The Message of Moses and Aaron as Reflection of Arnold Schoenberg’s Spiritual Quest

One way of describing Schoenberg’s religious path is as a constant struggle between a level of abstract of God-awareness and a persistent need and preoccupation with well defined rules as offered by formal religious practice. Expressed in spiritual terms, this is a sub case of a larger modus operandi that encompassed Schoenberg’s music, prose, philosophy, and life-story, and which was dominated by the notion that any a given phenomenon may be represented as a dichotomy between two constituent aspects: the concrete and the abstract. The paper examines how this disposition affected the main milestones of Schoenberg’s creativity, and how it is reflected in the details of the text and drama of the opera Moses and Aaron.