Moses Tragicus: Freud, Schoenberg, and the Defeated Moses: Freud Birthday Lecture, Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna 6.5.2006 Translated by Pamela Cooper-White

Jan Assmann and Michelangelo's Moses

In the early 1930s, in the face of the increasing anti-Semitism and the barbarism that unfolded, there were two assimilated Viennese Jews who—independently and presumably unaware of one another—were founding fathers and lawgivers of their respective disciplines: Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and Arnold Schoenberg, the father of twelve-tone technique. Each, like the other, began to deal with his Judaism in relation to another paradigmatic founding father and lawgiver: the figure Moses. Schoenberg's opera "Moses and Aron" was written in 1928–32; Freud's "Moses and Monotheism" in 1934–38. Both saw themselves as revolutionaries, embattled professionally, and threatened existentially as Jews, so they saw in Moses a likeness to themselves, besieged and imperiled as they represented him in their works and encountered the lawless and inhumane evil spirits of their own time.

Freud's Moses is slain; Schoenberg's Moses doubts his mission and sinks to the ground in despair. And in a certain sense, both the scientist and the composer failed with their Moses works, at least initially. Schoenberg succeeded neither in composing the third act as planned, nor in acknowledging that the existing two acts with the tragic conclusion might stand as completed. Freud admitted to the reader that his form of presentation was "no less inexpedient than it is inartistic [unkünstlerisch]. I myself deplore it unreservedly" (Freud, 1964/1939, p. 103). Readers, despite the brilliance of the text, appear to have agreed with Freud's confession. For over fifty years, the book's content was abandoned as outdated and formally unresolved. However, both works have had a glorious comeback. "Moses und Aron" has now arrived not only in the musical canon, but also in the operatic performance repertory, and Freud's Moses book has now, for about 30 years, been one of the most discussed books of the 20th century.

Moses himself already appears in the Bible as an ambivalent figure, alternating between triumph and failure. In Numbers 12:3, we learn, "And the man Moses was very humble, more than all men on earth," while in Exodus 11:3, it is said, "And the man Moses was very great in the land of Egypt." Incidentally, as far as I can see, these are the only places where the Bible, like Freud, speaks of the "man Moses." Freud, who had a very good ear for such dualities in the biblical text, went so far as to split the biblical Moses figure into an Egyptian Moses and a Midianite Moses—one a great lord, popular leader, legislator, and liberator; the other a modest man, a priest and shepherd. Schoenberg also splits the Moses figure, distinguishing between Moses the thinker and Aron the herald. In Freud, it is Moses the Egyptian who is slain; in Schoenberg, it is Moses the thinker who despairs. In both works—in Schoenberg's even more than Freud's—the tragic aspect of the Moses figure and, in close connection with this, the ambivalent, even problematic, character of monotheism is expressed.¹ It would be appealing to compare these two Moses works, but since this Sigmund Freud lecture is on Freud's birthday today, I want to emphasize and start with Freud's Moses book. (In the following, I will specify "the biblical Moses"² when referring to the biblical figure, and then simply "Moses" when referring to the protagonist of Freud's book and Schoenberg's opera.)

Freud's book, as I said, was mostly disregarded for fifty years, and then had such a glorious comeback in the late 1980s—one could almost speak of the return of the repressed—that today, after another thirty years, it is scarcely necessary to sketch more than the most general features of its content. Freud had already written about Moses in 1914, publishing this paper anonymously as "The Moses of Michelangelo" (1955/1914). In this essay, he interprets Moses' gaze and gesture from...