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Arnold Schoenberg's 'Biblical Way': from 'Die Jakobsleiter' to 'Moses Und Aron'

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Arnold Schoenberg's 'Biblical Way': from 'Die Jakobsleiter' to 'Moses Und Aron' Arnold Schoenberg's 'Biblical Way': From 'Die Jakobsleiter' to 'Moses und Aron' Berry, Mark, 1974- Music and Letters, Volume 89, Number 1, February 2008, pp. 84-108 (Article) Published by Oxford University Press For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mal/summary/v089/89.1berry.html Access Provided by Royal Holloway, University of London at 07/13/11 9:28AM GMT Music & Letters, Vol. 89 No. 1, ß The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/ml/gcm068, available online at www.ml.oxfordjournals.org ARNOLD SCHOENBERG’S ‘BIBLICAL WAY’: FROM ‘DIE JAKOBSLEITER’ TO ‘MOSES UND ARON’ BY MARK BERRY* Unrepresentable God! Inexpressible Idea of many meanings, wilt thou permit this explanation? Arnold Schoenberg, Moses und Aron Schoenberg conceived of his musical and artistic development as a journey. This jour- ney was more a seeking after faith than the following of a trustworthy map. As early as 1909, he wrote to Busoni that interpretation of his recent atonal compositions demanded ‘belief and conviction’. They could only be played by ‘someone, who like yourself, takes the side of all who seek’.1 Such mystical seeking after faith might seem soon to have been outmoded by the more obvious constructivism of his later works, but little is ever outmoded in Schoenberg. Instead, the dialectic becomes more complicated as the search becomes more intense. Faith and organization both oppose and necessitate one another, as does their content. Schoenberg’s early atonal music has been seen on the one hand as amenable to a set of structural definitions, and on the other as a realm of perhaps unprecedented compositional freedom.2 The latter standpoint views works from this period, and indeed perhaps from beyond this period, as comprehensible only in terms of and answerable only to themselves. Both sides, however, may be seen to be correct, and the very strength of their respective positions reinforces the strength of their respective dialectical opponents. For, in Bryan Simms’s words, Schoenberg was keen to experiment ‘with ways by which ...‘‘impressionistic’’ composing could be folded into a newly ‘‘worked out’’ procedure’.3 This marked an important step on his path from so-called ‘free’atonality towards twelve-note composition. At other stages of *Peterhouse, Cambridge. Email: [email protected]. I should like to thank the Divinity Society of the University of Cambridge both for its invitation to speak and for the ensuing discussion.Valued suggestions and provocations came from DenysTurner, Douglas Hedley,TimJenkins, AliceWood, John Hughes, and Benjamin Moore, some of whom also proffered subsequent comments and advice. In this latter respect, I should also like to thank Alexander Goehr, John Deathridge, Robin Holloway, Hamish Scott, Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe, Ross Wilson, and Hermann Grampp. The com- ments of the anonymous readers for Music & Letters and Daniel Chua have been of great assistance. 1 Letter of 13 July 1909, in Ferruccio Busoni, Selected Letters, trans. and ed. Anthony Beaumont (New York, 1987), 382. The word ‘atonal’ is not an unproblematical designation for Schoenberg’s works of the period c.1908^23, yet it is more widely accepted than any other. On these works as a whole, see Bryan A. Simms, The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg (Oxford, 2000). 2 See Allen Forte, The Structure of Atonal Music (New Haven, 1973), for an example of the first understanding, and, for the latter, George Perle, Serial Composition and Atonality: An Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern (6th edn., Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991). 3 Simms, Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg,162. Simms refers here to Schoenberg’s fragmentary Symphony (1914^15), but the same could be said of various works from a similar period, not least DieJakobsleiter. 84 Schoenberg’s career,‘worked out procedure’ might be folded into ‘impressionistic’ com- position; as Michael Cherlin has remarked,‘a tendency to think in terms of ...dialectical oppositions is a basic constituent of Schoenberg’s creativity’.4 In this essay I attempt to follow part of Schoenberg’s arduous journey. Moses und Aron will be our destination, though it does not represent a terminus for the ideas under consideration. Written between 1927 and 1932, Moses started life as an oratorio text, which was then transformed into the libretto for an opera. Notwithstanding Schoenberg’s continual insistence upon his intention of completion, the work remained unfinished, the only music for the third act amounting to a few sketches. Only the first two acts of the work are usually performed, although the composer sanctioned the possibility of presenting the final act in spoken form.5 The final version of the text and the music were written during the three years 1930^2: that is, just before the Nazi seizure of power and Schoenberg’s constructive dismissal from his chair in Berlin.6 At this time he was still officially Christian. However, after his flight from Germany, he would publicly reconvert to Judaism as a mark of solidarityçand a mark of some- thing more than that too. The work as we know it dates from the late 1920s, yet its roots extend deep into the previous two decades. Before considering some of the more immanent issues with respect to Schoenberg’s drama itself, it would therefore be helpful to say something about his intellectual and spiritual path, with particular reference to two earlier works: the unfinished oratorio Die Jakobsleiter, or ‘Jacob’s Ladder’, and the spoken drama Der biblische Weg,‘The Biblical Way’. Tofollow this path is not simply better to understand its outcome, for the path itself is of intrinsic importance. It may be summarized in general terms as leading from religious syncretism via Zionism to negative monotheism, strong- ly influenced by both Schoenberg’s German (Lutheran) inheritance and his Judaism. The interplay between these two influences is both problematical and productive, the latter coming increasingly to the fore though never exclusively so. In the following essay I examine the fraught path towards negative monotheism as shaped by Schoenberg’s Lutheran-Judaic dialectic. Such is Schoenberg’s own ‘Biblical Way’. Like Kant’s Categorical Imperative, Schoenberg’s path may be formulated in more than one fashion, for the technical and the theological are inextricably intertwined. Both formulations of Schoenberg’s path, that from religious syncretism towards nega- tive monotheism, and that centred upon the dialectic between freedom and organiza- tion, will be examined in this essay, as part of the claim that they are ultimately one and the same. The former lays greater stress upon the goal, the latter upon the journey, but this is somewhat misleading, for the goal is never reached and yet is always present; any difference is perspectival rather than fundamental. For Schoenberg, both formula- tions lead towards a higher form of spiritual awareness, in which the Ideaçthat most 4 Michael Cherlin,‘Dialectical Opposition in Schoenberg’s Music and Thought’, MusicTheory Spectrum, 22 (2000), 157^76 at 157. 5 There are actually two versions of this final act, the first slightly longer, but Schoenberg seems to have consid- ered the second superior. The work has generally been performed without the third act, although there have been attempts to stage it, either in a spoken presentation or with other music by Schoenberg. Hermann Scherchen’s 1959 performances in Berlin had the third act spoken against a recording of music from Act I. This is not generally considered to have been an experiment worth repeating. 6 On 1 March 1933, at a meeting of the senate of the Berlin Akademie der Ku« nste, the Akademie’s president, Max von Schillings, announced the government’s intention to rid the Akademie of Jewish influence. Schoenberg walked out and treated this announcement as his dismissal, although this did not come into effect until October, in breach of his contract, which should have guaranteed him employment for two more years. 85 problematical yet truly fundamental concept in his thoughtçmay be perceived.7 The ‘unrepresentable God’ of the opening quotation is, as Schoenberg identifies, also the ‘inexpressible Idea of many meanings’. And yet, the attempt to express the unity of that Idea remains Schoenberg’s goal throughout the works considered here. ‘DIE JACOBSLEITER’ Schoenberg wrote the text to Die Jakobsleiter between 1915 and 1917, and partially composed the music between 1917 and 1922. He worked further on the score, albeit briefly, in 1944.8 Taking as its starting point Genesis 28: 12^23, he refers and alludes to exotic, heterodox religious ideas, including reincarnation, theosophy, and Sweden- borgian mysticism. This New Jerusalem does not reject the old Jerusalem, but chal- lenges its claims to exclusivity. A specific inspiration was the vision of Swedenborg’s heaven at the end of Balzac’s novella Se¤ raph|“ ta, a tale of illness, redemption, and finally ascensionçand an elitist tale at that: ‘None but the loftier spirits open to faith can discern Jacob’s mystical stair’, writes Balzac.9 The necessity of faith and the emphasis upon an initiate journey of ascent could hardly have failed to appeal to Schoenberg. His knowledge of Swedenborg apparently came more via Balzac than from the mystic; many pages of the single volume of Swedenborg in Schoenberg’s library were uncut.10 Nevertheless, its presence suggests that this was something he considered he ought to read, or at least to have to hand. Schoenberg wrote in 1940 of how the dawn of talking pictures had led him to hope for an artistic renaissance, which needless to say had never occurred: I had dreamed of a dramatisation of Balzac’s Seraphita [to which a few bars were actually composed in 1912], or Strindberg’s To Damascus, or the second part of Goethe’s Faust,oreven Wagner’s Parsifal.
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