The Dialectics of Nerves and Muscles: Schoenberg's Moses as the New Jew

Abstract

Who is this Moses, the Moses of Schoenberg's opera? The question is not just dramaturgical. That is, the question of portraying and comprehending this Moses goes beyond the practical considerations of how the theater will present a character to an audience—how he should dress, how he should comport himself on stage, how exactly to declaim the Sprechstimme of his vocal part (a practical problem of balancing singing and speaking). Rather, the question of who this Moses is involves understanding the character in a way that ties the opera not only to the Bible but to a host of other texts—literature, art, political writing—that reinvented and reimagined Moses as a national leader for a modern world. Indeed, as the opera itself tells the story of a search for meaning (of the ineffable Idea, of God, of representation), the character of Moses himself and the investigation of who he is lies at the heart of what this opera might mean, both as an autonomous artwork and in relation to the discourses of Jewish nationalism taking place around it.