It is difficult to conceive of a work in which music and language interact more closely than in Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und 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.1 One would wish that the intrinsic difficulty of the subject had not been aggravated by the “initiate” technicality of their approach. This is especially true of the account of the music written by Milton Babbit and issued with the only recording so far available of Moses and Aaron (Columbia K-31-241).
If I write this program note, it is because the great majority of those in the audience at Covent Garden will be in my position; they do not have the training or knowledge needed to grasp the technical unfolding of the score. The demands made are, in fact, severely beyond those required by a classical composition, or even by the orchestral density of Mahler. Together we shall have to take comfort in Schoenberg’s frequent admonition:
I cannot often enough warn against the overrating of analysis since it invariably leads to what I have always fought against: the knowledge of how something is made; whereas I have always tried to promote the knowledge of what something is.
And one recalls Kierkegaard’s observation at the outset of his discussion of Don Giovanni:
though I feel that music is an art which to the highest degree requires experience to justify one in having an opinion about it, still I comfort myself … with the paradox that, even in ignorance and mere intimations, there is also a kind of experience.
In the case of Moses and Aaron I would go further. It belongs to that very small group of operas which embody so radical and comprehensive an act of imagination, of dramatic and philosophic argument articulated by poetic and musical means, that there are aspects of it which go well beyond the normal analysis of an operatic score. It belongs not only to the history of modern music—in a critical way, as it exemplifies the application of Schoenberg’s principles on a large, partly conventional scale—but to the history of the modern theater, of modern theology, of the relationship between Judaism and the European crisis. These aspects do not define or in any way exhaust the meaning of the work; that meaning is fundamentally musical. But an account of them may prove helpful to those who approach the work for the first time, and who would place it in its historical and emotional context. Like other very great and difficult works of art, Schoenberg’s opera goes decisively outside the confines of its genre while giving to that genre a new and seemingly obvious fulfillment.
In a letter to Alban Berg of October 16, 1933, when he had just returned formally to Judaism in the face of Nazi anti-Semitism, Schoenberg wrote:
As you have doubtless realised, my return to the Jewish religion took place long ago and is indeed demonstrated in some of my published work (“Thou shalt not, thou must”) as well as in Moses and Aaron, of which you have known since 1928, but which dates from at least five years earlier; but especially in my drama The Biblical Way which was also conceived in 1922 or ’23 at the latest.2
Der Biblische Weg remains unpublished; but what is known about it points clearly to the theme of the opera. It tells of a Zionist visionary, in whose name, Max Arun, there may be a foreshadowing of Moses and Aaron, who fails to achieve his goal through human imperfection. Equally relevant is the other piece referred to by Schoenberg, the second of the Four Pieces for mixed chorus, op. 27. Written in 1925, it sets to music the prohibition of Mosaic law against the making of images. “An image asks for names.… Thou shalt believe in the Spirit; thou must, chosen one.” This injunction, expressed in a cadenced prose which anticipates the “spoken song” of the opera, summarizes the central dramatic idea and conflict of Moses and Aaron. But Schoenberg’s interest in the musical statement of religious thought and in the dramatic idiom of the Old Testament goes back even further: to Die Jakobsleiter, an oratorio left incomplete in 1917.
This concern persisted throughout Schoenberg’s later work: in the Kol Nidre of 1938, in the brief, harrowing cantata A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), in the setting of Psalm 130 (1950), in Schoenberg’s final opus, the unfinished Modern Psalms. The last words he set to music were: “And yet I pray as all that lives prays.” Thus Moses and Aaron is thematically and psychologically related to an entire set of works in which Schoenberg sought to express his highly individual, though at the same time profoundly Judaic concept of identity, of the act of spiritual creation, and of the dialogue—so inherent in music—between the song of man and the silences of God. The opera is both Schoenberg’s magnum opus (what T. W. Adorno calls his “Hauptwerk quand-même”) and a composition rooted in the logic and development of his entire musical thought.
Schoenberg began writing Moses and Aaron in Berlin in May 1930; he completed Act II in Barcelona on March 10, 1932. Roberto Gerhard, in whose Barcelona flat Schoenberg often worked, tells an instructive anecdote. Schoenberg did not mind friends chatting in the room, even when he was engaged on the fantastically complex score; what he could not tolerate were sudden spells of quiet. The dates of composition are, of course, important. On the one hand they mark Schoenberg’s hard-fought professional acceptance, as Ferruccio Busoni’s successor at the Prussian Academy of Arts. But they also mark bouts of illness which led Schoenberg to seek refuge in a southern climate, and, above all, the rise of the Nazi menace. A year after he had completed Act II, Schoenberg was compelled to leave Berlin and start a life of exile.
He did not live to complete the opera or hear it performed. An extract was given in concert form at Darmstadt on July 2, 1951 (plans for a production at the Maggio Musicale in Florence fell through). Schoenberg died less than a fortnight later. The first complete concert program was given at the Musikhalle in Hamburg under the direction of Hans Rosbaud in March 1954. On June 16, 1957, Rosbaud directed the stage première of Moses und Aron at the Stadttheater in Zurich. This was followed by a Berlin production under Hermann Scherchen in October 1959. Since that time there have been few major opera houses in Europe or the United States which have not expressed the hope of producing the work, and retreated before its formidable demands.
Karl Wörner says that Moses and Aaron “is without precedent.” This is not so: as opera, it is related to Wagner’s Parsifal, and there are orchestral anticipations both in Mahler and in Schoenberg’s own earlier compositions and in his short operas, Erwartung and Die Glückliche Hand. But it is technically more demanding than any other major opera, and the quality of the religious-philosophic conflict requires from the performers and producer an unusual range of insight and sympathy. Schoenberg has deliberately used a genre saturated with nineteenth-century values of unreality and modish display to express an ultimate seriousness. In so doing he reopened the entire question of opera.
The libretto is organized wholly in terms of musical form and development (if serial music anticipates electronic music it is in the totality of control which the composer aims at in every aspect of the musical experience). As Schoenberg remarked: “It is only while I’m composing that the text becomes definite, sometimes even after composition.” Nevertheless, the book of Moses and Aaron is itself of great fascination. Schoenberg has a distinctive style which one sees in his paintings and theoretical writings no less than in his music. He worked in large strokes, and achieved an effect of clarity and abstract energy by leaving out syntactical qualifications or half-tones. Like much in Schoenberg’s musical texts and literary tastes, the libretto shows traces of German expressionism, and of the sources of expressionism. Characteristically, Strindberg plays a part: Schoenberg knew Wrestling Jacob when he planned Die Jakobsleiter, and was aware of Strindberg’s Moses when writing his own very different treatment of the theme.
The idiom used in Moses and Aaron is highly personal. It is kept apart from the rhythms and tonality of the Luther Bible. Schoenberg wrote to Berg on August 5, 1930: “I am of the opinion that the language of the Bible is medieval German, which, being obscure to us, should be used at most to give colour; and that is something I don’t need.” Above all, each German word, whether in Sprechgesang, in direct song or choral declaration, is uniquely and precisely fitted to the musical context. The words are no less durchkomponiert (“fully composed, musicalised”) than are the notes. This is what makes any decision to produce Moses and Aaron in English so wrong-headed. To alter the words—their cadence, stress, tonalities—as must be done in translation, is tantamount to altering the key relations or orchestration in a piece of classical music. Moreover, there is no need to subvert Schoenberg in this way: the story of Exodus is known to everyone, and Schoenberg’s presentation of the plot is utterly lucid. A brief outline would have given an English-speaking audience all the help it wants.
The relationship of language to music in Moses and Aaron is unlike that in any other opera. The problem of that relationship, of how to apportion the stress between word and musical tone, of whether the ideal libretto should not be weak precisely in order to mark the distance between music drama and the spoken play, underlies the whole history of opera. As Joseph Kerman has shown, it is the problematic achievement of Wagner, the late Verdi, and twentieth-century operatic composers to have given the libretto a new seriousness. Hence the marked affinity to modern literature and psychological argument in the operas of Janáček, Berg, and Stravinsky. Hence the ironic allegoric treatment of the debate between poet and composer in Richard Strauss’s Capriccio.
But Moses and Aaron goes much deeper. It belongs to that group of works produced in the twentieth century, and crucial to our present aesthetics, which have their own possibility as essential theme. I mean that it asks of itself—as Kafka does of fiction, as Klee asks of visual form—whether the thing can be done at all, whether there are modes of communication adequate. Kierkegaard wrote of Mozart: “The happy characteristic that belongs to every classic, that which makes it classic and immortal, is the absolute harmony of the two forces, form and content.” One would say of modern art that what makes it such and unmistakable to our sensibility is the frequent dissonance between moral, psychological content and traditional form. Being a drama of non-communication, of the primal resistance of intuitive or revealed insight to verbal and plastic incarnation (the refusal of the Word to be made flesh), Moses and Aaron is, on one vital plane, an opera about opera. It is a demonstration of the impossibility of finding an exhaustive accord between language and music, between sensual embodiment and the enormous urgency and purity of intended meaning. By making the dramatic conflict one between a man who speaks and a man who sings, Schoenberg has argued to the limit the paradoxical convention, the compromise with the unreal, inherent in all opera.
The paradox is resolved in defeat, in a great cry of necessary silence. This alone makes it difficult to think of a serious opera coming after or going beyond Moses and Aaron. But that was exactly Schoenberg’s own problem as a post-Wagnerian, and as an heir to Mahler in artistic morality even more than in orchestral technique. Like Mahler, he was proposing to aggravate, in the literal sense, the easy coexistence, the libertinage between music and public which obtained in the opera house at the turn of the century and which Strauss, for all his musical integrity, never refuted. As Adorno notes, Moses and Aaron can be approached in the same spirit as a major cantata of Bach. But unlike Bach, it is a work which at every moment calls to account its own validity and expressive means.
The motif of a sharp conflict between Moses and Aaron is, of course, present in the Pentateuch. It may well be that later priestly editors, with their particular professional association with Aaron’s priesthood, smoothed away some of the grimmer evidence, and obscured the full, murderous consequences of the clash. Schoenberg made of this archaic, hidden antagonism a conflict of ultimate moral and personal values, of irreconcilable formulations or metaphors of man’s confrontation with God. Working on the principle—discernible at the roots of Greek tragic drama—that fundamental human conflict is internal, that dramatic dialogue is in the final analysis between self and self, Schoenberg gathered the entire force of collision into a single consciousness.
This is the drama of Moses. Aaron is one of the possibilities, the most seductive, the most humane, of Moses’ self-betrayals. He is Moses’ voice when that voice yields to imperfect truth and to the music of compromise. Schoenberg remarked in 1933: “My Moses more resembles—of course only in outward respect—Michelangelo’s. He is not human at all.” So far as the harsh, larger-than-life stature of the personage goes, this may be so. But the poignancy of the opera, its precise focus of emotion and suffering, comes above all from Moses’ humanity, from that in him which is riven and inarticulate. It is not of the fiercely contained eloquence of Michelangelo’s statue that one thinks when listening to Moses and Aaron, but of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (written just before Schoenberg started composing his own opera). Moses and Wozzeck are both brilliant studies in dramatic contradiction, operatic figures unable to articulate with their own voices the fullness of their needs and perceptions. In both cases the music takes over where the human voice is strangled or where it retreats into desperate silence.
Schoenberg admitted to Berg: “Everything I have written has a certain inner likeness to myself.” This is obviously true of Moses, and it is here that Michelangelo’s figure, which fascinated Freud in a similar way, may be relevant. To any Jew initiating a great movement of spirit or radical doctrine in a profoundly hostile environment, leading a small group of disciples, some of them perhaps recalcitrant or ungrateful, to the promised land of a new metaphysic or aesthetic medium, the archetype of Moses would have a natural significance. By introducing into music, whose classical development and modes seemed to embody the very genius of the Christian and Germanic tradition, a new syntax, an uncompromisingly rational and apparently dissonant ideal, Schoenberg was performing an act of great psychological boldness and complexity. Going far beyond Mahler, he was asserting a revolutionary—to its enemies an alien, Jewish—presence in the world of Bach and Wagner. Thus the twelve-tone system is related, in point of sensibility and psychological context, to the imaginative radicalism, to the “subversiveness” of Cantor’s mathematics or Wittgenstein’s epistemology.
Like Freud, Schoenberg saw himself as a pioneer and teacher, reviled by the vast majority of his contemporaries, driven into solitude by his own unbending genius, gathering a small band around him and going forward, in exile, to a new world of meaning and vital possibility. In Moses’ bitter cry that his lessons are not being understood, that his vision is being distorted even by those nearest him, one hears Schoenberg’s own inevitable moments of discouragement and angry loneliness. And there is almost too apt an analogy in the fact that he died on the threshold of acceptance, before his stature had been widely acknowledged, before he could complete Moses and Aaron or hear any of it performed.
Except for one moment (1, 2, bars 208–217)—and I have never understood just why it should be at this particular point in the opera—Moses does not sing. He speaks in a highly cadenced, formal discourse, his voice loud and bitter against the fluencies of the music and, in particular, against Aaron’s soaring tenor. (The parodistic yet profoundly engaged treatment of Aaron’s vocal score seems to be full of references to traditional operatic bel canto and the ideal of the Wagnerian Heldentenor.) The fact that the protagonist of a grand opera should not sing is a powerful theatrical stroke, even more “shocking” than the long silence of Aeschylus’ Cassandra or the abrupt, single intervention of the mute Pylades in The Libation Bearers. But it is also much more than that.
Moses’ incapacity to give expressive form (music) to his vision, to make revelation communicable and thus translate his individual communion with God into a community of belief in Israel, is the tragic subject of the opera. Aaron’s contrasting eloquence, his instantaneous translation—hence traduction—of Moses’ abstract, hidden meaning into sensuous form (the singing voice), dooms the two men to irreconcilable conflict. Moses cannot do without Aaron; Aaron is the tongue which God has placed into his own inarticulate mouth. But Aaron diminishes or betrays Moses’ thought, that in him which is immediate revelation, in the very act of communicating it to other men. As in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, there is in Moses and Aaron a radical consideration of silence, an inquiry into the ultimately tragic gap between what is apprehended and that which can be said. Words distort; eloquent words distort absolutely.
This is implicit in the first lines of the opera spoken by Moses against the background of the orchestral opening and the murmur of the six solo voices which portray the Burning Bush. The fact that Moses so often speaks simultaneously with Aaron’s song, or that we hear his voice in conflict with the orchestra, points to Schoenberg’s essential design. Moses’ words are internal, they are his thought, clear and integral only before it moves outward into the betrayal of speech.
Moses addresses his God as “omnipresent, invisible, and inconceivable.” Unvorstellbar, that which cannot be imagined, conceived, or represented (vorstellen means, precisely, to enact, to mime, to dramatize concretely), is the key word of the opera. God is because He is incommensurate to human imagining, because no symbolic representation available to man can realize even the minutest fraction of His inconceivable omnipresence. To know this, to serve a Deity so intangible to human mimesis, is the unique, magnificent destiny which Moses envisions for his people. It is also a fearful destiny. As the Voice out of the Burning Bush proclaims:
This people is chosen
before all others,
to be the people of the only God,
that it should know Him
and be wholly His;
that it undergo all trials
conceivable to thought
over the millennia.
The last two lines are eloquently ambiguous: the words can also be read to mean: “all trials to which this thought—of a God invisible and inconceivable—may be exposed.”
Aaron enters and the misunderstanding between the two brothers is immediate and fatal. Aaron rejoices in the proud uniqueness of Israel’s mission, in the grandeur of a God so much more powerful and demanding than all other gods (these other gods continue to be real to Aaron). He exults in imagining such a God, in finding words and poetic symbols by which to make Him present to His people. Yet even as he sings, Moses cries out: “No image can give you an image of the unimaginable.” And when Aaron elaborates, with a rich ease of perception mirrored in the music, the notion of a God who will punish and reward His people according to their deserts, Moses proclaims a Kierkegaardian God, infinitely, scandalously transcending any human sense of cause and effect:
Inconceivable because invisible;
because immeasurable;
because everlasting;
because eternal;
because omnipresent;
because omnipotent.
To which litany of abstraction, of inexpressible apprehension, Aaron responds with the joyous assurance that God shall bring wonders to pass on behalf of His enslaved people.
He does. Confronted with the rebellious bewilderment of the Jews, with their call for visible signs of the new revelation, Moses retreats into his own inarticulateness. It is Aaron who proclaims himself the word and the deed. It is he who casts Moses’ rod to the ground where it turns into a serpent, and shows Moses’ hand to be leprous and then miraculously restored. During the entire last part of the Act, Moses is silent. It is Aaron who proclaims the doom of Pharaoh and the covenant of the Promised Land. Fired by his eloquence, the people of Israel march forth and the music is exultant with Aaron’s certitude. It is through him that God appears to be speaking.
In one sense, in one possible idiom, He is. Moses’ understanding of God is much more authentic, much deeper; but it is essentially mute or accessible only to very few. Without Aaron, God’s purpose cannot be accomplished; through Aaron it is perverted. That is the tragic paradox of the drama, the metaphysical scandal which springs from the fact that the categories of God are not parallel or commensurate to those of man.
Act II centers on the Golden Calf. With Moses’ long absence on Sinai, the Elders and the people have grown rebellious and afraid. The invisibility of God has become an intolerable anguish. Aaron yields to the voices that cry out for an image, for something that eye and hand can grasp in the act of worship. On the darkening stage the Golden Calf shines forth.
What follows is one of the most astonishing pieces of music written in the twentieth century. As musical analysts point out, it is a symphony in five movements with solo voices and choruses. The orchestration is so intricate yet dramatic in its statements and suggestions that it seems incredible that Schoenberg should have heard it all inside him, that he should have known exactly (if he did) how these fantastic instrumental and rhythmic combinations would work without, in fact, ever hearing a note played. The pageant of the Golden Calf makes the utmost demands on orchestras, singers, and dancers. Rearing horses, treasure-laden camels, and Four Naked Virgins are requirements which even the most resourceful of opera houses find difficult to meet.
What Schoenberg had in mind is something very different from an ordinary operatic ballet. It is a total dramatic integration of voice, bodily motion, and orchestral development. Even the most frenzied moments of the idolatrous, sexual orgy are plotted in terms of a rigorous, immensely subtle musical structure. As Schoenberg wrote to Webern:
I wanted to leave as little as possible to those new despots of the theatrical art, the producers, and even to envisage the choreography as far as I’m able to.… You know I’m not at all keen on the dance.… Anyway so far I’ve succeeded in thinking out movements such as at least enter into a different territory of expression from the caperings of common-or-garden ballet.
But these “caperings” are not wholly irrelevant. In Schoenberg’s treatment of the Golden Calf, as in so much of Moses and Aaron, there is a revaluation—either straightforward or parodistic—of the conventions of opera. Are these conventions applicable to the modern circumstance? How much seriousness can they sustain? Thus the Golden Calf is both the logical culmination of, and a covert satire on, that catalogue of orgiastic ballets and ritual dances which is one of the distinctive traits of grand opera from Massenet’s Hérodiade to Tannhäuser, from Aïda and Samson et Dalila to Parsifal and Salome. Schoenberg is fully aware of the dual quality of the scene. It is at the same time supremely serious and ironic in its exhaustive use of the convention:
In the treatment of this scene, which actually represents the very core of my thought, I went pretty much to the limit, and this too is probably where my piece is most operatic; as indeed it must be.
With the return of Moses—his indistinct, terrifying figure looms suddenly on the horizon and is seen by one of the exhausted revelers—the drama moves swiftly to its climax. At a glance from Moses, the Golden Calf vanishes:
Begone, you that are the image of the fact that what is measureless cannot be bounded in an image.
The two brothers confront each other on the empty stage. And once more it is Aaron who has the better of the argument. He has given the people an image so that Israel may live and not fall into despair. He loves the people and knows that the demands of abstraction and inwardness which Moses makes upon the human spirit are beyond the power of ordinary men. Moses loves an idea, an absolute vision, relentless in its purity. He would make of Israel the hollow, tormented vessel of an inconceivable presence. No people can endure such a task. Even the Tables of the Law which Moses has brought from the mountain are only an image, a palpable symbol of hidden authority.
Baffled, incensed by Aaron’s argument, Moses smashes the Tables. Aaron accuses him of faint-heartedness. The tribes of Israel shall continue their march to the Promised Land whether or not they have grasped the full meaning of God’s revelation. As if to confirm his words, the Chorus resumes its march across the stage. It is led by a pillar of fire, and Aaron goes forth glorying in the visible wonder of God.
Moses is left alone. Is Aaron right? Must the inconceivable, unimaginable, unrepresentable reality of God diminish to mere symbol, to the tangible artifice of miracle? In that case all he has thought and said (the two are identical to Moses) has been madness. The very attempt to express his vision was a crime. The orchestra falls silent as the unison violins play a retrograde inversion of the basic twelve-tone set. Moses cries out, “O word, thou word that I lack!” and sinks to the ground, broken.
This is one of the most moving, dramatic moments in the history of opera and of the modern theater. With its implicit allusion to the Logos, to the Word that is yet to come but which lies beyond speech, it gathers into one action both the claims of music to be the most complete idiom, the carrier of transcendent energies, and all that is felt in twentieth-century art and philosophy about the gap between meaning and communication. But Moses’ defeat also has a more specific, historical bearing, which may help us understand why Schoenberg did not complete the opera.
The letters of 1932 and 1933 show that he had every intention of doing so. As late as November 1948, Schoenberg could write: “I should really best like to finish Die Jakobsleiter and Moses and Aaron.” What intervened?
There is evidence that Schoenberg found it difficult to give the third Act a coherent dramatic shape. He wrote to Walter Eidlitz on March 15, 1933, that he had re-cast Aaron’s Death for the fourth time “because of some almost incomprehensible contradictions in the Bible.” As it stands, the text of Act III is a curious torso, both repetitive and moving. Once more, Moses and Aaron, now in chains, state their opposite conceptions of idea and image. But Moses no longer addresses his brother directly. He is speaking to the Jewish people as it prepares to enter into the mire and compromise of history. He prophesies that Jews will prosper only so long as they dwell in the stern wilderness of the spirit, in the presence of the One and Inconceivable God. If they forget their great act of renunciation and seek an ordinary haven in the world, they will have failed and their suffering shall be the greater. Salvation lies in apartness. The Jew is himself when he is a stranger.
Freed of his chains, Aaron falls dead at Moses’ feet. (Is there here, one wonders, a reminiscence of Hunding’s death when Wotan glances at him in scorn?) As we have no music to accompany the words, it is difficult to judge their effect. But the third Act is essentially static. There is no dramatic justification for Moses’ triumph over a prostrate Aaron. Much is missing.
But the real impediment probably lay deeper. As Adorno remarks, Moses and Aaron was “a preventive action against the looming of Nazism.” But even as Schoenberg worked on the score, Nazism was moving rapidly to its triumph. 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 million voices bawling them at Nuremberg. How could he continue to set them to music? As he labored on the third Act in March 1933, Schoenberg must have known that the culture in which he had hammered out his vision of a new music, and for whose opera houses he had conceived Moses and Aaron, was heading for ruin or exile—as was his own personal life.
It is this which gives the end of Act II its tremendous authority and logic. The events that were now to come to pass in Europe were, quite literally, beyond words, too inhuman for that defining act of humane consciousness which is speech. Moses’ despairing cry, his collapse into silence, is a recognition—such as we find also in Kafka, in Broch, in Adamov—that words have failed us, that art can neither stem barbarism nor convey experience when experience grows unspeakable. Thus Moses and Aaron is, despite its formal incompletion, a work of marvelous finality. There was no more to be said.3
1 The most complete discussion of the work is to be found in Karl H. Wörner: Schoenberg’s “Moses and Aaron” (trans. P. Hamburger, London, 1963). Among the most important technical discussions of the music are those by Hans Keller in The Score (No. 21, 1957) and W. Zillig in Melos, Zeitschrift für Neue Musik (vol. 3, 1957). A fascinating, though often quirky and unnecessarily obscure survey of the philosophic and historical background of the opera may be found in T. W. Adorno: “Sakrales Fragment: Ueber Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron” (a lecture delivered in Berlin in April 1963 and reprinted that same year in Adorno’s Quasi una fantasia).
2 All quotations are from the Letters, ed. by Erwin Stein (London, 1964).
3 This is why it seems to me that a spoken performance of the third Act, which Schoenberg himself envisioned and regarded as permissible, adds nothing and, in fact, weakens the uncanny force and beauty of the musical close.