Adventures in the French Trade: Fragments Toward a Life by Jeffrey Mehlman

Author:Jeffrey Mehlman [Mehlman, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780804775076
Publisher: Stanford University Press

Wagner, the “Alpine chain” constituted by his oeuvre, we have seen, would appear to be the talismanic composer for Steiner.12 And yet the opera he chose to comment on at intriguing length in his first volume of essays, Language and Silence, was not Wagnerian but Schönberg’s unfinished masterpiece Moses und Aron. Not that Wagner is absent from the piece. Steiner is careful to state that it is inexact to say that the opera is “without precedent,” since it is “related to Wagner’s Parsifal.”13 Thus we are again confronted, however peripherally, with the relation between Wagner—or opera per se—and Judaism. The composer wrote in a letter to Alban Berg that the work was a crucial part of his “return to Judaism.”14

Schönberg’s conceit pits Aaron, whose propensity to idolatry is figured in part by his glorious voice, against Moses, whose role is spoken rather than sung. The askesis demanded by a God said to be unvorstellbar, unrepresentable, thus dictates a sacrifice of song, the quintessential property of opera, itself. Steiner relates this Mosaic sacrifice to the circumstance that ultimately led to Schönberg’s failure to complete the opera. He agrees with Adorno that the work was conceived in part as a “preventive action against the looming of Nazism.”15 And yet history was conspiring to arrange a strange contamination of the libretto by that which it was nominally predicated against: “The words Volk and Führer figure prominently in the opera; they designate its supreme historical values, Israel and Moses. Now they were wrested out of Schoenberg’s grasp by the millions bawling them at Nuremberg. How could he continue to set them to music?”16 But the conflation of Moses and Hitler, Führer and Führer, which is presented as an unfortunate contingency in the essay, corresponds precisely to the phantasm, a virtual wish-fulfillment, that concludes The Portage to San Cristobal: “Your invention. One Israel, one Volk, one leader,” as A.H. puts it. It is as though what was unvorstellbar, unrepresentable, was, for Steiner, less the abstract God of the Jews than a certain undecidability between the Hebrews and their fiercest adversaries.

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