"These are your Gods, Oh Israel”: Chosenness in Schoenberg's Moses und Aron as a response to Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Foundations

Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s reformulation of Wagner’s Judaism in Music was mentioned by Schoenberg in a number of writings, yet has not been considered thoroughly in Schoenberg scholarship. This article argues that many of Schoenberg’s ideas and writings in the early 1930s, including his notion of Jewish chosenness, engage directly with Chamberlain’s version of Wagner’s essay. In particular, the narrative of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron and its manipulations of Biblical sources reverse Chamberlain’s ideas, ascribing to Jewish artists a unique role as leaders of artistic integrity and purity, rather than as followers incapable of such purity, as Chamberlain and Wagner had suggested.