Butchering Moses

There is no Moses, only a whole tribe of Moseses. In the course of his life he undergoes many shape changes: an abandoned child drifting down a river; a leader of a slave revolt; a guide through the wilderness; a miracle worker; a lawgiver; a literary man writing the Pentateuch; a figure of disappointment, gazing from the mountaintop at the land of milk and honey he will never be permitted to enter. It is to be expected, then, that artistic representations of Moses would be vague and contradictory.¹

There is a small tradition of memorable musical Moseses. For example, in Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s oratorio Die Israeliten in der Wüste (1768–69), Moses is little more than a chorister promoted to soloist, the voice of his people praying to God for rescue; the main event is the miracle of the spring that suddenly flows from the rock. Bach set a text by Daniel Schiebeler, perhaps with some assistance from the redoubtable Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, author of Der Messias; and Moses as precursor Messiah was the only Moses here present. A century later, in Max Bruch’s oratorio Moses (1895), Moses’s character has almost reversed: Bruch’s Moses is a Jewish Wotan, thundering invective on his own people as idolaters. Far from being at ease as a member of the chorus, he outshouts the whole multitude in a great antiphony, in the oratorio’s one impressive passage, “Abtrünnige, kam es dahin mit euch?” at the end of part 1.

Moses was always more at home in oratorio than in opera, where his lack of a dramatic sex life was a handicap; but Rossini, in Mosè in Egitto, perches Moses uncomfortably on top of a love story involving the Egyptian pharaoh’s son and a Hebrew girl. It is always a perplexity when the lead character in an opera has no particularly intense personal relation with the other characters; sometimes such a libretto encourages the composer to identify the lead character with the orchestra, and this is exactly what happens in Mosè. Moses is a faceless torso of power, who summons God’s revenge in the form of great orchestral interludes: the plague of darkness at the beginning, the parting of the Red Sea at the end. Rossini didn’t add Moses’s magnificent prayer “Dal tuo stellato soglio” until 1819; in the 1818 original, Moses had little of interest to sing—he was merely the conductor of the divine instrumentalists in the pit.

Representing Moses has been a trial for visual artists as well. They are vexed by the Vulgate’s mistranslation of the Hebrew verb qaran, which can mean either grow horns or shoot out rays; by choosing the former definition, the translators of the Latin Bible enjoined artists to outfit Moses with a fine pair of horns on his forehead. Michelangelo knew how to sculpt Moses as an image of clenched, potent wrath, despite the horns; but Tintoretto and other painters equivocated between the two definitions of qaran by plunking onto Moses’s head two narrow yellow triangles, an effect that gives the impression of a defective halo. In this way the traditional iconography of Moses became entwined with the traditional iconography of fauns, satyrs, and cuckolds—and, worse, devils. Indeed in the years after 1965, when Joseph Kiselewski’s graceful terracotta Moses was unveiled at Syracuse University, members of the Latino American Law Student Association, the Black Law Student Association, the Women’s Law Caucus, the Lambda Law Student Association, and the Jewish Law Student Association all complained against depicting Moses as a demon.²

The visual Moses, then, was often at the threshold of burlesque. But Arnold Schoenberg, in Moses und Aron (1930–32), was the first composer to imagine a musical Moses of this sort. Schoenberg’s Moses doesn’t sing (except for one brief optional phrase); his music-speech has pitch indications, but these pitches are gestic improvisations, not very closely related to tight unfurlings of the twelve-tone row that determines the real music in the opera. Moses is at once the opera’s central force and a songless creature trying...