SOURCE: "Arnold Schoenberg: A Search for Jewish Identity," in The Jewish Presence: Essays on Identity and History, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977, pp. 32-45.

In the following essay, Dawidowicz concludes that Moses and Aaron is "the vehicle through which Schoenberg asserted his Jewishness. "

In December 1966, more than fifteen years after the composer's death, Arnold Schoenberg's unfinished opera Moses and Aaron was given a belated American premiere by the Opera Company of Boston. The occasion was full of ironies. The performance, which took place in America's historic citadel of high culture, was staged in a shabby one-time movie palace; the impresario was Missouri-born and Arkansas-reared; the work itself, a twelve-tone opera glorifying Jewish monotheism, was written by a Jew who had become a Lutheran but returned to Judaism. As a further affront to Boston's traditions, the opera contained an orgy scene which, in another day, would certainly have been banned...