Arnold Schoenberg: Religion as Protection and Place of resistance

The Commitment to Judaism in the works of Arnold Schoenberg

The opera Moses und Aron is undoubtedly a high point not only in Arnold Schoenberg’s oeuvre, but also in the respectable series of works that deal with religious themes in the 20th century. In its portrayal of the impossibility of expressing the idea of a God who cannot be imagined in words and images, the work is also – seen from the vantage point of our profane present – a frighteningly topical parable for the media age, in which truths are believed especially when they are clothed in colorful images, words and sounds.

The prominent position of the stage work, however, makes it easy to forget that in Schoenberg’s oeuvre, the preoccupation with the question of religion, often in the form of philosophical reflections on life, began years earlier and continued afterwards. Some of these compositions are considered of secondary importance and hardly play a role in today’s concert repertoire. This is a serious omission, because it is precisely in these works that Schoenberg’s views are crystallized into intellectually astute statements, musically sharpened by using the serial technique. And, as in his opera, religious questions and – in the broadest sense, politics – cannot be separated here either.

The reason for this lies not least in Schoenberg’s biography, specifically in the everyday anti-Semitism to which he was exposed as a prominent Jew throughout his life. Against this background, his turn to religious themes amounts to the construction of a mental sanctuary in which he became increasingly aware of his Jewish identity. In 1898, at the age of 24, he had converted to Protestantism, but in the 1920s under the pressure of the circumstances, he once again approached the Jewish religion in writing and reconverted to Judaism in 1930. This is the year in which, after a long period of preparation, he began composing Moses und Aron.

The 1921 turning point and the Holocaust

In the early 1920s, when Arnold Schoenberg was developing his row technique, the so-called Mattsee incident occurred, which brought about a radical turning point in his life. In 1921, when he wanted to spend the summer vacations with his family in Mattsee in the Austrian Salzkammergut, he was told with brutal frankness that, being a Jew, he was not wanted there. In 1934, when he was already living in exile in America, he wrote in retrospect to the New York Rabbi Stephen Wise: „From then on, it was easy for me to define assimilation as undesirable and to accept a Jewish nationalism that is both healthy and determined, a nationalism based on our national and religious belief of being chosen.”¹

This combination of religious, cultural and political arguments reflects thousands of years of collective experience. For the small minority of perhaps 14 million Jews scattered across the globe, who are threatened with genocide again today, the religious scriptures have always been a practical guide. Even under secular (non-religious) contexts, the religious law guides ethical behavior and thus helps one find ways of surviving in a potentially hostile environment. For Schoenberg, as he wrote in a letter to Wassily Kandinsky, religion increasingly became his „only support“.² In certain of his works from the 1920s onwards, he expressed this undisguisedly.

He achieved this in a startling way in A Survivor from Warsaw for narrator, male choir and orchestra. The twelve-tone composition, lasting just under seven minutes, was written in exile in America in 1947 under the lasting shock that the Holocaust had triggered in him. It is a single outcry, sharpened by a tight constructivist approach. Documentary character, subjective feelings of horror and outrage, and, last but not least, a spirit of resistance combine to create a piece of incredible dramatic force. Even today, when the SS officer shouts: „In einer Minute will ich wissen, wieviele ich zur Gaskammer abliefere! Abzählen!“ („In one minute I want to know how many I’m delivering to the gas chamber! Count them out!“)³ and the frightened Jews intone the „Shema Yisroel“, the central Jewish creed, listeners can feel shivers running down their spine. Luigi Nono rightly called this work „the aesthetic musical manifesto of our epoch.“

The chosen one and the law

Arnold Schoenberg’s works with religious connotations are documents of the will to assert oneself as a member of an endangered minority and a thorn in the flesh of the majority culture. The uncompromising nature and the spirit of resistance that they radiate cannot be ignored. The extent to which this way of thinking also influenced the genesis of the serial method of composition cannot be discussed here. What is interesting in this context, however, is the key word „law“. It forms a pillar in Schoenberg’s thought structure. He used it both in relation to the dodecaphonic principles as well as in his opera, where he has Moses say: „Inevitable law of thought compels fulfillment.“

At the center is the idea of a superhuman challenge: „Tapfere sind solche, die Taten vollbringen, an die ihr Mut nicht heranreicht. („Brave are those who accomplish deeds that their courage cannot match.“) The short piece ends with the statement: „War ein Gott noch so ungnädig, ihnen Erkenntnis ihrer Lage zu gewähren, dann sind sie nicht zu beneiden. Und darum werden sie beneidet!“ („No matter how ungracious a god was to grant them knowledge of their situation, then they are not to be envied. And that is why they are envied!“)

The old Jewish concept of being chosen, which shines through here and with which Arnold Schoenberg identified, is explicitly thematized in the second choral piece, „Du sollst nicht, du musst!“ (Not thou shalt, thou must!”): „Du musst an den Geist glauben! Unmittelbar, gefühllos und selbstlos. Du musst, Auserwählter, musst, willst du’s bleiben!“ („You must believe in the spirit! Immediately, without emotion, and unselfishly! You, the chosen one, must, yes, you must, if you want to remain so [i.e., remain the chosen one]!“)

The rigidity of the serial logic is combined with the linguistic design of the vocal phrase to create a highly effective rhetorical gesture. Together with the opening lines „Du sollst dir kein Bild machen! Denn ein Bild schränkt ein, begrenzt, fasst, was unbegrenzt und unvorstellbar bleiben soll“ („Thou shalt not make an image! For an image restricts, limits, grasps what should remain unlimited and unimaginable“), Schoenberg proclaims here the principle of faith with the pedagogical rigor of a Talmud scholar, which becomes the pivotal point in Moses und Aron a few years later.

These confessions find a more introverted echo in some of the Sechs Stücke für Männerchor (Six Pieces for male chorus) a capella, op. 35, composed in connection with an application for the workers‘ music festival in Hanover in 1930. Schoenberg is again the author of the texts, but this time mostly toned down so as to offer general wisdom of a quasi-pedagogical nature. The second piece is again about the law: „Dass es ein Gesetz gibt, dem die Dinge so gehorchen, wie du deinem Herrn (…): Dieses solltest du als Wunder erkennen.“ („That there is a law to which things obey, as you obey your Lord […]: This you should recognize as a miracle.“) The softened pedagogical lecture bears the performance designation „very delicate;“ only in the core statement about the law the music takes on an emphatic tone. However, the heterogeneous group of works also includes the occasional peculiar piece, such as „Landsknechte“ (Mercenaries) with the disturbing lines: „Oho, es riecht nach Blut? Nach unserm Blut und Fleisch. Also dorthin gehts? Werden wir jetzt schon geschlachtet?“ („Oho, it smells of blood? Like our blood and flesh. So that’s where we’re going? Are we already being slaughtered?“) Is this crude mercenary poetry or a foreboding of the next pogrom? Schoenberg leaves that question open.

A theological assessment: Kol Nidre

Finally, Kol Nidre for speaker, mixed choir, and orchestra, op. 39, is a work with an unmistakable liturgical reference; commissioned by Rabbi Jakob Sonderling for his congregation in Los Angeles, the piece was composed in 1938 in exile in the United States. It touches on theological issues. „Kol Nidre“ is the name of the ritual chant that is sung on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in the synagogue by the rabbi or cantor. In it, all vows and promises that a worshipper has made and that have been made thoughtlessly or unknowingly are declared null and void. Only vows made before God are valid. As this principle of revocation was also understood by outsiders as a breach of contract – the revocation expressly refers only to the person’s promises about his or her own behavior and not to agreements with third parties – the Kol Nidre became a starting point for anti-Semitic attacks.

Arnold Schoenberg took a very clear stance on this sensitive point. In a letter to Paul Dessau dated November 22, 1941, he explains how he understands this principle of revocation. He had learned, he writes, that the Kol Nidre originated in Spain: „It merely meant that all who had either voluntarily or under pressure made believe to accept the Christian faith (and who were therefore to be excluded from the Jewish community) might, on this Day of Atonement, be reconciled with their God, and that all oaths (vows) were to be cancelled. So this does not refer to business men’s sharp practice.“⁴

Schoenberg preceded the traditional text of the Kol Nidre with a passage from Genesis and set it to music – according to liturgical practice, but with changes in the wording – three times with increasing expressive intensity, whereby the climax is structurally emphasized by the striking polyphonic scoring. The recitation by the speaker/rabbi alternates between free and rhythmically fixed speech without pitch indication. Some dramatic choral parts are reminiscent of the exciting choral scenes in Moses und Aron. As motivic material, Schoenberg took some recurring phrases from the synagogue chant of the Kol Nidre, which is frankly tonal in its musical content. This has repercussions in the score. In the atonal context, there are clear G minor islands, which is also indicated by the two repeatedly recurring accidentals B-flat and E-flat; the final chord is pure G major. Thus, Kol Nidre belongs to a series of works in which Schönberg returned to tonality from the late 1930s onwards. This forms a strong contrast with the op. 27 choral pieces. Schoenberg’s religiously based commitment to Judaism, however, did not change.

Recording: Kol Nidre for speaker, mixed chorus and orchestra op. 39

The German version of this essay was published in the magazine Musik und Kirche (Kassel) nr. 5 (Sept./Oct.) 2024, p.310-313.

Translation: Jürgen Thym and Ralph P. Locke

See also: Nuria Schoenberg Nono erinnert sich

Links:
Arnold Schoenberg Center Vienna
The anti-Semitism in the cultural sector

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Footnotes

1. The Mattsee Incident ↩︎
2. Arnold Schönberg, Briefe, selected and edited by Erwin Stein (Mainz: Schott, 1958), 76. ↩︎
3. The SS officer’s commands are in German language, the narrator’s part is in English. ↩︎
4. Letter to Paul Dessau ↩︎