Chapter Six - Butchering Moses

Summary

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; the 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.

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 a precursor of the Messiah was the only Moses here present. A century later, in Max Bruch's oratorio Moses (1895), Moses’ character has almost reversed: Bruch's Moses is a Jewish Wotan, thundering invective on his own people as idolators. 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 at the end of Part 1, “Abtrünnige, kam es dahin mit euch?” 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.