The Unfinished Masterwork
Arnold Schoenberg's Moses und Aron is among the most philosophically ambitious operas ever conceived and one of the most haunting examples of artistic incompleteness in Western music. Schoenberg worked on the opera from 1930 to 1932, completing Acts 1 and 2 in full, with text and music, but died in 1951 having written only the text of Act 3, never setting it to music. The opera was first performed posthumously in 1954 in Hamburg, with Acts 1 and 2 only - the form in which it has been performed ever since. Whether the incompleteness is a tragedy or an artistic statement has been debated by musicians and philosophers for seventy years.
The opera is composed in the twelve-tone system that Schoenberg invented in the early 1920s, and Moses und Aron applies it with extraordinary dramatic intelligence. The single tone row from which the entire score is derived is stated in the opening bars by the six speaking voices of God from the burning bush - a musical symbol for divine unity and creative inexhaustibility: from a single row of twelve tones, as from a single God, all musical material is derived.
The Theological Problem
The opera's subject is the central theological problem of Exodus 3-32: the relationship between divine revelation and human representation. God reveals himself to Moses from the burning bush with the name 'I AM WHO I AM' (Exodus 3:14) - a name that refuses to be a name, that asserts existence without definition, that cannot be spoken without falsifying. Moses, struck by this revelation, is given the mission to lead Israel out of Egypt. But Moses has a speech impediment (Exodus 4:10), and God assigns his brother Aaron as his spokesperson.
Schoenberg sees in this assignment not a practical solution but a metaphysical problem. Aaron is eloquent; he can communicate the divine message to the people. But in becoming communicable, the message is already distorted. The tension between Moses's inarticulate fidelity to the inexpressible God and Aaron's eloquent but simplifying communication is the opera's central drama. It is never resolved - which is why the opera is in a sense necessarily unfinished.
Voice and Silence: Sprechstimme
Schoenberg's most brilliant musical decision was to give Moses not a singing voice but a speaking voice - specifically, the half-sung, half-spoken technique called Sprechstimme ('speech voice') that he had developed in earlier works. Moses speaks in a kind of elevated recitation that is neither fully musical nor fully prosaic, occupying the boundary between speech and song as Moses himself occupies the boundary between the human and the divine.
Aaron, by contrast, is a high tenor - the most musically 'expressive' voice type in the operatic hierarchy. The contrast is exact: Moses, who has encountered the unrepresentable God, cannot sing; Aaron, who has not encountered God directly but has received Moses's message, sings with full operatic beauty. The implication is devastating: beauty of expression is a sign not of proximity to God but of distance from him. The more perfectly you represent the divine, the more you have falsified it.
The Golden Calf and Exodus 32
The climax of Act 2 is the Golden Calf episode from Exodus 32, which Schoenberg stages as an orgiastic scene of extraordinary musical and dramatic power. When Moses descends from Sinai to find the people worshipping the calf, he destroys the tablets of the law and is left alone on stage. His final words - the famous 'O Wort, du Wort, das mir fehlt!' (O Word, thou Word, that I lack!) - are the opera's theological summary. Moses cannot speak the Word he has heard from God. He can only point toward it, inarticulately, knowing that every human expression of the divine is an idolatry.
The text of Exodus 20:4 - 'You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below' - is thus the opera's deepest text. The second commandment prohibits not just physical idols but any fixed representation of the divine. Moses's failure is the failure of all human religious language: it always makes an idol of the God it intends to honor.
Schoenberg's Jewish Identity
Schoenberg was born Jewish, converted to Lutheranism in 1898, and reconverted to Judaism in 1933 after fleeing Nazi Germany. Moses und Aron was composed during the years immediately preceding his expulsion - the opera is inseparable from the context of German antisemitism and the experience of Jewish identity under threat. The opera is Schoenberg's meditation on what it means to be Jewish: to be the bearer of a revelation that cannot be adequately expressed, a people called to a vocation that human weakness constantly betrays.
The opera's incompleteness, in this context, takes on additional meaning. Moses could not finish his work - he died outside the Promised Land. Schoenberg could not finish his opera. The unfinished masterwork becomes itself a theological statement: the work that intends to speak of the unrepresentable God necessarily remains incomplete.