Composition and Context
Arnold Schoenberg began composing Moses und Aron in 1930, completing Acts 1 and 2 in full and leaving Act 3 as a libretto without music when he died in 1951. The opera had its posthumous premiere in Hamburg on 12 March 1954, performed as a concert work without staging. The first staged production followed in Zurich in 1957 under Hans Rosbaud, the conductor who had given the concert premiere. The opera has since been performed at the world's leading opera houses, always presented with only the two completed acts, their incompleteness now understood as essential to the work's meaning.
Schoenberg composed the work while living in Berlin, watching the rise of National Socialism and the intensification of German antisemitism that would eventually drive him to exile in the United States. The opera is thus simultaneously a philosophical meditation on Exodus 3-32 and a statement about Jewish identity under historical pressure. Schoenberg's reconversion to Judaism in 1933 - performed in Paris as an explicit rejection of Nazi racial antisemitism - is inseparable from the spiritual and political context of the opera.
The Drama of Representation
The central dramatic conflict of Moses und Aron is the conflict between the God encountered in Exodus 3 - the God who names himself 'I AM WHO I AM,' the God who cannot be represented - and the human need to give this God a form that people can grasp and worship. Moses has stood at the burning bush; he has heard the voice of the unrepresentable. He returns to his people with the impossible task of communicating what cannot be communicated. His speech impediment (Exodus 4:10) is in this opera not a practical problem but a metaphysical necessity: the God Moses has met cannot be spoken.
Aaron is Moses's solution and Moses's undoing. As the eloquent brother who can translate Moses's inarticulate experience into communicable form, Aaron is indispensable. But every translation falsifies. Aaron's golden calf (Exodus 32:4) is not a cynical political maneuver in Schoenberg's reading; it is a sincere attempt to give the people something they can hold onto. The calf is Aaron's best effort at representation. And that is precisely its idolatry.
Twelve-Tone Theology
The opera's musical language is the twelve-tone system, in which all melodic and harmonic material is derived from a single ordered series of all twelve chromatic pitches. Schoenberg unveils the row in the opera's opening bars as the voice of God in the burning bush - six speaking voices presenting the tone row as divine self-disclosure. The theological implication is exact: as from one row all musical variety is derived, so from one God all creation proceeds. The twelve-tone system is deployed not merely as a compositional technique but as a theological metaphor.
The row itself has a distinctive symmetrical structure that Schoenberg organized to carry specific musical properties, allowing the opera to generate an enormous variety of musical material - the lyrical, the declamatory, the dramatic, the orgiastic - from a single source. This musical unity beneath apparent diversity mirrors the theological unity that Moses proclaims and Aaron compromises.
The Golden Calf Scene
Act 2's central sequence - the Golden Calf episode - is the most dramatically elaborate and musically complex passage in the opera, occupying nearly forty minutes of performance time. Schoenberg stages it as a full orgiastic celebration: dancing, sacrifice, sexual ecstasy, and finally murder. The orchestral writing during this sequence is among the most rhythmically complex he ever produced, layering multiple simultaneous rhythmic patterns to create a sense of controlled chaos that represents the breakdown of order when the divine command is violated.
The sequence draws directly on Exodus 32:6 - 'So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry' - and 32:19, where Moses sees the calf and the dancing and smashes the tablets in anger. Schoenberg's staging asks what happens in the hours between verse 6 and verse 19: he fills those hours with music of disturbing sensuous power.
Act 2's Final Words
The opera ends with Moses's cry of despair: 'O Wort, du Wort, das mir fehlt!' (O Word, thou Word, that I lack!). Moses has destroyed the tablets, the people have returned to worshipping the calf, and he is left alone on stage, unable to find the words for the God he has met. This ending - Moses's complete failure to communicate his revelation - is in Schoenberg's reading not a tragedy but a theological statement: the true encounter with God cannot be expressed without distortion. Moses's inability to speak is his fidelity.
Act 3, had Schoenberg completed it, would have shown Aaron's death and Moses's final vindication. That it remains unset means the opera as performed ends in Moses's inarticulate despair. Whether Schoenberg intended this or whether it is the accident of death and work-in-progress, the unfinished ending has been received as profoundly right: the opera about the impossibility of completing the representation of God remains itself an unfinished representation.