The Sound of the Unsayable: Jewish Secular Culture in Arnold Schönberg and Aharon Appelfeld

Michal Ben-Horin

doi:10.3390/rel10050334

Abstract

This article examines the use of central elements of the Jewish religious repertoire and transcendental realm, such as prophecy or revelation, within the aesthetic secular realm of musical avant-garde and modern Hebrew literature. By focusing on two case studies, I attempt to shed new light on the question of Jewish secular culture. Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), an Austrian Jewish composer, was born into an assimilated Viennese family and converted to Protestantism before returning to Judaism in the 1930s while escaping to the United States. Aharon Appelfeld (1932–2018), an Israeli Jewish writer, was born in Czernowitz to assimilated German-speaking parents, survived the Holocaust and emigrated to Israel in 1946. My claim is that in their works both composer and author testify to traumatic experiences that avoid verbal representation by: (1) subverting and transgressing conventional aesthetic means and (2) alluding to sacred tropes and theological concepts. In exploring Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron and Appelfeld’s Journey into Winter among others, this article shows how the transcendent sphere returns within the musical and poetic avant-garde (musical prose, 12-tone composition, prose poem, non-semantic or semiotic fiction) as a “sound” of old traditions that can only be heard through the voices of a new Jewish culture.

Highlights

In his 1915 essay “Revealment and Concealment in Language” the modern Hebrew poet HaimNahman Bialik marks a borderline by distinguishing between two different modes of representation: verbal and non-verbal languages
According to Freud, Judaism emerged from the dialectics of oblivion and memory caused by a traumatic event—the murder of Moses, the monotheistic lawgiver—which was repressed and later returns in a new form: “When Moses gave to his people the conception of an Only God it was not an altogether new idea, for it meant the reanimation of primeval experience in the human family that had long ago faded from the conscious memory of mankind
Arnold Schoenberg and Aharon Appelfeld deal with issues of tradition and innovation as an inherent part of their cultural—musical and literary—creation

Summary

Introduction

In his 1915 essay “Revealment and Concealment in Language” the modern Hebrew poet Haim. My claim is that in their works, both composer and author testify to traumatic experience that avoids verbal representation by: (1) subverting and transgressing conventional aesthetic means and (2) alluding to theological tropes and transcendental concepts. In light of the Romanticist notion, this music becomes a means of a secular literary repertoire to reverberate with sacred transcendental realms that avoid verbal representation. Maurice Blanchot, for his part, explores similar issues of verbal representation as they are associated with the notion of disaster: “The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. Focusing on the work of Schoenberg before moving to that of Appelfeld suggests a few answers to the questions raised above

Schoenberg’s Music between Tradition and Avant-Garde

A Survivorwrote from in

Lacking Words

Appelfeld’s Fiction on the Threshold of Old and New

Against Telling

Conclusions