"Ad Vocem" Adorno

Harold Blumenfeld
The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 4. (Autumn, 1984), pp. 515-537.
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Ad Vocem Adorno
HAROLD BLUMENFELD
MCthode, MCthode, que me veux-tu? Tu sais bien que j'ai mangC du fruit de
l'inconscient.
-Jules LaForgue,
Moralite's le'gendaires
La comparaison entre poites inspirCs ferait bientbt perdre l'essence de l'inspiration. Toute comparaison diminue les valeurs d'expression des termes comparks.
-Gaston BachClard,
Poe'tique d e la reverie

Praeludium

HE writings of Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno have stirred

up a whirlwind which has cut a widening swath across the
musical thought of the entire middle half of this century. Adomo
-always provocative, sometimes provoking-places the musical
art under a scrutiny which is at once exhaustive and multidimensional. His critique remains unexampled in terms of the sheer multiplicity of vantage points from which it probes its subject. Rooted
in Hegel, Marx and Freud, his thought is often complex and complicated in expression-factors which have tended t o make it stick
in the throats of friends and foes alike. Much of his most significant
writing, however-analytical works on Mahler and Berg, and numberless tracts ("Moses und Aron-ein sakrales Fragment," "Musik
und Sprache," "Die gegangelte Musik"' among them)-is neither
indigestible nor controversial, but on the contrary persuasive and
directly illuminating. Whether his generally pessimistic theses have
grated on the nerves of positivists or nourished the languorous

' Music "Led by the NoseM-a harsh critique of Soviet music.

516

The Musical Quarterly

sensitivities of an e'lite de'sespe're'e, his ideas, with their demand for

totality, have accumulated into a general inheritance.
With the translation of two central works, the 1948 Philosophie
der neuen Musik and the 1962 Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie
in the past decade and a half, the impact of Adorno's thoughtcrucial from the start in Central Europe-is making itself increasingly
felt in the United States. I t is unaccountable that such translations
have been so tardy in appearing, for the United States was the
goal of much of the intellectual and artistic diaspora from National
Socialism. Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Bartok and Hindemith,
representing the outermost polarities of the then new European
music, became transplanted here, the former two-focal concerns
in Adorno's championing of dodecaphonic expressionism and opposition t o neoclassicism-both settling during the war in Los Angeles, as
did Adorno himself for a time. Adorno's critique of neoclassicism,
focused on Stravinsky, and his fostering of Schoenbergian dodecaphony are formulated and elaborated at length in the first-mentioned
work, published in English as the Philosophy of Modern Music in
1973. The main body of his social thought, as relevant t o music, is
expounded in the second work, translated in 1967 as the Introduction t o the Sociology of Music. Both translations, as will be shown,
are often less than reliable.
In his insightful and lucid study of ~ a h l e r , ' Adorno points
t o the composer's output as constituting one continuous, lifelong,
and unified work rooted in his earliest influences and efforts, specifically the marches and folk tunes of his native Bohemian village
and his own early Wunderhorn songs, all of which continue t o
make reappearances-in literal quotation or in spirit-throughout
his ever more convulsed production. The same can be applied t o
Adorno. His basic formulations appear early. They form leitmotivs
which recur throughout the development of an ever denser, ever
more fully fraught aesthetic.
Adorno's basic position is clear. Music, t o be true, must truly
and spontaneously reflect the condition of the society in which
it is conceived. This reflective image, however, must proceed from
works which remain governed by the inner functioning of their
own proper elements and parameters and subject t o criteria determined by their innate possibilities and restraints. The basis for
Mahler. Eine musikalische Physiognomik (Frankfurt am Main, 1960).

Ad Vocem Adorno

517

Adorno's musical thought thus holds within its dialectic two incongruent, if not directly contradictory, concepts-the hermetically
autonomous and the socially connected.
The next step in the elaboration of the theorem is the postulate,
proceeding from profoundly Hegelian-Marxist conviction, that
contemporary society be seen as riven by a total alienation and
corruption symptomatic of the final phase of capitalist-industrialist
bourgeois society. The conclusion to which these several equations
are pointed is that only the music of Schoenberg and his school,
particularly its dodecaphonic constituent, can stand as the true
music of our beleaguered age. Adorno characterizes "atonality,"
the bedrock upon which dodecaphony was built, in these terms:
The first atonal works are transcripts, in the sense of the dream transcripts
of psychoanalysis. . The scars of such a revolution in expression are, however,
those blots and specks which as emissaries of the Id resist the conscious will
of the artist in both painting and music alike
and can as little be cleansed
away by later conscious correction as the bloodstains in fairy tales.3

. .

...

Frederic Jameson further elucidates Adorno's idea:

The concrete experience of the simultaneity of the whole and its parts is no
longer possible in modern times. The most successful audition of a work by
Schoenberg yields
. a kind of shadow work, an optical illusion in which
the whole somehow floats above the concrete parts, not really at one with
any of them in any given moment . . the distorted result of an attempt to
imagine wholeness in a period that has no experience of it.4

. .

Adorno's criteria hold Stravinskian neoclassicism to be fraudulent:

It plays the fool and makes its grimace readily available for use. It bows mischievously to the audience, removes its mask, and shows that there is no face
under it. . The blase dandy of the aestheticism of yore, his emotions run
dry, turns ollt to be a store-front mannequin.

. .

. . .'

Elsewhere Adorno sums up Stravinsky's entire career in a sentence:

Philosophie der neuen Musik, trans. Jameson (Tiibingen, 1949), pp. 42-43.

' Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton, 1971), pp. 28-29.
* Philosophie

der neuen Musik, pp. 159-60.

518

The Musical Quarterly

"What started with the intention of fresh nayvet6 has ended in

alexandrine^."^
The problems arising from these sweeping conclusions hinge,
of course, upon Adorno's perception of several terms and postulates
constituent to his basic theorem. Initially and most basically, his
musical verdicts presuppose the validity and accuracy of his
pessimistic diagnosis of contemporary Western society-a profoundly
Germano-centric analysis which runs more or less counter t o the
less dirgelike beat of less ponderous recent drums-empiricism,
existentialism, and others.
The troublesome matter of the autonomous "mirroring" of
society by an autonomously governed musical art7 raises interesting
issues. Adorno places Beethoven at that juncture of human events
most propitious t o positive musical formulations. Jameson
summarizes Adorno's concept in these terms:
For Adorno the work of Beethoven stands as a kind of fixed point against
which earlier o r later moments of musical history will be judged. I t is, of course,
not a question of degrees of genius, b u t rather of the inner logic of historical
development itself, of a kind of accumulation of formal possibilities of which
Beethoven is the beneficiary. . . In musical terms, that unique reconciliation
which is Beethoven's historical opportunity takes the form of a precarious
equilibrium between melody and development, between a new and richer
thematic expression of subjective feeling and its objective working through
in the form itself, which n o longer has anything of that relatively mechanical
and a priori, applied execution of eighteenth-century music.'

At this juncture, Adorno himself becomes more specific. The

autonomous Beethoven "theme" and its exploitation in sonata
developments become a paradigm for the role of the individual
soon to be exploited by the rising industrialism of a still vigorous
and positive society. So specific a "mirroring" mechanism as this
invites the conjuring of many an intriguing scenario. The organum
quadruplum of the Ars Antiqua might thus represent an obedient
Christianity hugging the sustained chant notes in unison in the
Impromptus (Frankfurt am Main, 1968), p. 67.
idea more recently and engagingly expounded upon in Jacques Attali's Bruits
(Paris, 1977).
Marxism and Form, pp. 39-40.

' An

5 19

Ad Vocem Adorno

bass, while Father, Son, and Holy Ghost waft above in a trivium
of tenors-all, of course, in triple meter.g
In all fairness, Adorno wants to apply his "mirror" primarily
to "abstract" music, leading to a kind of tautological reasoning
which circles back to its point of origin. "Abstract" music means
music liberated from ceremony, practical function, and verbal
connection. Only instrumental music can be "abstract" in that
sense; and thus the theorem is limited to the relatively recent rise
and ascendancy of such instrumental music. It is doubtful whether
a mechanism so precariously conceived and so vast in its pretensions
can be conceded the validity claimed for it, based as it is on the
shaky evidence of just two hundred of Western polyphony's twelve
hundred years. Adorno's alternatives-Musik als Wahre oder ware?"
-together with the question of its "abstractness" are dealt with
by Jacques Barzun:
Most Western music has been written "about something." I t has more often
than not used the human voice
. discoursing explicitly about something.
I t is only within the last two centuries that solely instrumental music has
assumed preeminence. . . . Within [such] music, . . the critical enthusiasm for
the pure and absolute is the product of a very recent aestheticism. . . "Pure
form" in all the arts is meant t o reinstate spirituality in the teeth of a vulgar
materialism and practical life. l 1

..

The very concept of the "abstractness" of recent instrumental

music is thus in itself a complex problem, and one whose adequate
solution might well further limit the applicability of Adorno's
basic criterion of "mirroring."
What kind of distorted Distant Mirror might be invented for fourteenth-century
isorhythms? If Renaissance through-imitation might be made to stand for the passing
of a variety of goods from voice to voice, ?I la rising mercantilism, would the later fugue represent an impoverishment of supplies?
lo Adorno unremittingly attacks the "degradation"
of music for practical and
commercial use, seeing in this the exploitive nature of both capitalism and communism.
His vehemence on the subject appears exaggerated, in that 1Prt pour IPrt is a recent and
limited phenomenon, and one proceeding in part from the apparently ever-increasing isolation of the artist and his work from the audiences of his own time. He complains of
the disappearance of "pre-capitalist music-makingo-Musirieren for its own sake-and
of the alienation between music and the public; and yet, when Hindemith moves to counteract this alienation, Adorno is seized with haughty anger at what he sees as an implicit
lowering of artistic standards.
'I "The Meaning of Meaning in Music: Berlioz Once More," The Musical Quarterly,
LXVI (January, 1980), 6 .

520

The Musical Quarterly

When Adomo finds that a given major oeuvre falls short of

his criteria, his language turns to mockery and invective. But Adorno,
the Jasager, can bring penetrating insights to bear upon music congenial t o his requirements. It is in his response t o such music that
Adorno is at his most illuminating.
Yet even here his reader must be on guard. Adorno's use of
musical terminology tends t o reflect a suspiciously mechanical
approach to the various ingredients and parameters of the art,
and seems t o indicate an affinity for explication in terms of definitive categories and absolutes. Music analysis cannot be undertaken without recourse t o terms such as consonance and dissonance,
harmony and counterpoint, homophony and polyphony, tonality
and "atonality," motive and theme, theme and transition, form
and content; but the use of such terms tends to be productive only
when they are regarded as polarities, rather than poles-as constituting complementary principles rather than mutual exclusives.
Stravinsky wams of these semantic problems before discussing
matters involving them:
I t should be recognized that it is only by reason of practical necessity that
we are obliged t o differentiate things by arranging them in purely conventional
categories such as "primary and secondary," "principal and subordinate."
The true hierarchy of phenomena, as well as the true hierarchy of relationships,
takes o n substance and form o n a plane entirely apart from that of conventional classifications. l2

But Adorno neither takes the precaution nor seems sufficiently

aware of the problem. The results can be semantically ridiculous,
as in his characterization of Impressionist music:

. . a suspended treatment of form-a treatment which actually excludes "development" . . it acquires its dominance a t the cost of actual symphonic
structure. . an absence of counterpoint.
.I3

..

And one notes that, in terms of specifically music-structural

analysis, Adorno's field of concern is largely limited to details,
details often brilliantly revealed but insufficiently illuminated
Poetics of Music (Cambridge, Mass. 1947), pp. 18-19.
Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G . Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster
(New York, 1973), p. 188. AU subsequent translations are mine.
l1

l3

Ad Vocem Adorno

521

in terms of their functioning in the larger context of form. Indeed,

he rarely deals with the higher architectonic levels of musical
structure in any but a perfunctory and rather academic manner.
He appears unaware of the play of clarity and ambiguity in music
-polarities vital t o the art. For all his ingenuity, Adorno sometimes
appears to be analyzing music largely from outside it.
Adorno's aesthetic was formed during the relatively stable
musical interregnum between the world wars, a period which saw
the early century's explosion of diverse isms and trends settling
down into the dual mainstreams of neoclassicism and dodecaphonic
expressionism. It is in the presence of such clearly defined artistic
imperatives that criticism is spawned, partisanship runs high, and
contradictions between the concerned parties are seen as irreconcilable. It is in this context-added to that of his intense and automatic Germano-centrism-that Adorno's musical thought must
be weighed.
Modernism is now being seriously challenged for the first time in about a
century or more. Which, considering the really awful degree of narcissism,
nihilism, inanity and self-indulgence that late modernism has allowed itself
t o wallow in, is probably the best thing that could happen t o it. What has
been permanently lost is the sense o f the absolute that the modernist movement once gave t o its loyal followers. And t o that we can say: good riddance.
We are none of us now-either artists or critics or the public-quite as susceptible
as we once were to the idea that a t a given moment in time history ordains
that one and only one style, one vision, one way of making art or one way
of thinking about it, must triumph and all others [be] consigned t o oblivion.14

Kramer's words apply aptly t o Adorno's exclusionary thought,

suggest its boundaries, and help account for Adorno's apparent
inability meaningfully to cope with the phenomenon of post-1960
music, a music which, in its centripetal flux and kaleidoscopic
variety, in its growing pulverization of the concept of "avant-garde,"
offers a pluralism in which criticism is stymied.
If, as it is claimed, the simple English sentence is the greatest
achievement of Western civilization, so too is the complex German
sentence. The cluttered turgidity of much scholarly German has a
long and sometimes prestigious bloodline reaching back to
Aufklarung and beyond. The more abstract and speculative his
l4

Hilton Kramer, The New York Times, 3/28/1982, Section 2, p. 32.

522

The Musical Quarterly

vein of thought, the more heavily will Adorno partake of this heritage-this "Hegelei7'-together with its density, Schwerfalligkeit,
and obfuscation. By grace of highly inflected relative pronouns and
their clear traceability t o doubly inflected article-noun combinations,
the German language can subsume large doses of clearly linked
information under a single label. Properly engineered, the Giantsize German sentence will lose neither its way nor its reader.
Adorno's ideas unfold in the specialized lingoes of diverse fields
of knowledge and roam among them at will. His formulations flow
from varying levels of thought, the more profound of which have t o
d o with broad philosophical and psychological issues, and the most
scrutable of which deal with hermetic matters of music analysis. The
German sentence, often a paragraph in disguise, serves as the ideal
conveyance for Adorno at his most complex, for it allows him t o
move from level to level and jargon t o jargon within a singly constructed statement-one which often seems ready t o burst at its
seams. The degree of clarity in Adorno tends to be in direct proportion t o the specificity of his subject matter. The Mahler book is
clear, although certainly not simple. The sustained assaults on
Hindemith in Impromptus are frontal attacks waged in direct and
unequivocal terms.
Adorno's voice can alternate between the eloquent tone of
the advocate and the contempt, vituperation, and outright Schadenfreude of the antagonist. But in either case it tends t o sound forth
in terms of the flat statement, the decree. Adorno's favored verbal
forms are the assertive "ist," the mandatory, authoritarian "muss."
His airless and almost metaphorless dispensations are rarely hedged:
"usually," "mainly," and "hardly" rarely ever appear, making
the English-tongued reader, so used to these polite qualifiers and
the filtering mechanisms of "might be" and "ought," cringe at
the ungentlemanliness of these teutonics.
As conveyed in translation, both the Philosophy of Modern
Music and the Introduction to the Sociology of Music are cluttered
with English which stumbles over its imprecise relative pronouns
and cannot get the pecking order of its thoughts straight. In the
translation of the Philosophie der neuen Musik, the opening error
lies in the title itself. Adorno's "neu" is provocative, polemical,
as opposed to the neutral and gently chronological "modern" of
the English rendering.
Mistranslations range from mere gaffe t o disaster. Page 71 mis-

Ad Vocem Adorno

523

informs us that "Stravinsky's masks and Schoenberg's constructions

actually present a slight similarity," taking indecent liberties with
"Strawinskys Masken und Schoenbergs Konstruktionen haben in der
Tat zunachst geringe Ahnlichkeit."15 Gobbledygook and cognatitis
are rife. On page 39 we are told:
Since the beginning of the bourgeois era, all great music has founded its sufficiency i n the illusion that it has achieved a n unbroken unity and justified
through its own individuation the conventional universal legality t o which it
is subject.

This is another hopelessly garbled version of a clear original (p. 43),

aggravated by the mistranslation of "Universalgesetzlichkeit" (read:
universal legitimacy). This is closely followed (on p. 40) by the
nonword, "illusive," invented to handle the illusionary in "Absenz
des Scheins"; but it is not nearly so original as the interestingly
hybrid neologism, "autarky," fertilized on page 186 from Adorno's
"A~tarkie."'~
The Sociology translation often does little better. On page 74 we
are informed that The Rake's Progress is "a pastiche, a disassembling
imitation of unbelieved convention, as distant from them as his
most advanced ballets, devoid of effects on the naive"-a tangled
rendering of the unproblematical "Es ist ein Pastiche, demontierende
Nachahmung ungegelaubter Konventionen, diesen so weit entlaufen
wie seine avanciertesten Ballette, bar der Wirkung auf Naive.""
One starts hacking at this underbrush by correcting "as distant
from them" to "as evasive as these" and "devoid of effects" to
"devoid of effect." Which is not so entirely devoid of meaning
as "creativity-a theological name and strictly due to no work
at all" ("gebuhrt keinem Kunstwerk": does not appertain t o any
work of art), on page 21 3, or as dissonant as the "had he not chose"
on page 93.
Adorno's German can be heavy-handed, elliptical, and strangely
unbalanced in structure and rhythm, but it is always syntactically
correct. In the translations cited, however, almost n o important
sentence goes by without causing suspicion as t o its reliability
l5
("To begin with, Stravinsky's masks and Schoenberg's constructions actually have
little in common.") Philosophie der neuen Musik, p. 70.
l6 I b i d , p. 172. If we must have this word, it should be rendered as "autarchy."
"
(('It is a pastiche, a disarranged aping of unbelieved conventions, and just as extraneous to these as is the case with his most advanced ballets; and all devoid of effect on
the naive.") Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (Frankfurt am Main, 1962), p. 84.

The Musical Quarterly

and correctness, or annoyance at clumsiness far exceeding that
of the original. One must be on guard against holding Adorno responsible for the excess of obfuscation and confusion in much
of the English in which his thought has been cast."
On Wagner and Mahler
When Adorno approves a body of work-such as that of
Schoenberg-he can bring rare penetration t o bear upon it. In such
cases, the more specific his analysis and comment, the more enlightening the result: thus his detailed study of aspects of Moses
und Aron19 is more rewarding than are his more general pronouncements on matters such as dodecaphony. (There is a late retrenchment
from his basic imputation of absolute historical inevitability to
the method.)
The value of his brief writings on Webern and his thoroughgoing study of Berg2' stand in phase with his position of overall
partisanship toward these composers, qualified by what he viewed
as partial regression in the music of the latter and over-asceticism
in that of the former.
It is specifically in his book on Mahler that Adorno's insights
prove most rewarding, for in Mahler he finds a composer whose
music conveys an underlying pessimism, the unrelenting nature of
which he sees as an anticipation of his own world view. The results of
this consensus are remarkable. For Adorno, the negativity of this
most perplexing and perplexed of composers rings uncompromisingly
true. Here all the anguish of the later, more overt expressionist
outcry is seen as anticipated in a musical language which is not
only almost entirely tonal, but nonchromatic and nonmodulatory
as well; a prescient music which, in terms of melodic procedures,
coalesces from a swell of folk tunes, marches, and banalities which
are fractured, distorted, dismembered, and then tellingly reconstituted in the course of intractable structures which unpredictably
move between the expression of despondency and nostalgia, the

''

Robert Craft's "A Bell for Adorno" falls into this trap, clapper and all (in Prejudices in Disguise [New York, 19741 ), pp. 91-102.
'' "Moses und Aron: ein sakrales Fragment," Quasi urn Fantasia, I1 (Frankfurt am
Main, 1973), 306 ff.
Berg. Der Meister des kler'nsten ~ b e r g a n g s :Cesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am
Main, 1970), XIII, 321-494.

A d Vocem Adorno
shriek and the wistful, between transparent trifle and utter chaos,
the ever trostlos and trostend.
Adorno's study of Mahler is atypically systematic and down
to earth. His entente with the composer is grounded on sociophilosophical-psychological contexts, the light from which he focuses
on the works themselves. Technically these are dealt with largely in
close-up. In some two hundred cases he cites chapter and verse in
illustration of his points. Aesthetically the study penetrates t o the
very bone and marrow of Mahler's entire output. Adorno appears to
be the first t o recognize an element of self-cannibalization in
Mahler's music, calling attention to those moments when one theme
will chew up another alive and squirming, spewing out the gristle.
In typically revelatory passages from the second chapter, "Ton",
Adorno discusses the composer's vain desire t o encompass all humanity in his embrace, in the grasp of a direct and familiar musical
language.
Desperately [Mahler's music] gathers u n t o itself what high culture discardspathetic, maimed and mutilated as culture has rendered it. The art work, chained
t o culture, would break its chains and spread compassion over the mangy mob.
Every measure in Mahler opens wide its arms. . . Mahler's integrity has opted in
favor of high art. But the chasm between the two spheres had become the
essence of his own style and tone-that of brokenness. . His brokenness gives
expression t o the impossibility of putting the broken pieces back together again.
Borrowings from folk song . and popular music are provided with invisible
quotation marks by the art into which they are dragged, and they remain clogs
in the works of the purely musical construction.

. .

. .

And further he says:

Mahler's music is the individual's vision of an irresistible collectivity. But at the
same time it objectively states identity with this collectivity t o be impossible. . .
His music does n o t speak lyrically of the individual who expresses himself in it,
nor does it puff itself u p into a mouthpiece for the many or simplify itself for
their sake. I t finds its antinomic tension in the mutual unattainability of both
for each other. . . If Mahler's music is identified with the multitude, it is a t
once wary of it. The extremes in this music's collective pull-as in the first movement of the Sixth Symphony-are reached in those moments in which the blind
and rapacious march of the many intervenes: moments of being trampled t o
death.
. Where Mahler's music does n o t actually appear broken, i t must
shatter. I t too is subject t o Karl Kraus' thought that a well-painted gutter is
worth more than a badly painted palace.

. .

The Musical Quarterly

Adomo's reverence for Mahler is total and complete with but
few exceptions: he takes offense at the positivism of the last movement of the Fifth Symphony and the rondo finale of the Seventh;
he similarly reacts against a certain bland affinnativeness in most
of the Eighth.
Where Adorno the advocate can throw powerful new light
on his subject, Adorno the Neinsager will tend t o stop at nothing
in his attempt to undermine, if not destroy, the object of his disapproval. Even more virulent than his celebrated attacks on
Stravinsky is his onslaught against Wagner. The Versuch iiber Wagner
consists of a series of diatribes against Wagner the man and musician,
predictably pointing t o an array of Wagnerian contradictions, real
or invented. He attacks what h e perceives as Wagner's social
character, associates it with his musico-dramatic conceptions, and
condemns both.
He attacks Wagner's concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk and
particularly its incarnation in the Ring des Nibelungen, a work
he regards as serving bourgeois self-glorification through a form
of mob intoxication in which Nature and sensation are worshipped
abjectly.21 Of all the monuments of the century past, the Ring
-revolutionary in its musical techniques and dramaturgic goals,
all-embracing in scope and theme, and more than twenty-five years in
the making-is at once the largest and most impressive in sheer scale,
and at the same time the most vulnerable t o attack on every front.
The libraries of the world brim over with interpretation and expostulation, eulogy and denunciation of this most c ~ l o s s a land
colossally flawed of works. What Adorno adds t o the subject is
neither new nor particularly valid, for not once does he meet Wagner
on his own grounds, the pertinent terms of musical dramaturgy.
Adorno's attack on the leitmotiv technique (it is nondevelopmental;
it can only repeat sequentially ad infinitum; it constitues a redundant
set of gestures and signals designed t o clarify its mystifications for a
nouveau riche bourgeoisie) ignores the dramaturgic purposes behind
its innovation; overlooks its brilliant (and almost fortuitously apt)
growth from the simple associative and expository in Das Rheingold
2'
In his attacks on Wagner, Adorno finds an unwitting ally in Stravinsky. The Poetics
expends more space and energy in attacking Wagner than on any other target. But where
Adorno disapproves of Wagner, Stravinsky, in merely disliking his music, proves more
amusing.

Ad Vocem Adorno

527

to the status of ongoing subtextual enrichment in dramatically

more complex phases of the cycle (and particularly in the final
acts of Siegfried and Gotterdammerung). Furthermore, Adorno
does not acknowledge the varishaped and overlapping forms and
functions of leitmotivs as applied
in the Ring; nor those extraordinary passages in which, following textual implications, a given
motive can be distorted past recognition;22 nor those towering
moments of leitmotivic polyphony, in which numerous motives
are worked out and intertwined along simultaneous strata;23 nor
does he concede the vast difference between the more obvious
web-work of Ring leitmotivics and the consistently subtle, seamless,
and germane application of the technique throughout Tristan und
Zsolde and Parsifal.
Adorno objects that the Ring elevates Nature, feeling, and
the primitive at the expense of the rational and humane, thus paving
a pathway toward some of the obscene political and social developments of the present century. Yet any but a superficial reading
of Wagner's own writings must dispose of such contentions. His
entire approach t o his art, along with his written statements, reveals
a passionate and indeed quite Adornoesque hatred for the injustices
and deceptions of his times.
In his later writings, Wagner decries patriotism as the form
of deception necessary t o sustain nationalism, which in turn he
sees as a more general and invidious system of deceit in itself. In
this context, his constant use of the term "Wahn" (more than
illusion, it conveys outright deception) sounds what later becomes
a quintessentially Adornoesque note.
And further, as Gordon A. Craig puts it:
-

As the unification of Germany brought growing materialism, Wagner's criticism

deepened. What he saw around him was the degradation of art t o a mere instrument of enjoyment. He saw earnestness and dedication shouldered aside
by frivolity and routine. . . He concluded that the political and social conditions that permitted this sort of thing called for revolutionary transformation.
This was the message o f the Ring speaking t o Wagner's own age and condemning
its social and cultural values.24

22
Such as the passage in Act I11 of G o t t e ~ d a m m e m n gcommencing with Briinnhilde's "Wie Sonne lauter" (Eulenberg, pp. 1261-68).
23 AS at the end of the cycle (Eulenberg, pp. 1334-56).
The Germans (New York, 1982).

''

528

The Musical Quarterly

Adorno's stock complaint that Wagner elevates Nature and

the mythic at the expense of rationality can be defused by words
of the composer himself, quoted from the Kunstwerk der Zukunft
( 18 4 9 ):
From the moment man perceived the difference between himself and Nature.. . ,
when he thus set himself in opposition to nature . . . , from that moment, error
-the first expression of consciousness began. But error is the father of knowledge, and the history of the creation of knowledge from error is the history of
the human race, from the myths of the earliest times down to the present day.

That the colossus of the Ring is marked by flaws and textual,

dramatic, and musical lapses is nothing new. It is no accident that
most of Adomo's (and later, Stravinsky's) anti-Wagnerian ammunition is expended in its direction, and that little of the fire is aimed
at the highly contained and transcendent Tristan and Parsifal. Indeed
Adorno hardly conceals a grudging admiration for the music of
the former work, although he appears to have no suspicion of its
unique dramaturgic and textual qualities. At no point does he show
any awareness of the extraordinary relationship among Wagner's
final independent music dramas-the normative chromaticism of
Tristan and general diatonicism of Die Meistersinger as related
to the telling symbolic opposition of these contrasted harmonic
approaches in Parsifal.
Adorno's high-handed dismissal of the leitmotiv as "nondevelopmental" as compared with the developmental process in the
Beethoven symphonies-which he cites as the music drama's purely
orchestral counterpart-not only betrays a narrowly academic perception of "development," but lays bare the true emptiness of his
entire thrust against Wagner; for opera was not and has never been,
even in Mozart, a medium in which motivic-thematic exploitation
per se had been appropriate in any primary, essential, or consistent application. Wagner's musical techniques are commensurate
with verbal and theatrical values and criteria, and not necessarily
with those obtaining in "abstract" sonata developments. Failing
a dramaturgic point of departure, no Wagnerian criticism, including
that of Adorno, can be regarded as rising above the level of mere
carping. Adorno's investigations of the various parameters of
Wagner's music-structure, rhythm, melodic and textural procedure,
prosody and orchestration-are essentially without interest, as
is his blanket disapprobation of myth and the magical, and his

Ad Vocem Adorno

5 29

ingenuous complaint about the amorality of characters such as

Siegfried. So prissy a criterion would bring the better half of the
repertory under the ban.
On Hindemith
In the wake of the scandal caused by his vehement 1964 Hessischer Rundfunk broadcast critique of Hindemith, Adorno undertook
comprehensively to document the evolution of his position vis
B vis the composer over a forty-five-year period. Under the title
"Ad vocem Hindemith" in his collection of essays, I r n p r o m p t u ~ , ~ ~
the author reprints intact his major articles, published in 1922,
1926, 1939, and 1962 on the subject, elaborating on them with
additional comment designed in part to fend off charges of inconsistency and arbitrariness in his criticism of a composer who had
come t o be recognized by many as Germany's leading musician
and who had died just months before Adorno's ill-timed attack.
In the first volume of his Unterweisung im Tonsatz, published
in 1937 and released five years later in English as The Craft of
Musical Composition, Hindemith sets down an early formulation
of his evolving theoretical thought in a comprehensive form aimed
at summarizing his own practice and promulgated as an alternative
to what he regarded as the empty experimentation and arbitrary
formalism of "atonality" and dodecaphony. Ultimately drawn
from and based upon acoustical properties of sound, Hindemith's
system attempts to form a basis for the sane continuation of the
art. Initially, at least, it claims a certain universality and undertakes
to cope with all musical parameters recognized as such by Hindemith
up t o that time-among these, melodic construction and analysis,
and matters of texture and rhythm. A main thrust of his reasoning is directed at harmony and tonality, areas which, marked by
a growing intractability and resistance to analytic penetration over
the course of the past century, he regarded as requiring shoring
up against a perceived dodecaphonic threat. Hindemith regarded
tonality as "a natural force, like gravity"26 and attacked dodecaphony not only for a perceived arbitrariness ("a more doctrinaire
proceeding than to follow the strictest diatonic rules of the most
25
26

(Frankfurt a m Main, 1968).

The Craft of Musical Composition (New York, 1942), pp. 152 ff.

The Musical Quarterly

dried-up old academic")27 but for its final enthronement of equal
temperament.
Outraged by Hindemith's attack on Schoenberg and immediately
sensing the vulnerability of Hindemith's overextended theoretical
position, Adorno leaps to counterattack. Everything comes under
fire-first, the entire enterprise:
The attempt t o write a text on musical composition which establishes sensible
rules for contemporary practice and which wavers between registering compositional resources presently in use and conserving the antiquated didactics of
harmony and counterpoint, all appears neutral from a social standpoint. But
neutrality, too, is a

Hindemith's "reversion" t o a basis in natural phenomena strikes

Adorno as disgustingly analogous to the nature ethic of the Third
Reich.
Hindemith clearly concedes the indispensability of equal temperament as a compromise,29 but states its inapplicability t o the
a cappella chorus, the human voice in general and, t o a degree,
to all pitch-modifiable instruments. He is intensely aware of the
mutual influences of vertical and horizontal forces on tuning and
decries the implicit abandonment of all such considerations in
dodecaphony. Ever eager t o resist Nature's call, Adorno overlooks
this clear concessionary statement and attacks for the sake of attack:
Naturally this does not coincide with Nature. Like all his predecessors,
Hindemith is unable to cope with distortion of the purely tuned octave through
the exclusive application of pure intervals. But he is too stolid a workman
t o acknowledge the rationalization of physical pitches through equal temperament as a conscious intervention into a natural material which historically
had come t o inhibit musical ~ r e a t i o n . ~ '

Adorno spends his most concentrated fire on a concept which

may well constitute Hindemith's most significant contribution
to music theory, his formulation of Series One, a comprehensive
ordering of tones in terms of their closeness t o or distance from their
support or contradiction of, a given tonal center. The ordering,
set down in the Craft with an unhelpful touch of the polemical,
runs as follows with respect t o the center of C:
27

l8
29

I b i d , pp. 154 ff.

Impromptus, pp. 73 ff.
Craft, p. 28.
Impromptus, p. 72.

A d Vocem Adorno

and is intended to apply on all levels, from individual notes and

chords through to the more temporal-phrases, sections, movements, and indeed entire multimovement works. In the Craft,
Hindemith's first formulation of this idea is set down in an incomplete and rather unsatisfactory manner, a matter which he later
had hoped to correct, but which meantime has provoked misapprehension, confusion, and scorn with respect to his analytical
thought. In later years he came to apply the concept in an extremely
flexible manner, the clarifying nature of which exceeds the scope of
this essay.
Adomo's position as of 1962 may be scanned in his own words:
The attempt at a theory of harmony which normalizes all available contemporary materials according to general rules amounts to nonsense. . . . The practice
of moderated modernity, the ideology for which is delivered up by Hindemith,
is aimed specifically towards tearing the teeth out of a slandered atonality
and twelve-tone technique.31

The sui generis in him states:

Of course the correctness or falsity of every moment of a composition can
be decided, but by no other criterion than that of a specific and unique context
of which every element in the composition partakes. Because of this, individual
works appear as the products of history, not naturee3*

A statement which Hindemith, given the freedom of his own view

of "history," could cordially agree with.
Although Hindemith, from the beginning, qualified his claims
for his theories,33 he remained sternly opposed t o dodecaphony
-a "game of double-crosticsY'-and closed to its implications until
Impromptus, p. 73.

Ibid , p. 73.

" In the Craft he writes, "I am not motivated by any desire to freeze into permanent
shape what I have been teaching" (pp. 7-8).

='

532

The Musical Quarterly

the end. But he is on target in his characterization of aspects of

dodecaphony and its proponents as sectarian:
The parallelism t o religious sects goes so far, that a n idol is felt t o be necessary,
t o whom everything of importance ever created o r uttered in music is ascribed.
. The supreme condition for your participation is that you have n o disbelief
whatsoever in the perfection of the system.34

..

By 1955 Adorno himself was already fully aware of the pitfalls in

the very system of which he had become the leading proponent and
which he earlier had called indispensable:
T o be true t o Schoenberg is t o warn against all twelve-tone schools. Devoid
of experimentation as well as prudence, these schools n o longer involve any
risk, and hence have entered the service of a second conformity. The means
have become ends.j5

Like Schoenberg himself, in his later years Hindemith came

to have doubts about earlier certainties. In a 1959 letter t o his
biographer, Andres Briner, he states:
Frankly I am n o longer convinced of the one hundred percent correctness
of the views I p u t down years ago in regard t o harmony and tonality.

And yet his approach is analogous, in its comprehensiveness if not

in its ultimate historical significance, t o the initially dogmatic first
promulgations of dodecaphony.
Adomo's attack is extended to Hindemith's music. In his final
~
years after Hindemith's death and
essay, " ~ o s t l u d i u m , " ~four
a year before his own, Adorno fires his final and most ignoble
salvo, imputing t o the deceased composer what Ernest Bloch had
written of Reger half a century earlier: "empty, dangerous ability
and a lie on top of it. He is nothing and possesses nothing but a
finger dexterity of the highest order."37 And ambivalently, "The
greatness of the gift, original and eruptive, was extraordinary"
(a welcome contradiction of his 1962 retraction of the same judg34

A Composer's World (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 143.

"" Prisms (Frankfurt am Main, 1955), p. 166.

In an arch obeisance in the direction of Ludus Tonalis, Adorno introduces and

concludes the tour d'horizon of his "Ad vocem Hindemith" with introductory and concluding essays entitled "Praeludium" and "Postludium," after the cancrizans which frame
the work.
"
Geist der Utopie (Frankfurt am Main, 1964), p. 89.

Ad Vocem Adorno

533

ment of 1922). And further, with a verdict he has almost made

stick: ". . . but something happened. . . . Otherwise the overriding
positivity manifested in his late works would hardly be explainable:
" ~ ~ composer is carithey are reactive, acts of s e l f - d e ~ e ~ t i o n .The
catured as "a wretched Telemann, heaping piece on piece" and as
"the compositional prototype of impotent pseudo-activity."
Hindemith's masterpiece, Mathis der Maler, is dismissed in a word,
and the premitre of his late (and admittedly flawed) opera about
Kepler, Harmonie der Welt, is ungenerously described as a state
funeral.
On the surface, Adorno's treatment of Hindemith the composer,
theorist, and man is that of a polemicist whose partisan hostility
causes him to misread, distort, and exaggerate. The vehemence
and persistence of his attacks, however, proceed from a deeper
source-the profound underlayment of the ideologue whose moves
are motivated by Hegelian and Marxist thought. The aesthetic
reflex of this ground position of interlarded pessimism and determinism is the categorical imperative that high art spontaneously
mirror the evils of a society seen as hopelessly alienated and degraded. All art, all music not in conformarrce must be downgraded
and held in contempt. Hindemith, seen as the promulgator of false
doctrine, as a purveyor of low artistic standards geared to the masses
and to amateurs, as disinterested in society and social issues, as
a regressive, redundant tradesman busily grinding out a grey
succession of drab works, is a primary target. For Hindemith has
blasphemously challenged the one, the only, the unique Truth, the
godhead of dodecaphony. It is hardly a matter of judging individual
works: the heresy is in itself reason enough for their wholesale
condemnation.
There is no question of the basic conservatism of Hindemith's
music and general Anschauung. There is also no question of his
misapprehension of the rich vein of new expressive and technical
ore which was opened for music in the early decades of this century,
a wealth which, at first, Hindemith himself took a lead in exploiting.
But a basic stolidity of temperament led him to react strongly against
what he came to regard as the "orgies celebrated in adoration of
the Golden Calf of sound" during the first twenty years of the
century.
Impromptus, p. 80.

534

The Musical Quarterly

It is this very "orgy of sound" which, when all is said and done,
has formed the basis for the continuing development of the art;
for it was primarily the "atonal"-expressionist path which was
destined to broaden into the avenues and by-ways on which much
of the more technically and stylistically charged cargo of postWorld War I1 music came to travel.
It is thus that Adorno, the Neinsager and polemicist, takes
a socio-aesthetic stance which binds him to one music and deafens
him a priori t o all others. In no small measure through Adorno's
influence, Hindemith's music has fallen into partial eclipse-one
which may well pass with the changing of time and the tides of
taste, as has happened in turn with Verdi and Mahler, both dismissed
as anachronistic and then resurrected in the space of half a century.
Postludium
Adorno, who with an almost clairvoyant insight had understood
the content and implications of the works of Webern and Berg
almost as soon as the ink was dry on their scores, seems not t o
have recognized or understood how these implications were materializing during the last decade of his life-the crucial decade of the
Sixties which saw at once the zenith of post-Webernian achievement,
the near end of neoclassicism, and, paradoxically, the beginnings of
a new widespread and backward glancing conservative neo-neoclassicism.
His thinking unfolds in the context of a relatively stable interbellum period characterized by the simultaneous predominance of
just two major movements. After World War 11, however, music
becomes marked by a drastic centripetal multiplicity which, although
much of it finds roots in Webern, becomes increasingly resistant
and irrelevant to one-dimensional Adornoesque strictures. Adorno
occasionally mentions Stockhausen, several of whose works he
has heard (and not penetrated, or perhaps seen through), and Cage
(whom Stockhausen, at the time, was promoting as the only
American worth mentioning). He knows little of Boulez. He appears
unaware of Carter, whose first two string quartets were already much
in evidence, and is apparently unaware of works of the Sixties such
as Berio's Circles and Allelujah 11, Penderecki's Dies Irae, and much
else of significance.
,
in his music
While Adorno provisionally approves ~ a r t d k seeing

A d Vocem Adorno
a generally acceptable compromise,39 he mentions Britten and
Shostakovich only with the greatest contempt. Varkse is regarded
as an engineer who, under the influence of a heartless technology,
injects panic into a music which is beyond human compass.40
Toward the end of his life, Adorno's pessimism reaches the
extreme: "In the present situation, artists like Berg and Webern
would hardly be able to survive." He sees the very possibility of
taking aesthetic matters seriously as having been utterly destroyed.
The basic and irreducible problem in Adorno lies in the several
levels of inconsistency encompassed within his thought. His strong
espousal of music as its own semantic (which is the meaning of
his frequent use of the Latin "sui generis" and the clumsy Teutonic
"ein sich Seiendes") is difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile
with the unyielding demand that his own analysis of the human
condition be reflected, uniquely and only, in terms of the one
kind of music which he perceives as adequately reflecting that one
heavily pessimistic view.
Behind his misanthropic analysis of contemporary society
and culture there always seems t o glow the conjured vision of a
past Golden Age, a time of relative innocence unmarred by exploitation, domination, and the threat of Spenglerian dissolution in
which he sees the present enmeshed. But there probably never was a
Golden Age. In 1855, Flaubert, in a letter to Louis Bouillet, writes:
Against the stupidity of my era, I feel floods of hatred which choke me. Merde
rises in my mouth as in strangled hernias. But I want to keep it, solidify it,
harden it. I want to make a paste out of it with which I shall daub the nineteenth century, the way Indian pagodas were gilded with cow manure; and
who knows? Perhaps it will last.41

The description will apply to any age. The negative reflex is indispensable. But one need not be a Pollyanna, an indiscriminate
latitudinarian, to descry elements of renaissance in every rout. Rise
and Fall may be in the eye of the beholder. Any questioning of
Adorno's Weltanschauung carries with it a challenge t o the strictures
39

"Das Altern der Neuen Musik," Dissonanten (Frankfurt am Main, 1959), pp. 139 ff.

'' Ibid., pp. 151 ff.

4'
Flaubert's Europe emerges as a near-paradise when compared with the four ungolden preindustrial centuries as recounted in Fernand Braudel. Transported back into
the then prevailing nutritional and sanitational conditions, the average modern Westerner
might with luck survive for a fortnight.

536

The Musical Quarterly

of his narrow expressionist-dodecaphonic imperative, and opposition

t o a situation wherein one and only one musical essence is allowed
to pass through the eye of his needle, nullifying music's historic
power t o offer solace, transcendence, even escape.
And this again discloses a more profound and essential contradiction. The idea that in any era, music, t o be true and meaningful,
can speak in one and only one voice, is a concept whose extremity
runs counter t o the prodigality and boundless, exuberant diversity
of the art. Further, it would seem beyond contention that the
quality and value of music need not necessarily be commensurate
either with the level of its complexity or its specific gravity.
It would be nai've to believe that Adorno's unserene Olympian
thought is either dispassionate or objective. His grounding in the
thought of Hegel, Marx, and Freud, and in the music of the First
and Second Vienna Schools and the preponderantly German musical
tradition connecting them, bears with it an oppressive and intolerant
Germanic ethnocentrism which appears more or less automatically
to deprecate music in a direct proportion t o the distance separating
its provenance from Mitteleuropa. It is nonetheless the very resonance and latitude of thought that Adorno brings t o bear upon
music which make his contribution indispensable. This, added t o
his almost clairvoyant prescience-his gift for sensing the significant
in the new and predicting its impact-establishes him as a standard
against which musical thought and criticism is t o be measured.
Adorno identified the system which makes itself out as reality,
and called it catatonic mass deception. His horror at the deceit
accounts for his horror for anything he suspects of euphemizing the
deception and offering it a.ffirmation. Adorno is not concerned with
good pieces of music, but rather with ruthlessly exacting principles;
and the cyclone of his judgment-Hegelian, Marxian, Germanocentric, dogmatic-harries and roars past masterpieces, masters,
and entire treasuries of music when they d o not conform with
his standards. One can point out the individual merits and strengths
of the casualties-they are particularly heavy in this mid-centurybut t o no avail, for Adorno's deep position appears utterly consistent. The only legitimate voice is held to be that of unheeded,
uncomprehended resistance. "This thought finds solidarity with
metaphysics at the moment of its collapse."42
42

Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main, 1966),final sentence.

Ad Vocem Adorno
In his last major writing, Aethetische Theorie, Adorno appears
to move decisively away from the dogmatic. Here, finally, "Sinn"
(sense or meaning)-his criterion for truth in music for some fifty
years-gives way to the more abstract "Geist" (spirit) in a welcome
reformulation of his basic tenet:
All aesthetic questions terminate in questions of a work's content of truth:
is the spirit borne within a work objectively true in terms of its specific shape?
. . . There is much to be said for the concept that, in works of art, the metaphysically untrue manifests itself in terms of technical failure. . . . The content
of truth in artworks is not amenable to direct, definite identification. . . . The
only way it can be seen as mediated is in and through [the work] itself. The
perceptual character of theory transforms itself into the character of this acknowledgment: "Great works of art cannot lie."43

And here Adorno's prose, with the juxtaposition of "Erkenntnis-"

and "Bekenntnischarakter," soars with a final eloquence.
And, after all, a door to reconciliation is opened. We are left
with reconfirmation, of sorts, of a categorical imperative-the imperious requirement that music be judged, if judged it must be, on
its own terms: that it be weighed in conformance with the complex
balance of principles and forces which mold its many intractable
parameters into a convincing, expressive and meaningful whole,
into totalities autonomously conceived and autonomously reflective
of not just one, but diverse possible readings of contemporaneous
civilization and culture.
But we are also left with the looming, forbidding presence
of the thinker who called the system Deceit; who grasped the negativity and horror of his time, underplaying negativity's sempiternity
in order t o expose the present at its most naked; and whose atonal
philosophy44 brought musical criteria and criticism to new profundity and comprehensiveness.

43

44

Gesammelte Schtiften, VII (1970), 195 and 498.

Ceorg Picht's term.