A THEOLOGICAL MIDRASH IN SEARCH OF OPERATIC ACTION: MOSES UND ARON BY ARNOLD SCHOENBERG

RUTH HACOHEN

Minding the gap Moses und Aron belongs to a small group of operas that are based on the Hebrew Bible, known in the Christian culture as the Old Testament.1 More commonly, since the seventeenth century and onward, these sources had been adapted into oratorical works rather than into fully melodramatic ones. This may explain the fact that the creator of the Moses und Aron – the Viennese Jew Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), at the time of the work’ evolution a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin – initially conceived it as a cantata (1928), moving then into an oratorio libretto, and only later turned it into an operatic work. He composed the first two Acts, including their bridging interlude, in the course of 1930-32. Attempts

The term “Midrash” (from the Hebrew miḏrāš “commentary”) refers to a certain way of reading and interpreting a biblical verse or section that originated in Late Antiquity in Palestine and Babylon. In this article it particularly relates to a certain exegetical mode of filling in the many gaps left in the biblical narrative regarding events and personalities that are only sketched or hinted at. It also refers to a compilation of Midrashic teachings on specific Biblical books and scrolls. 1 Up to the twentieth century, most of the full operas in this group were French, and until Moses und Aron one can barely count even twenty operas on a biblical subject (excluding the apocryphal books). An opera that is worth mentioning in the present context is Étienne Henry Méhul’s Joseph (1807), a rather free adaptation of the last chapters of Genesis, narrating the story of Joseph upon his meeting, unrecognized, with the brothers who sold him to slavery. The opera was popular in nineteenth- century Germany, due to its affinity with the oratorical and contrapuntal German tradition. Curiously, the baritone who sang the Simeon role in the 1955 production in Hamburg also sang the Man in the first (concert) performance of Moses und Aron in 1954, also in Hamburg under conductor Hans Rosbaud. 406 Ruth HaCohen to set the third Act to music in the next decades were never successful; the work remained a fragment, the premiere of which took place only posthumously. The history of the work’s genesis attests to Schoenberg’s gradual realization of the musico-dramatic potential of his chosen sources. While retaining some of the oratorical qualities in its later version, the librettist-composer took care to elaborate a text that would effectively maintain an operatic action, combining the legacy of the medium with a modernist understanding of its new possibilities. He thus fashioned a well made fictional-sonic world, whose action breeds a vivid present, transpiring beyond a fourth imaginative wall. Yet he jettisoned an amorous plot while still leaving traces of a rather unsettling “family romance”,2 transmuting the basic emotional conflict of the opera elsewhere – onto the clash between theology and politics, as it erupts in the intersections between the personal and the collective, the philosophical and social. The basis of the clash is anchored in the biblical exodus, which conflates the liberation of an enslaved collective with its undertaking of a new religion, thus combining political salvation with a moral-spiritual vocation. As I have argued elsewhere, the opera’s raison d’etre is not the relinquishing of idolatry, and its success should not be gauged by whether it is guilty of becoming sensual or imagistic, as Adorno maintains. It rather revolves around the conflicts, both collective and personal, evoked once the idea of an abstract, monotheistic God is introduced by the collective’s leaders as a constitutive element in a new communal faith.3

2 On the notion of “family romance” as it relates to the parallel world of Sigmund Freud, see Michael P. Steinberg, Judaism Musical and Unmusical, Chicago, 2007, 38- 56. This is particularly relevant when Schoenberg’s work is compared with Freud’s own version of Moses’ story, in his Moses and Monotheism treatise. See Ruth HaCohen, “Psychoanalysis and the Music of Charisma in the Moseses of Freud and Schoenberg”, in New Perspectives on Freud’s ‘Moses and Monotheism’, eds Ruth Ginsburg and Ilana Pardes, Conditio Judaica 60, Tübingen, 2006, 177-95. 3 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Sacred Fragment: Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron”, in Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone, New York, 1992, 225-48, and Ruth HaCohen, The Music Libel Against the Jews, New Haven, CT, 2011, 311-30. See also Richard Kurth, “Immanence and Transcendence in Moses und Aron”, The Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg, eds Jennifer Shaw and Joseph Auner, New York, 2010, 181. However, Kurth’s claim that the opera exemplifies the Kantian sublime seems to me problematic.