Since Richard Wagner, German art, and especially German composers, have had some sort of ethical role imposed on them: as the bearers of art-as-religion, it is they who must lift humanity out of the morass of banality. At first, Arnold Schoenberg also saw himself as a prophet of the healing art, intending his ‘new’ music was intended to take the listener back to the purest fountainheads. Driven by the anti-Semitism of the period following the First World War, he returned to Judaism. His opera Moses und Aaron is his avowal of his concept of Judaism, in which the prophet Moses is powerless against the demagogue, his brother Aaron.