BERLIN LETTER
335
Schoenberg's subject is tremendous: it is the conflict between
pure and symbolic thinking, idea and image, spirit and magic,
represented by Moses and Aaron. Moses, as Schoenberg boldly
interprets the Second Book of Moses, has received the revelation
of an unimaginable God, yet he can communicate it only with
Aaron's help. Aaron, however, can only convey this abstract mes–
sage in terms of images which represent for Schoenberg a relapse
into the archaic, a virtual Fall from Grace-and must even resort
to miracles to convince his people. Nevertheless, the people return
to their orgiastic idolatry, and Aaron, accused by Moses, dies after
persuading them once more to reform their religious habits and
beliefs. Schoenberg makes the contrast between Moses, the abstract
thinker, and Aaron, the imaginative thinker, radically clear by
having Moses speak and Aaron sing-indicating, perhaps involun–
tarily, that in the final analysis his and Moses' ideal of non–
imaginative thinking is a principle that tends to destroy art. Sing–
ing choruses are used side by side with rhythmically, indeed even
tonally, fixed speaking choruses of such extraordinary difficulty
that for the Berlin performance they were recorded on tape and
reproduced electronically.
The performance of
Moses and Aaron
may well have been so
impressive and exciting precisely because of the immense problems
that exist both in dramatically representing actual thought and in
the representational media with which it wrestled, and wrestled
successfully-making the listener feel a participant in the creative
realization of a bold work of art. Beyond the problem of an abstract
God, it thus became the artistic equivalent of our enormously
complex world-the very thing which modern artists try to express
but hardly ever succeed in expressing intentionally. At bottom,
Schoenberg did not quite achieve the dramatic realization of his
true subject either, but what he did achieve is important enough,
and on this occasion it was brought to the stage by kindred spirits.
Hermann Scherchen conducted; Rudolf Sellner, one of the most
gifted Germans in this field, directed, and the sets and costumes
of Michel Raffaelli, a student of Picasso, seemed nothing short of
genius in their modernity.
In all this wealth of modern theater the absence of young
German dramatists is particularly striking. Kaiser, Sternheim, and
