SOURCE: "Schoenberg's Moses and Aaron," in Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman, Atheneum, 1967, pp. 127-39.

In the following essay, Steiner analyzes the relationship between music and language in Schoenberg 's Moses and Aaron.

It is difficult to conceive of a work in which music and language interact more closely than in Arnold Schoenberg's Moses and Aron. (The German title has an advantage of which Schoenberg, half in humor, half in superstition, was aware: its twelve letters are a symbolic counterpart to the twelve tones which form a basic set in serial composition.) It is, therefore, impertinent to write about the opera if one is unable to analyze its powerful, intensely original musical structure. This analysis has been undertaken by several musicologists and students of Schoenberg. One would wish that the intrinsic difficulty of the subject had not been aggravated by the "initiate" technicality of...