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Of Moses and Musicology: New Takes onJewish Musical ModernismAmy Lynn WlodarskiPublished online: 24 May 2012.
To cite this article: Amy Lynn Wlodarski (2012) Of Moses and Musicology: New Takes onJewish Musical Modernism, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 137:1, 171-185, DOI:10.1080/02690403.2012.669954
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Review Articles
Of Moses and Musicology: New Takes on Jewish Musical Modernism
AMY LYNN WLODARSKI
Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New, edited by Philip V. Bohlman, with a Foreword bySander L. Gilman. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008. xix�219 pp.ISBN 9780226063263; 0226063267.
Klara Moricz, Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008. xvii�436 pp. ISBN9780520250888.
Eagle Minds: Selected Correspondence of Istvan Anhalt and George Rochberg, 1961�2005, editedby Alan M. Gillmor. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007. xliii�426 pp.ISBN 9781554580187.
The final and most important question for all research into Israelite-Jewish religion will alwaysremain: Who was Moses?
(Ernst Sellin, Mose und seine Bedeutung fur die israelitisch-judische Religionsgeschichte (Leipzig, 1922))
The boy Itzig is asked in grammar school: ‘Who was Moses?’ and answers, ‘Moses was the son of anEgyptian princess.’ ‘That’s not true,’ says the teacher. ‘Moses was the son of a Hebrew mother. TheEgyptian princess found the baby in a casket.’ But Itzig answers: ‘Says She!’
(Sigmund Freud, as told to Theodor Reik, 1908)
The Moses of Freud: Jewish modernism and art
IN 1914, Sigmund Freud departed from his writings on neuropsychology to address aquestion that had long plagued him: Who is the Moses depicted in Michelangelo’s statue,housed in the church of San Pietro in Rome? In his essay ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’, Freudcontends that the sculptor seemed less concerned with representing ‘a historical figure’ than
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Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 137, no. 1, 171�185
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with exploring a ‘character-type [which] embod[ies] an inexhaustible inner force’.1 Just whichcharacter-type emerges from the carved stone becomes the crux of the essay, with Freudsurveying the various interpretations that have accumulated during the statue’s receptionhistory. Is Moses playing with his beard ‘as an agitated man nowadays might play with hiswatch-chain’? Or is he ‘grasping [. . .] his magnificent flowing beard’ because he is‘profoundly shaken’ at the sight of the golden calf ?2 Have critics read too much into thesculptor’s intent? Does the ‘celebrated left arm [have] no other function in reality than topress his beard to his body’?3 While putting forth his own reading of Michelangelo’s Moses,Freud concludes that art and its attendant criticism are ultimately products of imagination,what scholar Abigail Gillman describes as ‘memory-text[s] or memory-narrative[s] in [their]own right’ that contain ‘multiple transcriptions’.4 ‘In imagination’, Freud writes, ‘wecomplete the scene of which this movement, established by the evidence of the beard, is apart’, and how we complete it reveals as much about ourselves as it does about Moses.5
In Freud’s own exegesis, Michelangelo’s Moses emerges as a figure who does not shatterthe tablets in his hand (in part due to the frozen stance of the statue) but instead turns themupside down in a seemingly irreverent manner: ‘We see that the Tables are upside-down. Thisis a singular way to treat such sacred objects. They are stood on their heads’, while he ‘turn[s]his violence against his own body’.6 From his description, Gillman extracts what sheconsiders to be several prominent characteristics of Jewish modernism. She explains that ‘ForJewish modernists [. . .] Hebrew scripture had become the idol, a ‘‘distorted’’ text incapableof retaining the truth about Moses.’7 In this regard, Freud’s essay ‘exemplifies how Jewishmodernists treat scripture. They don’t ‘‘shatter’’ it � the Bible remains their most importantinterlocutor. They do turn it on its head.’8
Gillman also argues that Freud’s narrative reveals one modernist dilemma with which hewas personally wrestling during this period, that of the tension between sacred and secularidentities.9 ‘By representing [Moses] as divided against himself,’ she avers, ‘Freudaccomplishes in the domains of culture and religion that which he came to see as central’;‘Freud’s Moses was both too Jewish and not Jewish enough.’10 As further evidence, she drawsfrom Freud’s other writings on Jewish themes. In Totem and Taboo (1930), the issueresurfaces more personally and acutely for the psychologist; therein, Freud identifies himselfas ‘an author who is ignorant of holy writ, who is completely estranged from the religion of
1 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’, Writings on Art and Literature, ed. James Strachey(Stanford, CA, 1997), 122�50 (p. 133).
2 Ibid., 125�6.3 Ibid., 126.4 Abigail Gillman, ‘Freud’s Moses and Viennese Jewish Modernism’, The Jewish World of Sigmund
Freud: Essays on Cultural Roots and the Problem of Religious Identity, ed. Arnold Richards (Jefferson,
NC, 2010), 126�35 (p. 129).5 Freud, ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’, 136.6 Ibid., 140.7 Gillman, ‘Freud’s Moses’, 131.8 Ibid.9 For an excellent study of Freud’s writings on Judaism, see Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses:
Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven, CT, 1991).10 Gillman, ‘Freud’s Moses’, 133.
172 AMY LYNN WLODARSKI
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his fathers’ but ‘who feels that he is in his essential nature a Jew’.11 This theme becomes moredeveloped in his Moses and Monotheism (1939), in which he divides the modern self into twoparts: one’s lived experiences, and an ‘archaic heritage’ consisting of ‘memory traces of theexperiences of former generations [. . .], traces of what our forefathers experienced’.12
Freud’s elision of art, modernism and Judaism would surprise few familiar with the earlydecades of the twentieth century, especially in Vienna. The manner in which these threeelements engage one another, however, has been a topic of contentious debate since themodern period itself. Beginning in the late nineteenth century (some would argue withWagner’s writings on the Moderne), the question of how Jews influenced trends in art andmusic became a central aspect of the modernist discourse itself, although that discourse wasnever ‘singular, prescriptive, or consistent’.13 While prominent scholars such as Peter Gayhave warned against ‘canvas[sing] the great phenomenon of Modernism from the vantagepoint of the Jewish Question’, two models for considering Jewish involvement in themodernist arena have become more or less rooted in the literature to date.14 The first positsJewish assimilation as a rejection of religious identity outright, a position described byHannah Arendt in The Jew as Pariah: ‘Jews who wanted ‘‘culture’’ left Judaism at once, andcompletely [. . .]. Secularization and even secular learning became identified exclusively withsecular culture, so that it never occurred to these Jews that they could have started a process ofsecularization with regard to their own heritage.’15 The second paints assimilation as anexpansion of self-identity that fostered artistic explorations of ‘inner tensions’ generated by‘myriad different attachments � religious, social, cultural, and philanthropic’.16 Uriel Taldescribes this latter position as a Jewish ‘double aim � to integrate completely into theirenvironment as full-fledged [citizens] and at the same time preserve their separate Jewishexistence’.17
Ultimately, the attempt to capture or define Jewish modernism reveals itself as an elusiveprocess, one that necessitates an engagement with myriad past and present traditions andresults in a multiplicity of individual voices and experiences. In the specific context ofGermany, Michael Brenner observes that as German-Jews departed from a ‘pre-modernJewish life’ they constructed ‘a new Jewish self-definition [that] selected certain aspects of therich Jewish heritage and integrated them into modern European culture’.18 This creative
11 Freud, Totem and Taboo, as quoted and translated in Richard Cohen, ‘Urban Visibility and Biblical
Visions’, Cultures of the Jews: A New History, ed. David Biale (New York, 2002), 731�98 (p. 741).12 Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York, 1939), 157.13 Indeed, Scott Spector argues that while a ‘prescriptive formal definition of [Jewish Modernism]
seems futile at best (if not ominous), [. . .] there is a history to be told about a discourse on Jewishmodernism in German-speaking central Europe’. See Scott Spector, ‘Modernism without Jews:A Counter-Historical Argument’, Modernism/Modernity, 13 (2006), 615�33 (p. 617).
14 Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (Oxford, 1978),
21.15 Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (New York, 1978),
92.16 Cohen, ‘Urban Visibility and Biblical Visions’, 732, 734.17 Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Second Reich,
1870�1914, trans. Noah Jonathan Jacobs (Ithaca, NY, 1975), 17.18 Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, CT, 1996),
12.
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process, as Brenner notes, has been characterized by Eric Hobsbawm as a process of modern
invention and imagination that ‘resurrect[s] certain elements of an allegedly golden tradition
and adapt[s] them to the new conditions of a changing society’.19
Naturally, the Old Testament became a primary text that would be ‘refracted and
refashioned in a multitude of expressions, showing the shifting boundaries of Jewish life’.20
As David Biale contends, the biblical narrative, and the Moses saga in particular, was a potent
narrative source for modernists in that it ‘supplie[d] all the elements of later Jewish history �homeland and exile, fidelity and betrayal, divine revelation and the eclipse of God � but the
one thing it [did] not provide is finality’.21 He continues:
One might go even further back for a historical analogy to the present moment: to the period of theBible itself, not so much the Bible as it was finally edited and canonized but, rather, the many
conflicting cultural threads from which it was woven. [. . .] It is the cacophony of voices preserved inthe Bible � the complaints of the people versus the admonitions of Moses � that most resembles thestate of Jewish culture. There is, of course, a world of difference between the modern age and the
ancient, but the problems of Jewish identity remain startlingly similar.22
According to Cohen, ‘negotiation with the biblical text [during the modern age] helped Jews
[. . .] erect new boundaries with their cultural habitat’ and, as a result, ‘myriad different
attachments � religious, social, cultural, and philanthropic � anchored them[selves] to their
ancestral moorings’.23
And yet, as Yuri Slezkine argues in The Jewish Century, ‘Modernism as the autopsy and
indictment of modern life was not Jewish any more than it was ‘‘degenerate’’, but [. . .]
Jewishness became one of its most important themes, symbols, and inspirations.’24 Thus, a
more productive scholarly avenue might be to pose the question of how modernism became
individually incorporated into reimaginings of Jewish identity and communal traditions in
the twentieth century. Such is the goal of three recent musicological publications that
admirably wrestle with the problems of Jewish identity, musical modernism and self-
expression: Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New, edited by Philip V. Bohlman; JewishIdentities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music, by Klara Moricz;
and Eagle Minds: Selected Correspondence of Istvan Anhalt and George Rochberg, 1961�2005,
edited by Alan M. Gillmor. While diverse in their methodologies and approaches
to the subject, the three studies are connected by their engagement with a biblical
figure � unsurprisingly, Moses � who functions as a key metaphor for the dilemmas of Jewish
modernism. His shadowy presence roots these studies in the long-standing exegetical
tradition of Jewish musical modernism and twentieth-century Jewish identities.
19 Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture, 4. See also Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: InventingTraditions’, The Invention of Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge, 1983), 1�14.
20 Cohen, ‘Urban Visibility and Biblical Visions’, 731.21 David Biale, ‘Conclusion’, Cultures of the Jews, ed. Biale, 1147�50 (p. 1147).22 Ibid., 1150.23 Cohen, ‘Urban Visibility and Biblical Visions’, 764, 734.24 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ, 2004), 75.
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The Moses of Jewish Musical Modernism
Although the volume Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New situates the majority of its casestudies within the Austro-German region, its individual contributions extend the discussionof modernism beyond high-art figures such as Arnold Schoenberg and the disciplinaryboundaries of historical musicology. A diverse approach to the subject lies at the heart of theproject, which advocates that instead of a ‘unifying grand narrative [. . .] we experience Jewishmodernism as a collection of stories and a collectivity of narrators, whose own responses tothe increasingly public nature of Jewish self-identity varied vastly’.25 This emphasis onmyriad, localized modernisms promotes a ‘descriptive rather than a normative approach tothe concept of modernity, specifying what was considered modern, or modernistic, inparticular contexts’.26 Accordingly, each of the contributors dissects an expression of Jewishmodernism within a specific context, thus rooting the movement in the particulars of acommunity rather than within the broader European scenario. Mitchell Ash and PamelaPotter both focus on Germany and the impact of modern science on compositional ideas, asseen in Schoenberg’s encounter with the work of physicist Ernst Mach, or in the politicalrhetoric of Richard Eichenauer, who adopted scientific language in order to discredit Jewishmodernism on the basis of race. The volume then sways to sacred expressions of modernismexplored through more ethnomusicological lenses, a shift which underscores Bohlman’sintroductory observation that modernism emerged at a moment of ‘increased exploration offolk culture’.27 Edwin Seroussi details how modernism impacted the Viennese-Sephardicliturgy through a series of musical reforms that reflected the shifting demographics of thatcommunity from the fin-de-siecle period to the First World War.28 Kay Kaufman Shelemaywithdraws us from the European theatre almost entirely in her article, which explorestransnational contacts between Europe and Beta Israel (today known as the Ethiopian Jews inIsrael) and the various ‘echoes’ of modernism that resonated globally among Jewishcommunities.29 Finally, Michael Steinberg provides a creative account of how musical worksprovided thematic substance for the visual art of Charlotte Salomon, whose operaticallyinspired paintings offer personal reflections and commentary on the shifting political scene ofinterwar Germany.30
The inclusion of examples outside the normal modernist narrative � particularly theinclusion of sacred modernisms and non-European traditions � attests the great value of thevolume, but it also places a heavy burden on its editor, Philip V. Bohlman, who weaves theseindividual strands into a cohesive meditation on Jewish modernism. His solution is a
25 Philip V. Bohlman, ‘Introduction: The Transcendent Moment of Jewish Modernism’, JewishMusical Modernism, ed. Bohlman, 1�30 (p. 16).
26 Mitchell G. Ash, ‘Multiple Modernisms? Episodes from the Sciences as Cultures, 1900�1945’,
Jewish Musical Modernism, ed. Bohlman, 31�54 (p. 32).27 Bohlman, ‘Introduction’, 9.28 Edwin Seroussi, ‘Sephardic Fin des siecles: The Liturgical Music of Vienna’s Turkisch-Israelitische
Community on the Threshold of Modernity’, Jewish Musical Modernism, ed. Bohlman, 55�80.29 Kay Kaufman Shelemay, ‘Echoes from Beyond Europe: Music and the Beta Israel Transformation’,
Jewish Musical Modernism, ed. Bohlman, 102�24.30 Michael P. Steinberg, ‘Charlotte Salomon’s Modernism’, Jewish Musical Modernism, ed. Bohlman,
125�52.
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redemptive narrative of transcendence, in which Jewish music participates in a transitory
movement from one particular communal state of ‘time and space’ to another, often in
response to a ‘moment of crisis’. This transcendent movement from past to future is crucial to
Bohlman’s analysis of Jewish modernism, with new histories not displacing the older myths
but reflecting the ‘conditions and identities that accrue to Jewish communities in their
encounter with modernity’:31
Whereas Jewish modernism emerged from and [. . .] overlapped with modernity and modernism, itshistorical trajectory was distinctive in several decisive ways. [It] did not move toward and participate
in the universal; rather, it gathered its impetus by a centripetal movement toward the local. [. . .] [It]did not seek to free itself from its origins.32
Fluid, transitory movement between these various poles � past and present, sacred and
secular, universal and local � imbues Jewish modernism with a powerful transcendent ability
to ‘diffuse the preexisting historical dichotomies’ and ‘supplant the crushing hegemony of a
global history’, one whose ‘anti-Semitism and rejection of otherness is negated in this
space’.33 Thus, Bohlman concludes, the decisive ‘moment of Jewish modernism is one in
which history is being reconfigured. New goals and direction supplant the old, [with] Jewish
modernism fulfill[ing] its goal of transition by reconfiguring its symbolic contexts,
specifically so by enhancing what the modernists understood to be Jewishness.’34
In the spirit of reconfiguring symbols, Bohlman concludes the volume with an exegetical
summation based on the Pentateuch � familiarly known as the Law of Moses and consisting
of the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy � and thus
approaches Jewish modernism through prominent themes of the Torah.35 Rather than
reading Jewish modernism through the ‘recurring authoritative models of Jewish histori-
ography [that view] Jewish history as ‘‘patterns of cycles’’’, Bohlman observes that the
narrative design of Moses’ scriptures reflects how ‘Jewish history becomes teleological when it
encounters modernity, moving towards moments of crisis’.36 From these writings, he extracts
themes central to the Jewish experience of transcendence, in which Jewish artists came to
redefine their self-identities through modernist reconfigurations of Jewish life and historical
space and time. The diaspora of Exodus now becomes a metaphor for the displacement of
Jewish culture at the beginning of the twentieth century, migrations in which ‘music came
increasingly to provide an important domain for the imagination of authenticity and for the
historical inscription of myth’.37 As Moses and the chosen people begin to formulate a central
book of laws that will lend Jewish society ‘cosmopolitan dimensions’ in Leviticus, so
31 Bohlman, ‘Introduction’, 5.32 Ibid., 2.33 Ibid., 4, 8.34 Bohlman, ‘Epilogue: Beyond Jewish Modernism’, Jewish Musical Modernism, ed. Bohlman, 153�77
(p. 154).35 Ibid., 155.36 Ibid.37 Ibid., 160.
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Bohlman sees Jewish engagement of modernism in urban settings as a process of ‘turn[ing]
inward toward themselves to create their own world’.38
Jewish self-identity becomes strengthened in Numbers, the book that comes to stand formodernism itself. Here, many of Bohlman’s earlier discussions of modernism find integration
and clarification: that it is a movement spurred by intensified interest in secular and
humanistic Jewishness, and that Jewish self-consciousness received additional impetus from
the ways it interacted with modernism. As Bohlman notes, ‘the aesthetic of Jewishmodernism resulted from deliberate decisions to make music more Jewish. Composers
who never would have written ‘‘Jewish music’’ prior to 1933 did so afterwards’ and with
greater frequency.39 Thus, we see the onset of an ‘accelerating teleology’ that gives way to a
‘complex heterotopia in which the Jewish people [. . .] are ‘‘numbered’’’, their identities
‘specified in more distinctive ways’.40 This ‘numbering’ had direct anti-Semitic consequencesin the twentieth century, ultimately leading to the definitive moment of historical crisis � the
‘Holocaust [as] the ultimate dystopia at the end of Jewish modernism’.41 And yet, Bohlman
asserts, music provided one of the few modes through which transcendence was achieved in
the face of ‘historical conditions that permit no transcendence’. He ends with a poignant
contrast between the biblical Moses and Schoenberg’s title figure in Moses und Aron, writtenat the height of the composer’s modernist phase. In Deuteronomy, the biblical Moses knows
he will die without reaching the final goal of the Exodus; instead of lamenting, he offers his
‘Song of Moses’, which transcendently announces ‘life beyond the borders of the present and
chronicles history as it unfolds in the future’. Schoenberg’s Moses also has a ‘highly musical
utterance’, but one lodged in a modernist tone that declares the ‘inexpressibility of ending’and reflects the transcendent search for new Jewish modes of expression: ‘Inconceivable God!
Unspeakable idea, with so many meanings! Will you permit such a conclusion? [. . .] Oh
word, you word, that I cannot find!’42
The Moses of Jewish Identities
In Klara Moricz’s impressive Jewish Identities, Schoenberg’s Moses also emerges as
a modernist figure; he is the protagonist of the composer’s first large-scale work ‘built on
a single twelve-tone row and thus demonstrates the large-scale organizational possibilities of
his new compositional method’.43 Moricz initially describes Moses und Aron as possessingcertain transcendent qualities, in that it appears to strive toward spiritualization. In it, ‘Music
is set free from its physical reality, its ‘‘body’’ is dissolved into an idea that inhabits a totally
unified, homogenous, nonphysical musical space.’44 But, as Moricz describes, Schoenberg’s
Moses cannot break free in a similarly transcendent manner, for he is tethered to
his singing alter ego, Aron, who represents the dystopian elements of Jewish society.
38 Ibid., 161.39 Ibid., 165.40 Ibid., 167.41 Ibid., 162.42 Ibid., 168, 171.43 Moricz, Jewish Identities, 233.44 Ibid., 234.
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The impossible negotiation between the two characters does not point at a ‘solution’, but
‘magnifies the problem’.
The inability of Moses to express the pure idea of God in music already suggested this comingsilence. No matter how the twelve-tone row is displayed in connection with Schoenberg’s
inconceivable God, in Aron’s part the music � and, metaphorically, music itself � marks corruption,the falsification of the pure idea.45
The unfinished opera thus serves as a metaphor for the boundaries, limitations
and multiplicities of Schoenberg’s Jewish modernism, an individualized version
‘completely cleansed of all [the] elements [of Judaism] that Schoenberg [. . .] was unwilling
to accept’.46
Such an interpretation of Moses und Aron derives from Moricz’s approach to Jewish
identity and modernism, which seeks to undercut the notion of neatly drawn histories and
essentialist notions found in earlier studies. She agrees with Mitchell Ash that modernist
identities are ‘not monolithic and static but [. . .] multiple and fluid’, and thus looks for the
‘contradictions inherent in the concept of ‘‘Jewish music’’’ rather than a tidy narrative arising
from scholarly preference for ‘the expression of a community over that of the individual, or
[. . .] the belief that the individual psyche reflects the communal experience’.47 Such studies,
she contends, promote the problematic conviction that ‘The experience of a nation or an
ethnic group can be reduced to some essence that is present in every member of the group,
and the idea that works of art inevitably carry this essence.’48 Her preference, as demonstrated
by her case-study approach, is to focus on the individual forces that shape creative enterprise
and identity politics. As she explains, ‘Jewish identity is not an essence. Its significance in a
person’s life depends on contexts: personal, national, cultural, religious, political, and
historical, to name only a few from the eternal list that keeps Jewish identities in a constant
flux.’49
The book unfolds in three sections, each dedicated to a separate consideration of what
Moricz casts as three key protagonists in Jewish modernism: the establishment of the Russian
Society for Jewish Folk Music (OYNM), the Jewish-themed works of Ernest Bloch, and
Schoenberg’s precarious relationship with his own spirituality. While her treatment of all
three subjects is masterful, the chapters dedicated to Schoenberg demonstrate the full scope
of her methodology and present several interesting counterpoints with Bohlman’s
conclusions in Jewish Musical Modernism. As Moricz astutely recognizes, Schoenberg was
initially a reluctant Jewish figure ‘drawn into the narrative of Jewish music because his stature
in the history of twentieth-century music marked him for appropriation’.50 The idealism of
Schoenberg, an artist with a ‘strong utopian persuasion’, became challenged in 1933, when
the composer found himself ousted from the academy by the National Socialists owing to his
Jewish heritage. In many biographies and studies, scholars have characterized this turn of
45 Moricz, Jewish Identities, 234, 235�6.46 Ibid., 237.47 Ibid., 2, 1.48 Ibid., 1.49 Ibid., 351.50 Ibid., 7.
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events as Schoenberg’s ‘Jewish moment’ and have accordingly propagated a narrative in
which the composer rededicates himself (and his art) to the Jewish faith for the remainder of
his life, leaving his German self behind.51
Moricz wisely distrusts such clean acts of disassociation, and instead adopts Gershom
Scholem’s term Deutschjudentum to describe the inextricable amalgam of identities found in
many German-Jewish modernists of the early twentieth century. She argues that ‘separation
from German culture, which [Schoenberg] equated with Western culture’, proved difficult for
the composer, who had always remained ‘deeply suspicious’ of the existence of ‘Jewish art
music’.52 As a result, she uses Schoenberg’s political writings and Jewish-themed works to
demonstrate how Schoenberg envisioned a new Jewish utopia to ‘replace the [German] one he
had lost’, one ultimately constructed from the ideologically uncomfortable realms of anti-
democratic, anti-Semitic ideals prevalent in German society. Moricz makes a bold assertion in
the course of this discussion � that ‘Schoenberg’s statements can [. . .] read as those of a fascist
sympathizer, despite his being a victim of persecution � and, I believe, would be read that way
were not his reputation as a cultural icon of modernism at stake’; and the remainder of her
chapters explore the difficulty that Schoenberg had in reconciling his musical style with his
new political ideals.53
Schoenberg’s utopian discourse reaches an apex with the composition of the dodecaphonic
Holocaust cantata A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), in which a cathartic profession of faith �the singing of the Shema Yisroel by the beaten Jews � has come to signify for many scholars
‘Schoenberg’s belief in the possibility of transcending horror by spiritual-religious unity’.54
For example, in The Composer as Jew, Alexander Ringer described A Survivor as the moment
when ‘Schoenberg poured all his sorrow and the full measure of his Jewish pride into a
unique mini-drama, a relentless crescendo from beginning to end of unmitigated horror
defeated by unyielding faith.’55 A decade later, David Liebermann cited the 12-tone setting of
the Shema Yisroel as proof that Schoenberg had rewritten his will and withdrawn ‘from
German music the right to inherit that which he considered his most enduring legacy and
which he had developed specifically for the benefit of German music: the method of
composing with twelve tones related only to one another’.56 In these cases, the cantata
functions as a form of musical transcendence similar to that described by Bohlman in JewishMusical Modernism: the transitory moment in which Schoenberg definitively moves from
German modernist to Jewish modernist, in which he evokes the past to recuperate the
51 Most scholars seize upon Schoenberg’s 4 August 1933 letter to Anton Webern, in which he confides:‘I have long since resolved to be a Jew. [. . .] It is my intention to take an active part in endeavors ofthis kind. I regard that as more important than my art, and am determined [. . .] to do nothing in[the] future but work for the Jewish national cause.’ See Willi Reich, Schoenberg; A CriticalBiography, trans. Leo Black (London, 1971), 49.
52 Moricz, Jewish Identities, 208, 209.53 Ibid., 214�15, 224.54 Ibid., 285.55 Alexander Ringer, The Composer as Jew (Oxford, 1990), 203.56 David Liebermann, ‘Schoenberg Rewrites his Will: A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46’, Political and
Religious Ideas in the Works of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Charlotte M. Cross and Russell A. Berman(New York, 2000), 193�229 (pp. 212�13).
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present and future, in which the ‘borders between myth and history’ engender ‘a growingreconfiguration of self and other’.57
And yet, as Moricz demonstrates, A Survivor quickly became a metaphor for modernism’spost-war dystopia, with the composer articulating his own personal convictions throughmodernist idioms that now seemed cliched in the face of a historical event such as theHolocaust. As the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno would argue, Schoenberg’s decision tolodge his response to the Holocaust in the tired tropes of high modernism raised ethical andartistic problems: ‘The aesthetic stylistic principle, and even the chorus’s solemn prayer, makethe unthinkable appear to have had some meaning; it becomes transfigured, something of itshorror removed. By this alone an injustice is done [to] the victims.’58 Transcendence, widelyrecognized by Holocaust scholars as not ‘easily tenable in relation to the Holocaust’, becomesmired in convention in A Survivor, a piece that ‘instead of articulating horror, turns toconventional musical paradigms’.59 The composition thus functions as a liminal work thatstraddles the border between Schoenberg’s own utopian vision of Jewish aesthetics andpolitical action and the later dystopian realization that such an ‘illusory triumph [. . .] haslittle to do with the brutal reality’ of the genocide.60
The realm of A Survivor thus becomes a heterotopian vision of Jewish modernism, inwhich contractions, tensions and multiplicities accumulate without resolution. MichelFoucault described heterotopias as ‘a sort of mixed, joint experience’ similar to that ofviewing oneself in the mirror:
The mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy.
From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place whereI am since I see myself over there. [. . .] It makes this place that I occupy at the moment when Ilook at myself [. . .] at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, andabsolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over
there.61
In Jewish Identities, we ultimately see each of Moricz’s subjects through an impressiveanalytical mirror that reflects both the authenticity of their individual relationships withJewish modernism and the diverse aesthetic consequences of such artistic engagement. Theirlives and compositions are thus revealed as absolutely true and yet ultimately constructed,what Moricz describes as a ‘dangerous’ and ‘philosophically ineffable purity’.62
The Moses of Eagle Minds
In his introduction, Bohlman wrestles with the problem of defining the period of musicalJewish modernism, noting that ‘there is no neat suturing, no transition, no clear sense of
57 See Bohlman, ‘Introduction’, 6�7.58 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Engagement’, quoted in Moricz, Jewish Identities, 295.59 Moricz, Jewish Identities, 295.60 Ibid., 297.61 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, 16 (1986), 22�7 (p. 24).62 Moricz, Jewish Identities, 340.
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closure and ending’.63 He attributes this difficulty to several factors, including a desire to
resist the ‘brutal enforcement of closure that lay at the core of what the Nazis achieved with
the Holocaust’ as well as the fact that ‘There was no grand narrative that unified the diverse
narratives that converged as Jewish modernism.’64 Indeed, as Moricz stresses, the experience
of Jewish modernism was a highly individualized and multifaceted process in which
individuals were ‘torn between the claims of different personal [. . .] and cultural impulses’.65
These realizations serve as a productive backdrop to editor Alan M. Gillmor’s Eagle Minds, a
volume of selected correspondence exchanged by Canadian composer Istvan Anhalt and
American composer George Rochberg over the course of 40 years. Through their
correspondence, one comes to recognize the lingering weight of the post-Holocaust identitypolitics on Jewish composers and the long shadow that modernism cast well after Adorno’s
1955 proclamation that the new music had aged beyond its relevance.66
Anhalt and Rochberg first met in 1960 at the International Conference of Composers
(Ontario), where they quickly became friends and long-time correspondents, generating over
400 handwritten letters over their lifetimes. As Gillmor notes, a number of parallels in their
careers drew the two composers together. They were both of the same generation, born less
than a year apart; both had fought in the Second World War, Anhalt with a forced-labour
battalion in Fascist Hungary and Rochberg as an infantry lieutenant in the European theatre;
and both had ‘explored atonality and serialism after the war’, later broadening ‘their aural
experience in the 1960s and 1970s to embrace traditional elements, including collage and
tonality’.67 Over the course of four decades, the two composers gradually expanded their
conversations beyond talk of creative projects to two issues that would assume a central
position within the collected correspondence: their relationship to Judaism and the viability
of post-war modernism. Unsurprisingly, the two men have strikingly different views of both
subjects, best represented by several letters exchanged during the 1980s, around the time
when they published their respective monographs, Alternative Voices (Anhalt) and Aesthetics ofSurvival (Rochberg).
In the late 1960s, as Anhalt and Rochberg began to broach the subject of their Jewish
heritage and its impact on their musical compositions, Rochberg made explicit the
connection between his Jewishness and his scepticism of modernism. In a letter to Anhalt,
he admitted a new academic fascination with the Second Commandment and worried thatmodernist music had led composers astray: ‘Perhaps the oddest thing of all that is happening
to me is a growing need to confirm [and] reaffirm my Jewishness. [. . .] In a strange way the
urge is tied up with music. I mean that music is being corrupted today, it is being lost in the
vagaries of ‘‘false idols’’. It has become unclean.’68 Anhalt responded with news of his own
process of spiritual awakening, albeit a less critical and more self-reflective one. Describing his
piece Foci (1969), he revealed his own interest in ‘groping towards an understanding of some
63 Bohlman, ‘Introduction’, 23.64 Ibid.65 Moricz, Jewish Identities, 352.66 See Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Aging of the New Music’, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert
(Berkeley, CA, 2002), 181�202.67 Alan M. Gillmor, ‘Introduction’, Eagle Minds, ed. Gillmor, xii�xliii (p. xvi).68 Rochberg to Anhalt, 14 July 1969; Eagle Minds, ed. Gillmor, 74.
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facets of the collective psyche of our group which until now were far removed from my
concerns’.69 The multimedia piece, with movements titled ‘Group’ and ‘Testament’, involves
a number of taped source recordings in which Anhalt hoped to preserve the ‘uniqueness of
the individual’ as personal reflections on a variety of spiritual sources, including the Zohar,one of the central texts of the cabbalistic tradition.70
Such overt reference to Jewish themes within art seemed heavy-handed to Rochberg, who
would later launch a strong campaign against artistic literalism and the scientific construction
of modernism. In a series of letters from 1984, he raises deep concerns about the sincerity of
overtly political art, which he sees as related to the systematic manipulation of sound in
modernist music:71
My ultimate reasons for finally rejecting modernism have to do with my intense belief that whatever‘realities’ an artist or composer deals with they must be transformed such that the pain induced inthe social being is raised to a level beyond the phenomenological in the artistic being. No one can
doubt the ‘sincerity’ of today’s composers who wish to deal directly with the raw effects of politicalcrimes [. . .] but ‘sincerity’ is not an adequate substitute for the transformational process which goesinto making art.72
Driven by an equally intense self-exploration of Jewish expression, Anhalt responds by
identifying in Rochberg’s rhetoric an inherently Jewish tone:
I hear in your prose a familiar cadence and intonation, that of a latter-day prophet who saw the
monster and rose to do battle with it, whatever the consequences may be. Perhaps prophets have nochoice. [. . .] [Our Jewishness] echoes in certain sentences. [. . .] Has this Jewishness something to dowith the circumstance that we are the champion survivors among nations?73
The prophet to which Anhalt refers might have been King Solomon, who makes an
appearance in Rochberg’s 1984 monograph The Aesthetics of Survival, a collection of essays
that took aim at the perceived scientific basis of modernism and called for a more humanist
approach to musical composition. Therein, Rochberg writes,
The emergence of forms of art totally devoid of human content, and therefore meaning, oweseverything to a naively accepting and uncritical belief in the values of machine technology and thescientific premises on which this technology has been firmly based. While it is true that humanistic
traditions still prevail in some artistic quarters, it is nevertheless true that they have been abandonedlargely in favor of varieties of production which concentrate on consciously devised technicalmanipulation.74
69 Anhalt to Rochberg, 5 August 1969; Eagle Minds, ed. Gillmor, 74.70 For a more in-depth discussion of Foci, see Istvan Anhalt, Pathways and Memory, ed. Robin Elliott
and Gordon E. Smith (Montreal, 2001), 151�3.71 Rochberg to Anhalt, 20 May 1984; Eagle Minds, ed. Gillmor, 140.72 Rochberg to Anhalt, 20 May 1984; ibid.73 Anhalt to Rochberg, 27 May 1984; ibid., 142.74 Rochberg, ‘Humanism Versus Science’, The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer’s View of Twentieth-
Century Music, ed. William Bolcom (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005), 135�44 (p. 139).
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Anhalt’s inclination to read this anti-modernist discourse as prophetic may have derived from
Rochberg’s well-known essay ‘Humanism Versus Science’, featured in The Aesthetics ofSurvival. At the conclusion of the essay, Rochberg describes musical composition as being
held hostage to the ‘days before the terror’ in which ‘any sense of the human limits of music
has been lost’.75 He concludes with an allusion to the biblical King Solomon, here
representing the essential tragedy of modernism:
I am poor King Solomon. Once I was immeasurably rich and wise and god-fearing. [. . .] But mywisdom destroyed my fear of God, and when I no longer feared God, my wisdom destroyed myriches. Now all cities are dead over which I ruled; the empire which was entrusted to me is empty, adesert shimmering in a blue light, and somewhere, around a nameless star, senselessly, eternally
circles the radioactive earth. I am Solomon, I am poor King Solomon.76
In a letter from 1985, Anhalt comments on the post-atomic rhetoric (now conflated with a
Jewish figure) proffered by Rochberg: ‘You seem to feel/think that we might blow each other
to bits. [. . .] But you are transposing here something. It is not only the reality of the bomb
that we should endeavor to survive [. . .] it is the reality of ‘‘modernism’’.’77 In response,
Rochberg adamantly rejects this literal interpretation of his writing, arguing that ‘While the
chaotic horrors of our day are all too real, I’m not convinced they are ‘‘subject matter’’ for art
unless their rawness is transfigured, transformed through the power of an intense artistic
mind [and] nature.’78 This world-view would later become the basis for his harsh critique of
Judaism, which Gillmor characterizes as too insistent on the ‘separation of the exterior and
interior worlds, of the practical and the visionary, of humans from nature, of self from
world’.79
As Gillmor notes, Rochberg’s ‘position on doctrinaire religion continued to harden in later
years’, resulting in some passionate exchanges between the American composer and Anhalt,
who maintained an ‘intense interest in the rich Jewish intellectual tradition’.80 In one
exchange from the late 1980s, Rochberg quietly admits that while re-reading the Jewish poet
Stephen Berg, he ‘began to wonder if what was plaguing him [was] not simply being
‘‘human’’ [. . .] but rather, buried under layers [and] layers of secularized living, a kind of
‘‘genetic’’ suffering that comes with being born a Jew’.81 Anhalt seizes upon this revelation
with gusto, using it as an excuse to share with Rochberg his own intimate confusions:
In the ‘finale’ of my life, I ought to find a [. . .] satisfactory answer to the questions: ‘In what senseam I a Jew?’ ‘What is (are) the necessary component(s) in the notion of ‘‘being a Jew?’’’ [. . .] For a
long time [. . .] I thought that my credentials [. . .] for being a Jew were forever vouched for by thatimpeccable authority on the matter: Adolf Hitler. Now I know better. [. . .]
75 Ibid., 144.76 Ibid.77 Anhalt to Rochberg, 13 April 1985; Eagle Minds, ed. Gillmor, 161.78 Rochberg to Anhalt, 23 April 1985; ibid., 165.79 Gillmor, ‘Introduction’, xxiii.80 Ibid., xxiv.81 Rochberg to Anhalt, 31 January 1988; Eagle Minds, ed. Gillmor, 206�7.
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I have to document myself, have to read. [. . .] I want [to] understand my very specific reality,
which includes my Jewishness and being at peace with my entire past, even if that part includes agreat disconcern for Jewishness.82
In his next letter, Rochberg responds vociferously with a widespread disregard for organizedreligion: ‘Have I ever mentioned my abhorrence of the religion of Judaism, its narrow-chested,nationalistic legalisms, rituals, tribal echoes � none of which I can identify with in the least? Ofcourse, this is only part of my general distaste for all orthodox religions.’83 A decade later,Rochberg would again address his discomfort with the issues raised by Anhalt � the corruptionof modernism and post-Holocaust identity politics � in a final Moses metaphor. Describing arecent performance of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, he relays to Anhalt:
I felt immediately the great [and] terrible irony: a work composed 1930�32 by a nominal Lutheranwho reconverts 1933 to Judaism in the language (German) of the monsters who set about destroyingall the Jews (not to mention others) they can, said work performed to great acclaim (at least in
N[ew] Y[ork]) long after the horrors of the Holocaust [and] sung in the very German of Hitler. [. . .]Frankly, it makes me shudder.84
Conclusion
Collectively, these three studies illustrate the complexity of coming to terms with the conceptof Jewish musical modernism or, potentially, any of its individual elements. What is Jewishmodernism or even Jewish music? Was it an aesthetic movement that existed in reality, ormerely a historical post-war construct? Can one really speak of a cohesive Jewish art-musictradition, or are the expressions so individualized that they escape collective categorization?Unlike Adorno, who in 1959 associated the phrase ‘coming to terms with the past’ with asocietal wish to ‘turn the page and, if possible, [wipe] it from memory’, the books surveyedabove engage the past in such a manner that Jewish musical modernism gains further tractionas a twenty-first-century intellectual concept through its interpretative legacy.85 Granted, thatlegacy is one of multiple texts and contexts, in which Jewish musical modernism emerges as aseries of irresolvable contradictions and paradoxes. It constitutes an inexpressible and yetdefinitive historical denouement; a transcendent and yet corrupt artistic moment; a utopianyet dystopian spiritual vision; an abstract yet highly politicized movement. In short, Jewishmusical modernism has become a metaphor in its own right, signifying the aesthetic andreligious challenges of the early twentieth century as well as the importance of hermeneuticswithin the field of twenty-first-century musicology.
In this regard, we might interpret these three studies as contributions to an evolving andaccumulating literature on Jewish music and modernism, similar to a midrashic tradition ofrabbinical exegesis. Derived from the Hebrew word for inquiry, Midrash denotes scripturalinterpretation in general, whether explicit or inferred, and has come to stand for a ‘late
82 Anhalt to Rochberg, 9 February 1988; Eagle Minds, ed. Gillmor, 208�9.83 Rochberg to Anhalt, 17 February 1988; ibid., 212.84 Rochberg to Anhalt, 2 March 1999; ibid., 354.85 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?’, Bitburg in Moral and
Political Perspective, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (Bloomington, IN, 1986), 114�29 (p. 115).
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repository for interpretive traditions that had long and broadly circulated’.86 As Steven D.Fraade notes, the scope and intent of midrashic exegeses varies widely and depends highly onthe ideological foci of the rabbinical interpreters. Midrash thus includes
interpretive traditions; interpretive methods by which those traditions are thought to have been
exegetically derived; the formal structures by which they are textually embodied in our extantdocuments; the rhetorical strategies by which those documents seek performatively to engage (andtransform) their audiences within particular socioreligious settings; or the underlying assumptions of
claims to interpretive authority on behalf of the text’s authors/transmitters/studying communities.87
Similarly, Jewish Musical Modernism, Jewish Identities and Eagle Minds apply a broadspectrum of approaches to the subject of Jewish musical modernism, exploring secular andsacred traditions; hermeneutical methods used to define and contextualize the perceivedphenomenon; the actual musical structures created by Jewish modernists; the rhetoricalstrategies of performance and meaning; and the authority invested in given figures, works andcompositional strategies (such as Schoenberg, Moses und Aron and the 12-tone method,which appear in the commentary of all three volumes). As a result, they must be readdialogically against one another, with none standing as a sole interpretative source, but asanother exegetical voice designed to draw its readers into a conversation about Jewish musicalmodernism and its variable meanings. By wrestling with the interpretative tensions generatedbetween the texts, we come to realize that Jewish musical modernism continues to be apluralistic and controversial movement, one which offers not only new questions to considerbut, more importantly, the promise of future Moses figures to come.
86 Steven D. Fraade, ‘Rabbinic Midrash and Ancient Jewish Biblical Interpretation’, The CambridgeCompanion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, ed. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Martin
S. Jaffee (Cambridge, 2007), 99�120 (pp. 102�3).87 Ibid., 101 (italics original).
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