Volume 20, Number 20 · December 13, 1973
Moses and Aaron in Paris
By Robert Craft
Moses and Aaron, Schoenberg's largest twelve-tone work, was composed between May, 1930, and March, 1932. Although the opera as planned is incomplete, the ending as it stands is in no way truncated, the unwritten third act, to judge from the libretto, containing little promise of further dramatic development. Yet Schoenberg's failure to compose music for all of his text has been attributed not to unresolvable difficulties in the subject but to the threat of Hitler, a credible hypothesis but a difficult one to prove since the composer could very well have stopped where he did because of a philosophical and artistic impasse. After all, the dilemma of the Moses of the opera is one of the special concerns of all the arts of the age, that of being bound to words, which are instruments of falsehood.
Feature, 3300 words
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