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PARTISAN REVIEW
fundity of its musicality is as much present in its poignant and
dramatic use of silence, of the interval, of the separation of the
spoken word and the sung word, as in its dissonant instrumentation,
so jarring to the familiar harmonics of Wagnerian opera or the
operas of Richard Strauss on which Schonberg had been raised .
Schonberg creates a music and a libretto to seize the inexpressible,
to translate beauty beyond itself into the sublime, to make an opera
where the single central presence is the unseen, unspeaking,
unheard God.
It
is little wonder that after the making of this opera,
begun in 1928 and uncompleted at his death (although he worked on
it fitfully throughout the 1940s, while composing his memorial
A Sur–
vivorfrom Warsaw
in 1948 and his
De Profundis
set to the Hebrew text
of Psalm 130),
Moses and Aaron
remains one of the triumphant ex–
amples of aJewish reading of the crisis of modernism. At the conclu–
sion of Act Two, having destroyed the Golden Calf and shattered the
Tablets , Moses is left alone after the People have disappeared and
Aaron has followed them into the darkness : Moses in Schonberg's
libretto sing-talks an astonishing cry of despair:
Inconceivable God
Inexpressible, many-sided idea ,
will you let it be so explained?
Shall Aaron , my mouth , fashion this image?
Then I have fashioned an image too , false ,
as an image must be.
Thus am I defeated!
Thus, all was madness that/ I believed before,
and can and must not be given voice.
o
Word, thou word, that I lack!
Moses has recognized that it is not merely the Golden Calf that is
false , but words themselves . Nothing can communicate adequately
what is beyond speech . There is no way that he can bring down the
Word and speak it to the People. It is not merely that he stutters
while Aaron speaks like a charmed flute- all words are false , all
language deceives, no truth can make over a rotted mankind. And in
this, Schonberg gives to Moses in his final assertion:
"0
Word, thou
Word, that I lack" an affirmation that every artist of this century
who has been wedded to the truth can share: no work of art is equal
to its intention, and everything, even the work that appears to be
complete, is fated to incompleteness and failure .
So much for the battered God of the Jews, so much for trium–
phant modernism. In the one, I find hope; in the other, as an artist I
share despair.
