ARTHUR A. COHEN
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tion of, although of course that man Hitler is not of their opinion ."
And later in the same letter: "How can a Kandinsky approve of my
being insulted . . . how can he refrain from combating a view of the
world whose aim is St. Bartholomew's nights in the darkness, of
which no one will be able to read the little placard saying that I'm
exempt." Ten years later, on July 30 , 1933, having been dismissed
from his post in Berlin and excluded from the musical world that he
had revolutionized, in a private ceremony at the synagogue on the
Rue de la Victoire in Paris, Arnold Schonberg was again received
into the Jewish religion . From that moment until his death in 1951,
Schonberg never departed his people again . It may be contended
that his conversion to Judaism was an act of solidarity with his
beleaguered folk, but that would be to oversimplify a gesture which,
at its most profound, had been prepared long before the event and
remained in the deepest sense a religious act. In 1922, writing to
Kandinsky, he had described his oratorio ,
Jacob's Ladder,
as an affir–
mation of religion; indeed, as he continued, "This (religion) had
been my one and only support all these years -let this be said here
for the first time. "
No less was the case with his complex interpretation of the
Messianic obligation of the Chosen People set forth in his opera of
1926, The Biblical Way (Der biblische Weg),
where the sacrificial death
of his hero , Max Aruns , symbolizes the impossible unity of spirit
and word, impossible precisely because the modern world cannot
bear that the man of spirit should also be the one who can interpret
and communicate himself. This contention about the precarious
estate of prophecy becomes all the clearer in Schonberg's master–
piece, the opera
Moses and Aaron,
the most complex and demanding
work of the modern operatic
oeuvre.
Building freely upon Biblical
texts, Schonberg creates a dichotomy and antagonism between
Moses, the lover of God and the bearer of his message who lacks the
power of eloquent speech , and Aaron, lover of Moses and the Peo–
ple, who cannot see God other than through the spirit of Moses, and
is fated therefore to misunderstand God's requirements, while none–
theless being able to interpret eloquently Moses's rendition of the
divine Word. The opera is constructed in such a way that Moses
never sings melodically, but follows the pattern of
Sprechgesang,
that
is the half-sung, almost monotonous speech of one who has visions
but does not command language, and the melodic , enriched voice of
Aaron who has no vision but possesses the power of speech.
The singular aspect of this consummate work is that the pro-
