On 26 May 1933, Arnold Schoenberg specified that he would complete his opera Moses und Aron six to eight weeks. As we know, he never set the third act to music. But whether or not this decision represents an act of completion or noncompletion is a matter for debate. The opera is, after all, about the ability and limitations of humans, through words and music, to utter the absolute, to assume a divine voice. God speaks to and through Moses, and Aaron speaks for Moses. Aaron, the phrasemaker, is given a coloratura line; Moses is given no singing in a conventional sense, but, rather, Sprechgesang. When Moses witnesses the episode of the golden calf, and Aaron's part in it, he despairs over what he judges to be humankind's fall from divine imitation into ungrounded and illegitimate forms of representation, idolatry, and ideology. Always suspicious of music, Moses laments, O Word, thou Word, that I lack! In his recent book The Angel's Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera, Michel Poizat comments on Schoenberg's musical setting of this moment with eloquence: