You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In the early 1930s, in the face of the increasing anti-Semitism and the barbarism that unfolded, there were two assimilated Viennese Jews who—independently and presumably unaware of one another—were founding fathers and lawgivers of their respective disciplines: Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and Arnold Schoenberg, the father of twelvetone technique. Each, like the other, began to deal with his Judaism in relation to another paradigmatic founding father and lawgiver: the figure Moses. Schoenberg's opera “Moses and Aron” was written in 1928-32; Freud's “Moses and Monotheism” in 1934-38. Both saw themselves as revolutionaries, embattled professionally, and threatened existentially as Jews, so they saw in Moses a likeness to themselves, besieged and imperiled as they represented him in their works and encountered the lawless and inhumane evil spirits of their own time.
Freud's Moses is slain; Schoenberg's Moses doubts his mission and sinks to the ground in despair. And in a certain sense, both the scientist and the composer failed with their Moses works, at least initially. Schoenberg succeeded neither in composing the third act as planned, nor in acknowledging that the existing two acts with the tragic conclusion might stand as completed. Freud admitted to the reader that his form of presentation was “no less inexpedient than it is inartistic [unkünstlerisch]. I myself deplore it unreservedly” (Freud, 1964/1939, p. 103). Readers, despite the brilliance of the text, appear to have agreed with Freud's confession. For over fifty years, the book's content was abandoned as outdated and formally unresolved. However, both works have had a glorious comeback. “Moses und Aron” has now arrived not only in the musical canon, but also in the operatic performance repertory, and Freud's Moses book has now, for about 30 years, been one of the most discussed books of the 20th century.
Moses himself already appears in the Bible as an a