The silence of God in Arnold Schönbergs literary texts

this article attempts to delineate the religious dimension of arnold schönberg’s literary texts. the question about the role of religion in his creative work has been discussed at great length, though almost always with reference to his musical compositions. his literary texts, however, do not deserve such neglect as they address a number of fundamental religious concerns. the author is perplexed by the elusiveness of the divine presence, his inability to express the experience of nothingness and absolute abstraction, the necessity of praying treated as an act of defiance against the void. the article also discusses schönberg’s libretti to his major musical works (Die Jakobsleiter, Moses und Aron, and Moderne Psalmen) and his drama Der biblische Weg. it is there that the composer shows how the modern man’s religious experience gets tainted by negativity and a sense of god’s absence. the only way to cope with the problem of Le Dieu caché is to enter the path of apophatic theology, that is to try to approach him through negation, adopt the attitude of ‘deliberate incomprehension’ and puts one’s trust in paradoxes.