An Introduction to Adorno's Music and Social Criticism

Author(s): Ronald Weitzman

Source: Music & Letters, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Jul., 1971), pp. 287-298
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/734524
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 AN INTRODUCTION TO ADORNO'S
MUSIC AND SOCIAL CRITICISM

BY RONALD WEITZMAN

IT WAS in August I969 that Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno died, a

month before his sixty-sixth birthday. Tributes paid to him by the
British Press were modest, to put it politely-for I am referring to a
figure who became one of Europe's leading intellects through his
far-seeing and often unashamedly polemical writings, his activities
at the head of the 'Frankfurt School', so prominent in the youthful
history of the 'new left', and above all his proficiency and originality
as a music critic, probably unequalled for his understanding of
composition of the Sch6nberg era and its technical language.
Before giving the reader a glimpse into Adorno's writings on
music it is necessary to fill in some of the facts of his development
relevant to the main line of his musical thought. His passion during
student days was to become a composer, and subsequently he sought
out Alban Berg, in Vienna, who willingly accepted him as a pupil.
Adorno's later reputation as a philosopher, sociologist and psycholo-
gist, he would have insisted, was based not so much on his exceptional
versatility and erudition as on a perpetual feeling of anxiety and
futility of the self-contained role of a 'specialist' in these respective
disciplines in this century-a contention he never repudiated but
which he never allowed to degenerate into facile compromising
either. He directed the famous Viennese journal Anbruch, among the
first regular publications to support the 'new' music, from I928-31.
He then returned to Frankfurt, published a book on Kierkegaard,
and taught at the university there until National Socialism took
Germany in its grasp. To escape Hitler's purging tactics Adomo
came to England and worked on a critique of Husserl's phenomen-
ology at Oxford from 1934-37. The fruits of this work have alway
been implicit in his musical writings, and should be fully acknowledged
before attempts at possible invalidation by his potential critics. (The
relative infancy of modern phenomenology combined with the
Englishman's devotion to positivist orthodoxy and linguistic philo-
sophy, and also Adorno's rather abstruse, ponderous prose, which
makes translation into English no easy matter, contribute enormously
to our ignorance of his output.)
In America, where he lived throughout the war, his work as a
sociologist became renowned through his contributions to 'The
Authoritarian Personality', that controversial and lengthy study of
anti-semitic and other prejudicial behaviour in our society. During

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this time he acted as musical director of the Princeton Radio
Research Project, and as music adviser to Thomas Mann for the
writing of 'Doctor Faustus'-the book that brought about the much-
discussed rift and subsequent, though not widely realized, recon-
ciliation between Mann and Schonberg. Adomo even 'appears' in
the novel, as the silhouette of the Tempter. In I949 he chose to
return to Frankfurt, where he, together with Max Horkheimer and
Herbert Marcuse, had brought the whole 'Frankfurt School' into
being almost twenty years earlier. From then until his death he
taught philosophy and sociology and was Director of the Institute
for Social Research there.
As I have hinted already, one must be prepared to wade through
pages of verbose prose if one is to derive any benefit from Adorno's
very impressive attempts at fusing different terminologies.
('Correlating' would be too ambitious-and too academic-a term
in this context. It is precisely Adorno's ambitious use of the literary
Leitmotiv that makes criticisms of affectation and pretentiousness
on his part not altogether unreasonable, but which is in turn essential
to an understanding of what is most important about his work.) It
is necessary to be able to separate with uncondescending tact and
sensitivity rare insights from the unavoidable practice of confused
projection of highly passionate prejudices-which, in Adorno's case,
act as the sharpest of double-edged swords.
Adorno never allowed himself to be identified with any 'move-
ment', political or otherwise. His claim to a legitimate foundation
in the philosophy of Kant and Hegel is qualified; and the most
iconoclastic of his Frankfurt students had to have knowledge of how
Hegel's principal discovery works-that contradiction is not
external to reality but built into its structure. Existential writin
basic to Adorno's thought, though the existentialist rarely escapes
the rough edge of his literary tongue. Karl Marx's inversion of
Hegel's thought on dialectic is a logical concomitant to this; but
most crucial to Adorno's approach is his critical application of
Husserl's original handling of phenomenology, derived directly
from Hegel's definition of the term.' Husserl's genius lay in the
recognition of a specific truth, described most succinctly by Sartre2-
that "there is an incommensurability between essences and facts,
and that whoever begins his researches with the facts will never
attain to the essences". In turn, Adorno's thought involves a pre-
1 "Phenomenology became the basis of all philosophical knowledge [for Hegel]
since he insisted that philosophical knowledge must encompass the totality of cultural
forms and since in his view this totality can be made visible only in the transitions from
one form to another. The truth is the whole-yet this whole cannot be presented all at
once but must be unfolded progressively by thought in its own autonomous movement
and rhythm". Ernst Cassirer, 'Philosophy of Symbolic Forms', vol. 3: 'Phenomenology of
Knowledge' (New Haven, 1957). Husserl started "from an analysis of the principles of
logical thought. His whole philosophy depends on the results of this analysis. His highest
aim was to make an 'exact science', to found it upon unshakeable facts and principles".
Cassirer, 'The Myth of the State' (New Haven, 1946).
2 'Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions' (London, i962).

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occupation with dialectic, its praxis and process-in other words,
the complicated issues involved in the stating and the doing, about
which Sartre has had so much to say.,
Adorno has been criticized for allowing his topics to disappear
behind "wearisome displays of dialectical fireworks". It is true that
his writing is often strewn with an abundance of generalizations
and questionable speculation. But his concern with dialectics, in
relation to music, has become far clearer to me with a practical as
well as theoretical involvement with the work of the Scottish
psychoanalyst, R. D. Laing. In order to appreciate Laing's import-
ant contribution to psychoanalytic theory, and his treatment of
persons who have come to be labelled 'schizophrenic' in our society,
we must recognize his non-apologetic leanings towards existential
and phenomenological thought. Indeed Laing maintains that it is
only by the use of such an approach that the process of going mad in
our society can even begin to make sense.4 It is my contention that
only through an acceptance of what Laing is attempting to do in the
sphere of psychoanalysis that Adorno's work can begin to show its
true potential. To avoid diluting the work of either Adorno or Laing
into some kind of shallow compromise, the challenge of fetishistic
tradition and preconceived thinking must not be relinquished.
Adorno states his own position in the foreword to the English
edition of his collection of essays, 'Prisms'-his only critical work
translated so far in this country. These essays play a key role in what
constitutes his ideas, and will act as the basic source of the intro-
ductory exposition to his musical writings which follows. Adomo
begins by explaining his efforts to reflect on facts, "without which
there can be no true knowledge", in a way which differs radically
from the generally accepted canon of scientific thought:

My primary concern has been not to accept uncritically the con-

ventional opposition between methodology and material knowledge
When Adorno writes about a composer of the past, he is best when
describing his link with present trends on the musical scene. Although
a sharp critic of the music of Pierre Boulez, it is significant that
Adorno is the only critic whom Boulez has openly respected and
endorsed. There are analysts of music better equipped to cope with
the very latest avant-garde developments in musical techniques; but
although unashamed in his use of psychological jargon in requisite
circumstances, Adorno never resorted to the doubtful methods of
esotericism which is so often the content of musicological analysis,
and which dominates so much musical criticism in our culture.

3 'Being and Nothingness' (London, 1956) and 'Critique de la raison dialectique'

(Paris, i960).
4 "Existential phenomenology attempts to characterise the nature of a person's
experience of the world and himself. It is not so much an attempt to describe particular
objects of his experience as to set all particular experience within the context of his whole
being-in-the-world". 'The Divided Self' (Tavistock, 1960).

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Instead the quality of his insights stand unequalled in this field, the
result of an almost morbidly sensitive grasp of what can come under
the heading of our 'inhuman predicament'.
Adorno challenges obsession with historical musicology whenever
it is in danger of getting on to stilts, proclaiming an 'authentic', a
'definitive' way of interpreting the old masters. Now the discipline
of musicology can be of considerable value in so far as it often arrives
at accuracy of texts and collation of sources, and can make available
data which illumine to a considerable degree methods of perfor-
mance at the time when such-and-such a work had its premiere.
If Adorno's musical writings eventually receive the recognition they
deserve in Great Britain, our commentators will certainly use the
definition of the term 'musicology', and Adorno's wilful deviation
from the generally accepted definition, as a central point of contro-
versy. At this point it is necessary to re-state that Adorno attempted
to establish a common terminology, and that he viewed methodo-
logical endeavours with avowed scepticism. Musicology as a scientific
discipline is what Adorno challenges. What it boils down to is the
fundamental review of the actual meaning of the term 'science' as
Sartre has argued in his mammoth 'La Critique de la raison dialectique'.
I can only refer the reader to this work, or at least to R. D. Laing's
valuable commentary on it,s until it receives an English translation.
The issues involved are vast and it would be absurd even to outline
a discussion of them in the present context. But I do not think it
rash or exaggerated to suggest that Adomo's work comes into
fundamentally serious combat with many an aspect of musicological
research. Adorno's pungent social criticisms, implicit through-
out his musical criticism, invoke the mood referred to above.
With apt cynicism and fury Adorno embarks upon his attack on
the Bach 'devotee' or 'purist' thus:

The view of Bach which prevails today . .. corresponds to the role

assigned to him by the stagnation and industriousness of a resurrected
culture. 8

He quickly shatters the absurdity that Bach's music is untouchable.

On interpretation he writes:
The only adequate interpretation ofthe dynamic objectively embedded
in his work is one which realises it. True interpretation in an x-ray
of the work; its task is to illuminate in the sensuous phenomenon the
totality of all the characteristics and interrelations which have been
recognised through intensive study of the score. The favourite
argument of the purists is that all should be left to the work itself,
which need only be performed ascetically in order to speak; inter-
pretation, they contend, serves only to emphasize unduly music
which can be expressed simply and which is all the more powerful
without such frills. This argument completely misses the point. As
long as music requires any kind of interpretation whatsoever, its
5 R. D. Laing & D. G. Cooper, 'Reason and Violence' (Tavistock, i964).
s 'Bach Defended against his Devotees', in 'Prisms' (London, I967).

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 form defines itself through the tension between the composition's
essence and its sensuous appearance. To identify the work with the
latter is only justifiable when the appearance is a manifestation of the
essence. Yet, precisely this is achieved only through subjective labour
and reflection. The attempt to do justice to Bach's objective content
by directing this effort towards abolishing the subject is self-defeating
. . . Devotion to the texts (of a musical score) means the constant
effort to grasp that which it hides. Without a dialectic, devotion
becomes betrayal; and interpretation which does not bother about
the music's meaning, on the assumption that it will reveal itself of its
own accord, will inevitably be false, since it fails to see that the
meaning is always constituting itself anew. Meaning can never be
grasped by the 'pure' rendition, allegedly purged of all exhibitionism;
rather such a presentation, which is meaningless in itself and not to
be distinguished from the 'unmusical', becomes not the path to
meaning, as which it sees itself, but a wall blocking the way.7

Of Bach's double fugue in G: minor (Book II, no. i8 of the '48')

Adorno sees the deliberately vague harmonization and the 6/8
character of the piece evoking Chopin's most mature work:

It is music broken down into coloured facets, modern precisely in the

sense of that nervous sensibility which Historicism would like to
exorcise. Anyone who thinks this argument invalid as a 'romantic
misunderstanding' must first . . . free himself of that spontaneous
relation which was the prerequisite to understanding music from
Monteverdi to Schoenberg.8

I have quoted Adomo at considerable length, as he seems to have

put the case against the so-called 'definitive' in music more force-
fully than anybody in this country, with the possible exception of
Sir Neville Cardus, ironically Adorno's antithesis in all other
respects. Adorno will have nothing to do with cheapened attempts
to present music by past masters. Monstrously augmented orchestras
when not required are sickening; but he shows no sympathy with
those "mechanically squealing continuo-instruments and wretched
school choirs" which contribute not to "sacred sobriety but to
malicious failure". Adorno sums up his creed, and justifies it, by
endorsing whole-heartedly Schbnberg's instrumentation of Bach's
triple fugue in E major (the 'St. Anne') and Webern's of the six-
part Ricercare from the 'Musikalisches Opfer', in which "every
facet of the composition is dissolved into the most minute motivic
interrelations and then reunited through an overall constructive
disposition of the orchestra". (Sch6nberg would have had less
success, it would seem, in his orchestral re-creation of Brahms's
piano quartet in G minor, Op. 25.)
Adorno lays his finger on the critic's fear of searching, however
impotently, for that link between the mental and the physical. He
scrutinizes the fallacy of the very role of the 'cultural critic' (Kultur-
kritik). Such a critic, Adorno suggests,

7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.

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 speaks as if he represented either unadulterated nature or a higher
historical stage. Yet he is necessarily of the same essence to that
which he fancies himself superior.9

He then examines the process within bourgeeis society in which the

element of usurpation will inevitably be found in the origins of the
progression towards the role of cultural critic. It is worth following
Adorno's vital, but often difficult, social criticism in some depth. In
tracing the essence of his thought here it should be pointed out at the
outset that his social criticisms make their greatest impact so long as
one has some knowledge and experience of the cultural patterns in
practice on the European mainland. (The expression 'cultural
critic' is already a bit stilted when employed in the English language.)
Yet as none of us can deny that we are no less products of a similar
cultural background that he attacks-for instance, when he recog-
nizes the so-called 'integrity of the mind becoming fiction' in
accordance with the predominant social tendency-Adorno's
Continental bias ought not to dissuade us from the attempt to
absorb the principal aspects of his attack, or to dismiss it with a
smug indifference. Much of what he writes is of wide significance.
He starts somewhat facetiously by reminding us that the very
word Kulturkritik is pieced together from Latin and Greek, and
subsequently "recalls a flagrant contradiction". What is immedi-
ately irritating to Adorno is the cultural critic's vanity of rarely
being able to avoid the "imputation that he has the culture which
culture lacks":

When the critics in their playground - art - no longer understand what

they judge and enthusiastically permit themselves to be degraded to
propagandists or censors, it is the old dishonesty of the trade ful-
filling itself in their fate. The prerogative of information and position
permit them to express their opinion as if it were objectivity. But it
is solely the objectivity of the ruling mind. They help to weave the
veil.1 I

Because of this, the freedom of the mind is only delusion, and in

music Adorno sees an even closer clinging on "to the material base
which it claims to transcend". Adorno's unalleviated scorn and
wilful 'subjectivity' endorse Hans Keller's remark that "history is
art's worst enemy". Ultimately, on the sore matter of the Kultur-
kritik, and with a warning that implicit fetishism "gravitates towards
mythology", Adorno says:

The greatest fetish of cultural criticism is the notion of culture as

such. For no authentic work of art and no true philosophy, according
to their very meaning, has ever exhausted itself in itself alone, in it
being-in-itself. They have always stood in relation to the actual
life-process of society from which they distinguished themselves."

" 'Cultural Criticism and Society', in 'Prisms'.

10 Ibid.
1 Ibid.

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 Adorno received a certain amount of fragmentary attention in
this country some years ago when it was revealed that he had attemp-
ted, by means of musical and psychological analysis, to show how
Wagner's music nurtured the seeds of National Socialism-a thesis
gleaned from his book on the composer.12 Adorno never retracted
this contention, as listeners to his broadcast on Wagner for the
BBC 'S Third Programme a few months before his death will recall.
But such emphasis without further explanation leads, and has led,
to flagrant misinterpretation. Adorno never desired to underestimate
the awesome genius of Wagner by his insistence on drawing attention
to this discomforting phenomenon:

It is not easy ... to make a dichotomy between Wagner, the political

reactionary, and Wagner, the musical or artistic revolutionary . . .
The music itself has a tendency to persuade and even to drown people
by its strength and violence, to make them helpless and impotent,
and to force them to render to the impact of the music, to identify
with the ideology ...13

Adorno has taken exhaustive measures to study those elements in

Wagner that can be termed 'progressive' and 'retrogressive', and
warns against glib over-simplification in attempting to clarify and
distinguish those elements in his music. Certainly he endorses the
'sexual emancipation' brought about by Wagner by the very sound
and design of entire sections, entire acts and, in the case of 'Tristan
und Isolde', an entire opera. What he had to say, in his broadcast,
about Wagner's obsession and identification with myth is of extreme
relevance, as it acts as an aid to remove fallacious criticism which
has challenged Wagner's unquestioning adoration of the world of
mythology:

[Wagner,] who was at the same time an extremely modern and in

many ways an archaic mind, has brought to the fore . . . this very
strange identity of the modern and the archaic in a very problematic
... and a very threatening sense ... That he expressed this without
covering it up . . . seems to me an element of truth in his work. Now
one may say that he, instead of criticising this world of violence,
identified with it; and this is certainly true . . . However, the way in
which he expresses this mythical structure without mitigating it,
without colouring it in a conformist sense, is objectively also, at the
same time, a kind of opposition to it. He criticises it, he oppresses it,
without literally going into any kind of opposition . . . Speaking
musically . . . this is the point where one can say that in Wagner
there is a very strong potential of atonality, in the modet n sense.

Adomo went on to explain that this assertion should not be mis-

interpreted as a suggestion that Wagner was in any way an atonalist,
but that if one studied the concrete structure of Wagner's work,
discord and the most complicated of harmonic features are so
preponderant that one feels that "the whole system may go to

12 'Versuch aber Wagner' (Berlin & Frankfurt, I952).

is BBC Third Programme (first relayed 23 November I968).

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pieces ... This potential of a complete emancipation in music cannot
be overestimated".
In turn this leads to an acute awareness of what one must call
'disintegration' in music, and this has been explored by Adorno in
his writings on Mahler. I employ the term 'disintegration' in the
literal sense of the word, which is in order so long as temptations
towards over-simplification are resisted. Patience with Adorno's
approach should make the oft-discussed link between Mahler and
the Viennese school of the Sch6nberg era more comprehensible.
He already perceives in Mahler's 'Wunderhorn' songs the essential,
contradictory nature of the composer:

Wherever the traditional idiom [of the folksong texts] is disarranged

we see the face of the composer through it, which suffers for the others
whom it resembles;-so far away from the archaic trust in an eternal
form-world of music, a kind of lyricism, which in Mahler first became
doubtful of the right to say 'P' still to himself. Nobody will sing the
Lieder well who is unable to find the split, the reciprocal actions,
between the idiom and that which digresses from it."4

The physiognomy of Mahler's music is the basis of Adorno's un-

translated book on the composer:
Mahler searches in vain for the simple. The 'cheap', the vulgar, is
with him the negation of culture, which failed . . . Form, measure
taste, ultimately the autonomy of form, which of its own accord
floats ahead of his symphonies, are branded by the guilt of those which
exclude the others from it.15

In one of Adomo's earliest books, 'Philosophie der neuen Musik',

he had the courage to risk the trap of jargon by following the
symptoms of clinically diagnosed schizophrenia in Stravinsky's
music. It is here that efforts to come to terms with R. D. Laing's
studies of the family in our society, and its direct relation to schizoid
symptoms in patients, will be of fundamental importance to the
meaning intrinsic in Adorno's writings. His analysis of Stravinsky's
'The Soldier's Tale' is purposely composed as if the music were in
the psychiatrist's consulting-room. Indeed the bold page headings
include 'Permanent Regression and Musical Form', 'The Psychotic
Aspect', 'Estrangement as Objectivity', 'Fetishism as the Means',
'Depersonalization', 'Hebephrenia', 'Catatonic Stravinsky', and
so on. 'The Soldier's Tale' is, according to Adorno, Stravinsky's
"central work which, at the same time, scorns the idea of a master-
piece". Here it is "as if the de-composition composed itself entirely
by itself".18 'The Soldier's Tale' throws light on Stravinsky's entire
output. Adorno's handling of psychiatric vocabulary is juxtaposed
with comment on Stravinsky's instrumentation and manner of
svnconation. The acrimonious nature of so much of this music
1" 'Zu einer imaginaren Auswahl von Liedem Gustav Mahlers', in 'Impronmptus'
(Berlin, I968).
15 'Mahler. Eine musikalische Physiognomik' (Berlin, I960/64).
is 'Philosophie der neuen Musik' (Tiibingen, I949).

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undergoes intense analysis of this sort. By the time one has finished
reading Adorno on 'The Soldier's Tale' one might well suspect that
this could all be dismissed as speculative rubbish, were one not to
detect in it as well a sort of musical 'counterpart' to case histories
written up in such great detail in the original research by Laing and
his colleagues concerning the schizophrenic and his environment.'7
Dare we suggest that the joining of the hands of art and psycho-
analysis is beginning to progress somewhere beyond the obtuse or
the prosaic, after all, since the day when Mahler visited Freud?
A passage that Adorno has written on the differences between
Stravinsky and Sch6nberg-the basic thesis of his 'Philosophie der
neuen Musik'-will serve as a bridge between these worlds, and so
bring us into the nerve-centre of his musical thought, through which
his ultimate importance will eventually be decided:

The reproach of 'intellectualism' is linked to the lack of melody

[in Schonberg]. Yet he was supremely melodic. Instead of the estab
lished formula he constantly produced new forms . . . Even
Schoenberg's instinctive mode is melodic; everything in him is
actually 'sung', including the instrumental lines. This endows his
music with its articulate character, free-moving and yet structural
down to the last tone. The primacy of breathing over the beat of
abstract time contrasts Schoenberg to Stravinsky and all those who,
having adjusted better to contemporary existence, fancy themselves
more modern than Schoenberg."8

Adorno was among Sch6nberg's first advocates, as readers of the

composer's published letters"9 will know. Any implication that
Schonberg was a failure, despite his being an innovator, reformer and
inventor of a new system, is immediately shattered. Most important
of all, Adorno proceeds to illumine the sovereignty with which
Schonberg always entrusted himself to the demands of his subject-
matter and the way in which it has restricted his influence:

It is precisely because of its seriousness, richness and integrity that

his music arouses resentment. The more it gives its listeners the less
it offers them. It requires the listener spontaneously to compose its
inner movement and demands of him not mere contemplation but
praxis . . . [But] in this Schoenberg blasphemes against the expec-
tation, cherished despite all idealistic assurances to the contrary,
that music will present the comfortable listener with a series of
pleasurable sensations.20

He then strikes at the very heart of the matter when he writes:

"Schoenberg honours the listener by making no concessions to him".
With these words, refreshingly terse for Adorno, he states explicitly
the need that music, and art in all its forms, must grow up-which

17 R. D. Laing & A. Esterson, 'Sanity, Madness & The Family', vol. 1: 'The Families
of Schizophrenics' (Tavistock, I964); also 'The Self and Others' (Tavistock, I96I) and
'The Divided Self'.
18 'Arnold Schoenberg, I874-1951', in 'Prisms'.
19 'Arnold Schoenberg Letters' (London, I964).
20 'Arnold Schoenberg, 1874-1951', in 'Prisms'.

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necessarily requires the same of us. Adomo re-stated this point in his
broadcast on Wagner when he used the word miindig ('mature'
in the sense of 'coming-of-age') in the development of musical forms.
This new world, which Schonberg opened up for us, is easily
reproached for being merely 'experimental', as if that were some
kind of sin. Adorno's writings on Schonberg, and Schonberg's most
distinguished pupils, Berg and Webern, must surely be regarded as
among the most informative and 'edifying' studies of their kind
available in print.21
Adorno ultimately sees Schonberg's achievement as something
of a hindrance. A full discussion of this complex matter would
warrant an article to itself. Suffice to say here that although Adomo
insists that nobody can compose today who has not heard with his
own ears "the gravitational pull towards the twelve-note technique",
he condemns the music student who is a slave to the rules of the
technique:

It is not the method itself which is forced . . . but rather its hypo-
statization, the rejection of all that is otherwise . . . Music must not
identify its methods, a part of subjective reason, with the subject-
matter, which is objective ... To be true to Schoenberg is to warn
against all twelve-tone schools. Devoid of experimentation as well
as prudence, these schools no longer involve any risk, and hence have
entered the service of a second conformity.22

Adorno partly blames Schouberg himself for fashionable obsession

with these laws. He categorically condemns his composing twelve-
note gigues and rondos, forms in which this technique becomes
superfluous, while "remaining fundamentally incompatible with
musical types that so unmistakably pre-suppose tonal modulation".
Adorno is insistent and instructive in his claim that any student of
composition who returns time and time again to a study of the still
tonal first string quartet, Op. 7, already has the key to Schonberg's
later works.
Adorno's failure to sympathize, to an even limited degree, with
Schonberg's religious nature reveals his own conflict; and his blind
spots could eventually prove detrimental to important aspects of
his thesis, for his commentaries on religious phenomena are in truth
second-rate and unoriginal. His squeamishness, apparent at the
very hint, let alone mention, of the term 'spiritual', contains malice
and cynicism, but hardly the trenchancy one must cower before
when men of greater poetic and philosophic gifts have challenged
the norms of religion. Here we witness Adorno's double-edged
sword at its most exasperating, its implicit hysteria not a little
tedious. Not that his attack fails to start impressively enough. He
sees the paradoxical nature of the twelve-note formula as character-
izing Schonberg's ambivalent attitude towards authority. This seeks

21 See especially 'Alban Berg' (Vienna, I968) and 'Klangfiguren' (Frankfurt, I963).
22 'Arnold Schoenberg, I874-I951', in 'Prisms'.

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to defend the work "as though behind a hidden authority". But this,
in turn, "ultimately makes itself into the authority". This is then
followed up by the wild assertion that "in the eyes of the Viennese
composer, coming from a parochial background, the norms of a
closed, semi-feudal society seemed the will of God".
What would appear to be accurate insight into Sch6nberg's
authoritarianism, which so affected Berg and Webern (whether
adversely or not is another matter) is here mingled with an almost
insulting attitude towards the composer whom Adorno so revered.
At its dubious best Adorno's manner resembles that naivety which
he accuses Schonberg of suffering from. Thus the criticism he makes
about Sch6nberg's religiosity could better serve as a criticism of
Adomo himself-in an inverted sense. He finds it necessary to see
God-or rather his hatred of, or rejection of, God-and society's
blind reverence and fear of God-as his weapon to clear the air.
His presumptions obscure Schonberg's own concept of the path
that led its way out of the "glorious life to be had in the muck" (to
quote a favourite line from 'Die Jakobsleiter'). Then they attempt to
negate Schonberg's own profound religiosity, the recognition of a
spiritual life and an accompanying spiritual vocabulary that is not
impotent, and which would defy even the subtlest rationalizing in
the battle against myth. Adorno depends far too much merely on
that 'mystifying process'-Karl Marx's term which R. D. Laing
uses to impressive effect-that is so much part and parcel of mass
society's unthinking, stereotyped attitude towards religion. Such an
attitude mirrors the perfunctory and the prosaic, those very com-
ponents most foreign to a non-unctuous religious emotion that
contains intrinsic worth. This idiosyncracy of Adorno's subsequently
finds it necessary to harp on Sch6nberg's inability to complete
'Die Jakobsleiter' and 'Moses und Aron'. Observe the question-
mark that hangs over this passage on 'Die Jakobsleiter':

The text reveals the desperate nature of the enterprise. The literary
inadequacy discloses the impossibility of the object itself, the incon-
gruity of a religious choral work in the midst of late capitalistic
society, of the aesthetic figures of totality. The whole, as a positive
entity, cannot be antithetically extracted from an estranged and
splintered reality by means of the will and power of the individual;
if it is not to degenerate into deception and ideology, it must assume
the form of a negation . .. The idea of a masterpiece has today been
twisted into the genre of a masterpiece . . . The greater the artist,
the stronger the temptation of the chimerical. For, like knowledge,
art cannot wait; but as soon as it succumbs to impatience it is
trapped.23

But we have now had opportunities to hear public performances

of the work, and know it to be among the composer's sublimest
achievements. Adorno has wallowed in the more abstruse meta-

23 Ibid.

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physical spheres, leaving that path where his words truly contain
the power to shake the timid and tight 'verification' principles of
average academicism and the various types of luxuriant complacency.
Although Schonberg has taken his place among the 'great',
Adorno puts a slightly facetious accent on the adjective 'great', "as
if the notion were eternal". For this could just be another 'mystifying'
label. Adorno's output represents a concrete literary statement
which articulates the crisis of the problem of genius and the problem
of substance. His point may best be clarified by referring to R. D.
Laing's most outspoken and bitter vein, where all academic re-
spectability is thrust aside, and subject-matters purposely keep their
distance from the realm of the sublime, referring only to our common-
place, everyday existence. Laing has remarked on how imperative
it is for adults to brainwash children so that "their dirty minds
cannot see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but
we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves-with high I.Q.'s
if possible".24 If we seek intelligibility with enough rigour and
integrity, there is a real danger that we shall be deemed mad, or of
being prematurely dismissed or invalidated. The strength and
weakness of Adorno's argument along these lines is suggested in
this quotation from his essay on 'Cultural Criticism and Society':

The notion of free expression of opinion, indeed, that of intellectual

freedom itself in bourgeois society, upon which cultural criticism is
founded, has its own dialectic. For while the mind extricated itself
from a theological tutelage, it has fallen increasingly under the
anonymous sway of the status quo. This regimentation, the result of
progressive socialisation of all human relations, did not simply
confront the mind from without; it immigrated into its immanent
consistency. It imposes itself as relentlessly on the autonomous mind
as heteronomous orders were formerly imposed on the mind which
was bound.

We need to know more about Adorno's thought. Although it is

doubtful if he had in fact created anything like an adequate termin-
ology which fuses the subjects to which he devoted his life-time's
work, he was never guilty of attempting to impose an 'Esperanto'
vocabulary. So much that he says, and implies, is substantial enough
for urgent consideration on a serious level. His books would demand
a translator of great dexterity and tolerance, living on the boundary
of passionate involvement and intelligent detachment, which Adorno
himself advocated in reference to attaining an understanding of our
cultural existence. His many books and collections of essays on music
provide the key to the complex overall thought-process of a man
whose aim was to achieve happiness and simplicity. The time is now
ripe for a wider section of people interested in cultural and social
problems to acknowledge his importance.

24 'The Politics of Experience & The Bird of Paradise' (London, I967).

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