Introduction to Schoenberg XII: Moses und Aron—a Kabbalistic Bühnenweihfestspiel

This is the twelfth and final post in this series on Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School. As there are twelve notes in the chromatic scale, so there should be twelve posts in this series. For this final post, I have chosen Moses und Aron. Although unfinished, it only adds to the mystery of the work, which Schoenberg considered his magnum opus. The reason for the missing letter "a", in the name Aron, is due to Schoenberg's superstition about the number 13, leading him to avoid having a title with 13 letters. Schoenberg was born on the 13th, and, interestingly, also died on the 13th. That is all the more reason to stop this series of posts at the number XII. I could have chosen many other works, but I chose this with a specific purpose in mind that will also tie this series of posts in with others in this blog on Wagner.

Schoenberg (1933): "My Moses more resembles—of course only in outward respect—Michelangelo’s. He is not human at all."

Within a year of completing the music to Act II of Moses und Aron in March of 1932, Hitler had risen to power. Anyone who discusses Schoenberg simply has to sooner or later confront the fact that he is the composer par excellence of the Holocaust. Schoenberg was descended from Jewish cantors, but grew up in Vienna an assimilated Jew with a Protestant faith, in a Catholic Austria. Like many Jews, he patriotically volunteered for service in the First World War.

Arnold Schoenberg in the Austro-Hungarian army: he can be seen holding his cap, bottom row, second from the right.

During the war, the so-called Jewish census was conducted in 1916. It showed that, far from being unpatriotic or working only as desk clerks (as Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf), Jews were not only over-represented within the German armed forces, but over-represented amongst those serving on the front lines. The Jews were more patriotic rather than less so. Some Jews volunteered so as to prove that they were thoroughly assimilated, and were as loyal patriots of Fatherland and Kaiser as any non-Jew. Jews were fully accepted in this role fighting alongside their gentile brethren. Even Hitler's Iron Cross First Class was awarded to him by his Jewish commanding officer, Hugo Gutmann*.

Hitler was awarded his Iron Cross by his Jewish commanding officer, Hugo Gutmann

You will find many Jewish names on German and Austrian military graves from the First World War. Others Jews volunteered in the secret hope of serving on the Eastern front against the Russians, to wreak vengeance for their pogroms against the Jews. For them, the Kaiser deserved their loyalty as a "force for good" spreading emancipation across Eastern Europe. Even Schoenberg asserted as late as 1950:

When the First World War began, I was proud to be called to arms and as a soldier I did my whole duty enthusiastically as a true believer in the house Habsburg, in its wisdom of 800 years in the art of government and in the consistency of a monarch's lifetime, as compared with the short lifetime of every republic. In other words, I became a monarchist. Also at this time and after the unfortunate ending of the war and for many years thereafter, I considered myself a monarchist, but also did not participate in any action. I was then thereafter only a quiet believer in this form of government, though the chance for restoration were at zero.

Schoenberg: Style and Idea P505-506, (Ed. Stein) University of California Press, 1975

Historian, Thomas Weber tells us that:

Jews on the eastern front fled from the ravages of the Russian Army to the civilized embrace of Austria or Germany. The German armed forces went so far as to tell their soldiers that if some of the Eastern European Jews they encountered appeared dirty or behaved as crooks, they should know that this was only a result of having lived under Russian occupation for so long. As two articles from the army newspaper of the 10th Army told its readers in early 1916, at their core the Jews of Eastern Europe had kept a ‘truly astounding vitality and moral fortitude’, ‘a strong and selfless idealism', and ‘a deep and honest thirst for knowledge and education driven by great intelligence, sobriety, temperance, thrift, and a goodness of character’. Furthermore, the Jews' ‘adherence to the German language' was another indicator that Jews and Germans ultimately had interchangeable characteristics and values. All it needed for Eastern European Jews to lose any negative traits they might possess, the articles concluded, was for the Germans ‘to free the captives from their chains’. In short, Germany's mission in the war was to liberate the Jews of Eastern Europe, to ‘bring freedom and light to millions of unfortunate people.’

Thomas Weber. Hitler's First World War p194

It is little wonder that Jews felt an endearing loyalty to their Kaiser, for whom they had fought and died as equals alongside their gentile brothers in arm. Both the Austro-Hungarian and German Imperial forces had Jewish chaplains such as Leo Baeck.

A Jewish chaplain from the Austro-Hungarian Army conducts a service for Russian Jewish prisoners

All of that abruptly changed with the ascendency of National Socialism in Germany**, and even Jews who had loyally served their Kaiser in the First World War were betrayed through extermination in the camps with scant regard for their service record. For such Jews, private Hitler, who had served in cushy safety well behind the front line, was a false usurper to the throne of the Kaiser—a crooked "Kaiser from Atlantis"***—who had stabbed them in the back despite their loyalty to their real Kaiser.

Confronted with the rise of Hitler in Weimar Germany, Schoenberg converted to Judaism as a public protest. As a consequence, Schoenberg left some of the most beautiful Jewish sacred music in the canon of Austro-German compositional history. Yet even here one senses, not a conventional Jewish theology, but one deeply influenced by the likes of Strindberg and the mystical theology of Swedenborg. The end result is a deeply personal, unorthodox, and neo-kabbalistic Jewish mysticism.

Dieter Borchmeyer, the Wagner scholar, recalls a story told him by the Israeli composer, Joseph Tal. When Tal played the Prelude to Parsifal, his father – a rabbi – exclaimed: "that is musical Kabbalah.” Schoenberg's Moses und Aron is very much the fulfilment of this. Moses und Aron is thus the most Wagnerian of all of Schoenberg's works.

Even in Los Angeles, his pupil Dika Newlin recalled spotting Schoenberg at a concert performance of Die Walküre. She simply knew that he would be there, because Schoenberg was such a passionate Wagnerian. If he regarded Brahms as being a radical, who gave much freer reign to his fantasy than most would admit, Schoenberg regarded Wagner's Leitmotiv technique to be systematic and rigorous to the point of verging on the academic and intellectual. Even the following criticism levelled against Schoenberg's Moses und Aron sounds like the usual cache of clichés recycled ad nauseam about Wagner's Parsifal:

For despite Schoenberg’s efforts and intentions, the work is a dramatic, musical, and theological failure that testifies to the difficulties of creating religious art outside a religious community. 

Michael Linton on Moses at the Met, 1999

In short, Linton simply finds the idea of a kabbalistic Bühnenweihfestspiel to be something he will not accept. Yet accept you must, and once you get over that, you simply have to agree that Moses und Aron is an extraordinary and unqualified triumph.

Despite his politically defiant conversion to Judaism in the face of the rise of National Socialism, Schoenberg never attended synagogue nor made an attempt to keep a kosher household. Even the conception of God as the vast Indefinable in Moses und Aron sounds more like something out of the pages of existentialist philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard. Yet it is precisely that which makes scenes such as when God speaks through the burning bushes seem all the more terrifying and utterly sublime. Linton goes on:

Schoenberg’s libretto, which is not so much about the beginning of the Exodus as it is a Heideggerian ramble on the nature of God.

Actually, Heidegger never really did write—let alone rambled—about the nature of God, unlike Kierkegaard. Linton fails to give a single bibliographic citation from Heidegger for us to examine, suspecting us to think it is Linton who is doing the rambling.

Schoenberg's lack of a prejudice towards Wagner can be understood when you grasp that the sort of nonsense (commonly likened to alien abduction fantasies in their elaborate bizarreness) modern scribblers like Joachim Köhler come up with about Wagner were simply totally unknown to Jews like Gustav Mahler, Otto Klemperer, Fritz Reiner, Bruno Walter and Arnold Schoenberg. For that generation of German Jews, Wagner was just a part of their lives, as it was for the disproportionately high number of Jews performing at the Bayreuth Festivals. In a speech given on the Jewish situation in 1935, Schoenberg confirms my own reading of Wagner's Judaism in Music as a thorougly Assimilationist document. Schoenberg's reading has also been fully validated by no less an authority than the great Holocaust scholar, Saul Friedländer, who said that in Wagner's essay there still echoed the liberal "revolutionary ideals of his age".

The great Holocaust scholar Saul Friedländer reads Wagner the same way as Schoenberg as an idealist liberal Assimilationist document

Friedländer, a Holocaust survivor, is the author the monumental two-volume Nazi Germany and the Jews

Schoenberg said in 1935:

Wagner, perhaps not sure of his own pure Aryan blood, gave Jewry a chance: 'Out of the ghetto!' he proclaimed, and ask Jews to become human, which included the promise of having the same rights on German mental culture, the promise of being considered like true citizens.  

But it was not the destiny of the Jews to develop like Wagner desired. It was not our destiny to disappear, to meld and assimilate with Germans or any other people. And fortunately it depended not on desire, propositions and suggestions from any well-meaning stranger, but only on Divine Providence. We had to remain Jews and, as always when Jewry was endangered by assimilation, Providence for once constrained us by her powerful hand to fulfil our duties as God's elected people and made the new-starting racial anti-Semitism her instrument.

Style and Idea P503

Some of the words Schoenberg chooses here are direct paraphrases from the final paragraph Wagner's Judaism in Music.  Wagner repeated the classical Enlightenment era argument that the ghettoisation of the Jews, who Wagner saw as victims of a "Medieval Jew-hatred" (mittelalterlicher Judenhass) and German "predatory bestiality" (räuberische Rohheit) had ground them into a state of spiritual degradation. Once again following the arguments of the Enlightenment proponents of Emancipation, Wagner believed in the possibility that Jews could regain their true humanity and realise their redemption (Erlösung) into "genuine human beings" (wahrhaften Menschen). He believed that Assimilation was the necessary next step that had to follow Emancipation. In achieving the final goal of Assimilation, Wagner believed that Jew and German had to be rise up to become "united and without difference" (einig und ununterschieden):

"thus will we become united and without difference!" (from original 1869 printing of Judaism in Music)

Admittedly, in the process of assimilation, the Jews would have to "stop being Jews", by conversion to Christianity and taking up a German cultural identity: the redemption of Ahasvar. It was a doctrine that even Theodor Herzl, father of Zionism and lifelong passionate Wagnerian, also believed in most of his life.

Wagner called for the "Assimilation" of the Jews (from original 1869 printing of Judaism in Music)

Like Friedländer, Schoenberg correctly points out that for the National Socialists, and their "new-starting racial anti-Semitism", Jews were utterly beyond any hope of redemption, and thereby beyond assimilation, because they were racially condemned to be forever different and forever Jews. Being beyond redemption, the conclusion soon follows that annihilation—rather than assimilation—was the only "final solution". The contrast with Wagner's Enlightenment age Redemptive Assimilationism could hardly be more stark. Indeed, the views of Wagner and the National Socialists represent diametrically opposite positions. If you are going to accuse Wagner of proto-Nazism you might as well level the same accusation against Theodor Herzl. I am absolutely confident that Herlz, as well as Schoenberg, would have heartily thanked me for writing that!

Furthermore, Schoenberg draws a sharp distinction between Wagner and the ideas of his most fanatical self-proclaimed "followers":

What always happens with ideas when camp-followers develop them also happened in the case of Wagner; if Wagner were relatively mild, so his followers were harsh; if Wagner gave the Jews the possibility of living like citizens, his followers insisted on nationalism; if Wagner considered only the mental and moral accomplishments of Jews, his followers stated the racial differences. Followers always carry on to excess, and so we had soon to learn from men like Houston Chamberlain that there is a racial difference between Jews and Germans—that not only is the Aryan race a very superior race destined to rule the world, that not only is the Jewish race an inferior race and one to be detested, but, we had to argue against the very superficial philosophy of this poor man, nor against his theories, which are based on unproved statements, nor against the evident untruthfulness he brought about.

Style and Idea P503 

Worse still, for Köhler and others of his ilk, Schoenberg and all of the composers of the Second Viennese School revered Wagner. And, the most profoundly Wagnerian of all of Schoenberg's works is his Moses und Aron. Indeed, Schoenberg is Wagner's great Viennese successor as the writer of a Music-Drama that represents a Gesamtkunstwerk, a synthesis of all the arts. Schoenberg even draws parallels between Wagner's Leitmotiv technique and his own method of having a Basic Set of twelve tones permeating the structure of the composition:

Prior to Richard Wagner, operas consisted almost exclusively of independent pieces, whose mutual relation did not seem to be a musical one. Personally, I refuse to believe that in the great masterworks pieces are connected only the superficial coherence of the dramatic proceedings. Even if these pieces were 'fillers' taken from earlier works of the same composer, something must have satisfied the master's sense of form and logic.  We must not be able to discover it, but it certainly exists. In music there is no form without logic, there is no logic without unity. 

I believe that when Richard Wagner introduced his Leitmotiv — for the same purpose as that for which I introduced my Basic Set — he may have said: 'Let there be unity.'

Schoenberg, Composition with Twelve Tones: from Style and Idea, P244

Schoenberg further wrote about the influence Wagner had on him:

From Wagner [I learnt]: 

1. The way it is possible to manipulate themes for expressive purposes and the art of formulating them in the way that will serve this end.
2. Relatedness of tones and chords
3. The possibility of regarding themes and motives as if they were complete ornaments, so that they can be used against harmonies in a dissonant way.

Schoenberg went so far as to say that "there was as much organisational order, if not pedantry in Wagner as there was daring courage" (Brahms the Progressive P401, Style and Idea).

In the Indiana Theory Review, Reynold Simpson writes of the parallels between Moses and Tristan:

[At] the opening of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, [there are] a series of unresolved phrase endings and a new harmonic entity—the Tristan chord—depict the mystic intoxication of the magic potion. But equally important is how distinct and concise this opening is, for precisely this characteristic gives the materials of the opening their recognizable, dramatic and unifying power throughout the first act. The dramatic structure of the first act demanded an innovative musical representation of the Potion, a representation that could retain its freshness and identity, from the Prelude through numerous secondary appearances in reference to Isolde's and her mother's sorcery, until the Potion is drunk in the last scene. 

Despite their differences off the opera stage, the dramatic and structural roles of God in Moses und Aron and the Potion in Tristan und Isolde are quite similar, and the musical depiction of God at the opening of Moses und Aron required the same efforts as the representation of the Potion: The musical depiction of God had to be distinct, concise, theatrically appropriate, so musically compelling and so musically innovative that its injections into the drama would always ring clearly and profoundly.

Most importantly, there are hidden allusions to the Grail Leitmotiv in Moses und Aron. This is most conspicuous in the burning bush scene which opens the work, with the following words uttered by Moses containing in them a variant of the Grail motif:

Einziger, ewiger, allgegenwärtiger, unsichbarer und unvorstellbarer Gott...!

The One, eternal, omnipresent, invisible and indefinable God...!

It should be mentioned that unvorstellbar means a lot of things. Literally, it means unrepresentable, as in pictorial representational form, but equally unimaginable, inconceivable, unvisualisable, unjudgeable, and indefinable. The word vorstellbar is related to the Vorstellung in Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation). Following Wagner, Schoenberg had studied Schopenhauer, and it is seems that here God is thought of as the noumenal in-itself beyond the phenomenal world of representations.

Michael Cherlin writes in his book Schoenberg's Musical Imagination:

The opening trichords of Moses und Aron, signify an emanation from a Divine source: Moses, we are meant to believe, perceives not Paradise, but the source of being itself. To be sure, the ghostly presence of the Grail motive, the faint trace of Wagner deeply hidden within the workings of the Moses und Aron tone row, cannot have been conscious. We might even go a step further and ask ourselves if the presence of the motive is actual or imposed by analytic sleight of hand. Is it statistically convincing that six out of the opening eight tones can be rearranged to form a motive from Wagner? Well, not just any motive, this motive. Are the deeply hidden connections to Parsifal composed by the composer or imposed by the analyst? I suspect that neither option is correct and yet to say that they are composed by the musical language itself, with bows towards “the death of the author,” where language composes its own manifestations, strikes me as wholly inadequate. And so, we will assert that the ghostly presence is one that defies a definitive “rational” explanation and so defies a clear attribution or understanding: in this it is just as Moses’ vision itself.

There are further allusions to Leitmotivs from Wagner's Ring in Moses und Aron****. In Act I, scene 4, when Moses has rod transformed by Aron into a snake, Schoenberg quotes a variation of the “Dragon” motif from Siegfried:

There are other allusions to The Ring in Moses. The Dance Around the Golden Calf is a scene that shares dramatic similarities to the Flower Maiden scene in Parsifal or the Venusberg scene in Tannhäuser.

The Dance Around the Golden Calf by Emil Nolde

However, there are still further music allusion to The Ring in The Dance Around the Golden Calf. For a start there are similarities between the Naked Youth motif in The Dance Around the Golden Calf and the Siegfried motif:

Schoenberg transforms Siegfried into a Naked Youth

The Rhinemaidens cry "Rheingold! Rheingold!", whereas the Four Naked Virgins sing "O goldener Gott, O priester goldener Götter": both contain references to gold. There are even similarities in the chordal progressions used. Given Schoenberg's unquestionable admiration for Wagner, including that of Wagner's belief in the possibility of an emancipation—a spiritual Regeneration in the truest Wagnerian sense—of the Jews from their degraded state, these can only represent a deeply respectful tip of the cap in Wagner's direction. Nor can it necessarily be said that these allusions are even something Schoenberg was conscious of, since Wagner was a composer that Schoenberg carried in his very soul.

Not surprisingly, Köhler apparently regards the greatest composer of the late nineteenth century to have been Franz Liszt, whose tone poems he seems to regard as the supreme achievement of the era that achieved the philosophical goal of "die Offenbarung des Ganzen" ("the revelation of all things") (Köhler, P402 Der Letzte der Titanen, Claassen Verlag, Munich, 2001). Our good Papist Köhler's main motivation for hero worshipping Liszt, while vomiting endless contempt for Wagner, seems to be because Liszt was a pious Catholic, whereas for Wagner "the Pope meant nothing for him" (ibid P228).  We have already seen how the trumped up charges of genocide levelled by Köhler against Wagner are likely just a cunning way of extracting vengeance for Wagner's rabid anti-Catholicism. Köhler also insinuates that Wagner significantly plagiarised Liszt without really publishing a single concrete musical example (ibid, P401) from any score. 

The very fact that Köhler sarcastically calls Wagner The Last of the Titans (der Letzte der Titanen), is further calculated to immediately exclude Schoenberg, or any other composer of the Second Viennese School, as qualifying for the imaginary title of the last great composer belonging in the Austro-German tradition. Though, for that, we also have Stockhausen, whose Licht cycle, of Nibelungen proportions, is equally profoundly Wagnerian. In fact, it was Schoenberg who famously announced his twelve-tone system as a method of composition that would ensure "the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years". That was an utterance by a composer who felt he had earned his stripes to be consider "united and without difference!" with his gentile countrymen. It is an utterance perfectly in harmony with the identity of the composer who wrote the supremely Wagnerian Moses und Aron, as well as Jakobsleiter, Kol nidre, and A Survivor from Warsaw. It is only perfectly befitting that, as Wagner's true heir as the emancipator of dissonance, Schoenberg should rise up to become the greatest of all musical voices of the Holocaust, and the ultimate Last Titan of the Austro-German tradition.

Recommended Recordings

My first recommended recording for Moses und Aron is once again Boulez with the BBC Symphony Orchestra:

There is also a more recent transfer available as part of a boxed set. Boulez made another recording later on with the Concertgebouw Orchestra but I prefer the special chemistry between Boulez and the BBC orchestra.

The other problem here is the Moses of David Pittman-Jennings, whose Sprechstimme is unconvincing. I seriously wonder if he even speaks German since I can hear a thick English accent. A Sprechstimme role in German is as hard for a non-native speaker as performing Shakespeare in English for a German. Admittedly, the terrifying children's chorus through which God speaks to Moses through the burning bushes in the BBC recording also have a thick British English accent ("dow shtay'st oif 'ayliger bowden") but one can forgive children more. The Dutch children's choir do better since German and Dutch are more similar as languages go.

Another highly recommend recording comes from Herbert Kegel:

The problems of Sprechstimme remain for native speakers as well. I had expected huge things of Hermann Scherchen leading the Berlin State Opera with Josef Greindl taking the role of Moses. Alas, I was to be rather disappointed. Maybe I have just been spoilt by Boulez. The dramatic declamation is superb (you can understand every word), but there is too much Sprechen and too little Stimmen at certain moments. The children's chorus in the burning bushes scene sounds like it has been replaced by adult women's voices, robbing the scene of some of its awe and magic. Generally, it all sounds rather under-rehearsed and a bit sloppy. 

There is also a very good Moses from Naxos with the Stuttgart Opera:

The problem here is that there is a lack of declamation. Nor is there any sense of flow of the lines to give any sense of singing either.


Notes:

*Hugo Gutmann: see Thomas Weber, Hitler's First War.  Gutmann was arrested by the Gestapo and put in a Nuremberg prison. Gutmann later wrote in a letter:

I was lucky that a few of the men in the Deutschhaus barracks had been in my regiment. Particularly decent was a policeman who was a guard in the prison. He often came to me and told me that as a good Catholic he despised the Nazis. He said he was there against his wlll. He got me all the food I required; he was even courageous enough to go at night into the Gestapo room where my titles were kept. He informed me that they had nothing concrete. I mean no evidence, against me. Furthermore, through him I could keep up contact with my wife .... Later after my release, he visited me with his wife in my apartment under great danger to himself

Quoted from Weber P205 

** Even after the rise of Hitler, some Jews and part-Jews who culturally considered themselves German through and through, continued their tradition of heightened patriotism, and did serve in the German military during WWII.

*** Der Kaiser von Atlantis: an opera by Viktor Ullmann satirising Hitler. It was written in Theresienstadt but its premier performance was stopped when, after a rehearsal, an SS officer noticed a similarity between the main character and Hitler. Ullmann, a former pupil of Schoenberg, was later deported to Auschwitz were he died in a gas chamber in 1944. Like Schoenberg, Ullmann also did military service during WWI, where he served on the Italian front.

 **** Richard Begam in Modernist Cultures, Vol 3, P33-36, 2007. Unfortunately, the author otherwise suffers from delusory "alien abduction fantasies" of the Köhler type for which he can find not a single scrap of evidence. Always take your anti-psychotic medications before writing about Wagner.