosophically in accord with liberal Judaism, he also adopted a more formal, more deliberately intellectual, and thus more describable way of composing. 2 Both moves, in other words, involved a shift from the emotional and necessarily private to the deliberate and communal, the relevant community having been actual in the case of religion and potential where composition was concerned. Looked at more carefully, however, what looks like the transposition of a process of transformation from one sphere into another conceals a relationship of inversion. For as his music became, in a sense, more knowable and intersubjectively describable, Schoenberg came to understand God as absolutely unknowable and indescribable, as the God of Moses as interpreted by Jewish philosophers since Maimonides. 3
