University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation Formatting

Home , Bernhard Sekles, Emil Hertzka, George Perle, Lyric Suite (Berg)

THEODOR ADORNO AND ALBAN BERG: THE CROSSROADS BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND MUSIC

MORGAN M. RICH

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2016

In memory of my aunt, Constance L. Achorn.

3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Throughout the years it took to complete this dissertation I have been drawn into

a web of difficult and unfamiliar ideas, which often seemed impossible to untangle. I

owe a large debt to all of the people who saw the potential of these ideas and gave me

time to wrestle with Adorno’s philosophical difficulties. The stage for this dissertation

was set approximately ten years ago when Christopher Williams introduced our

hermeneutics seminar to Alban Berg’s Lulu; I was fascinated by Berg’s aesthetics and drawn to the scholarly literature on the opera.

My first doctoral seminar, on Lulu, with Silvio dos Santos opened a door to understanding what kind of musicologist I could be. Words fail to fully express how much I owe to my advisor’s knowledge, support, enthusiasm, criticism, patience, and appreciation of difficult ideas. He has taught me the value of getting the ideas on the page in a reader-oriented manner. But more importantly, I value our lively debates about my ideas once they made it to the page. I am grateful for what I have learned

from his research, particularly how to blend source study with philosophical and musical

analysis in an interesting way.

My committee members have been champions of my professional growth.

Jennifer Thomas’s critical questions and reading of my work have been invaluable to

crafting this dissertation. I must also thank her for support me as a whole person, and

literally cheering me on as I lifted heavy things. Alex Reed’s music theory seminars

allowed me to imagine methods suitable for interpreting the music. Eric Kligerman’s

understanding of Adorno and German modernism has provided a crucial outside

perspective. The musicology department at the University of Florida has supported all

4 stages of this work. John Duff and Kevin Orr, as directors of the School of Music, have

supported my research travel and presentations.

The archival research necessary for this research would not have been possible

without grants from the University of Florida Graduate School, College of the Arts, and

School of Music. It would have been nearly impossible to read Adorno in German

without an immersive summer language program in Frankfurt, funded by the Foreign

Language and Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS). This fellowship allowed me to begin

archival research at the Theodor Adorno Archiv (Frankfurt) and Akademie der Kunst

(Berlin). Michael Schwarz at the Akademie der Kunst has offered incalculable help

during my four trips to the archive. Also the staff and specialists at the Musiksammlung

of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek were of the utmost help during my brief but

essential visit.

A monumental undertaking like a dissertation would not have been possible

without the support of friends and family. I would like to express my gratitude to my

parents Michelle Chapman and Michael Rich. Thank you to my sister for the phone

calls, talking about life and my crazy-cute niece and nephew; Clover was born when I started this project. To Katie Reed and Sarah Bushey, we started this adventure together, without you both it would have been nearly impossible; thank you for the support! Finally, Navid Bargrizan has helped me translate many complex, seemingly impenetrable Adorno passages (but any mistakes are indeed my own). I would like to thank him for being supportive of my loftiest goals through all of the hard work.

5 TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF TABLES ...... 8

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 9

MUSICAL EXAMPLES ...... 10

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... 11

ABSTRACT ...... 12

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 14

Negative Dialectics ...... 17 Adorno’s Berg ...... 21 Approaches to Adorno’s Writings on Music in the Literature ...... 30 Key Concepts ...... 34 Scope and Methodology ...... 40

2 1925, ALBAN BERG AND THEODOR ADORNO IN A PIVOTAL YEAR ...... 49

Adorno’s Musical Aesthetics Before Berg ...... 52 Berg’s Pivotal Year ...... 69 Adorno’s Pivotal Year ...... 84

3 ADORNO’S NARRATIVE OF BERG AND HIS MUSIC ...... 98

Prevailing Views of Berg – The Other Berg Monographs...... 107 Adorno’s Analysis of Berg’s Music ...... 131

4 MUSICAL PHILOSOPHY: ALBAN BERG, THEODOR ADORNO, AND THE FORMULATION OF NEGATIVE DIALECTICS ...... 136

Berg, Adorno, and the Negative Dialectics of Composition with Twelve Tones .... 139 Berg, Twelve-Tone Methods, and the Historical Process ...... 154 Composing out his Conception of the Twelve-Tone Techniques ...... 158

5 NEGATIVE DIALECTICS AND PHILOSOPHY OF NEW MUSIC ...... 168

Overview of Philosophy of New Music ...... 173 Thought Models in Philosophy of New Music ...... 174 The Hegelian Thought Model ...... 177

6 Negative Dialectics in Philosophy of New Music ...... 184 Critique of the Twelve-Tone Technique ...... 194

6 CONCLUSIONS ...... 202

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 209

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 218

7 LIST OF TABLES

Table page

2-1 List of pieces Adorno composed prior to studying with Berg ...... 55

2-2 Adorno’s Frankfurt Music Reviews between 1922 and 1925...... 65

2-3 Adorno’s Early Writings on Music, 1921-25...... 67

2-4 Formal Outline of the Lyric Suite...... 82

2-5 Theodor Adorno’s writings on Alban Berg...... 96

3-1 Table of Contents for Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link...... 112

3-2 Adorno’s Writings on Berg before 1937...... 113

3-3 List of contents in Adorno’s Red Notebook “Zur Monographie Alban Berg.” .... 119

3-4 Table of Contents for the 1968 Kontrolexemplar of Berg: Eine Retrospektive from TWAA Ts 17193...... 122

3-5 Contents of Adorno’s Berg monograph, and previous published versions of those chapters...... 124

3-6 Materials Adorno was Preparing for Publication in the 1960s...... 134

8 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

1-1 Illustration of three-step Hegelian dialectical process...... 20

1-2 General model of Adorno’s negative dialectics...... 21

2-1 Analysis of Lyric Suite mm. 1-30...... 76

3-1 Adorno’s inscription to Helene Berg in the red notebook...... 117

3-2 Title “Zur Monographie” and the beginning of the first essay “Op. 1 Sonate für Klavier...... 118

3-3 Excerpt of “Three Orchestral Pieces” essay draft...... 120

4-1 Illustration of the three-step Hegelian dialectical process...... 147

4-2 General model of Adorno’s negative dialectics ...... 148

4-3 Dialectic model for composition with twelve tones...... 149

9 MUSICAL EXAMPLES

Examples page

2-1 Theodor W. Adorno, Six Studies for String Quartet, mm. 1-20. (Theodor W. Adorno, Kompositiononen, Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1980) ...... 61

2-2 Alban Berg, Kammerkonzert, Motto. (Alban Berg, Kammerkonzert Universal Edition) ...... 77

2-3 Alban Berg, Kammerkonzert, Thema, mm. 1-7. (Alban Berg, Kammerkonzert Universal Edition) ...... 78

2-4 Alban Berg, “Schließe mir die Augen beide.” All-Interval Row (P-5). (Alban Berg, “Schließe mir die Augen beide” 1925, Universal Edition)...... 79

2-5 Alban Berg, “Schließe mir die Augen beide.” All-Interval Row (P-5). (Alban Berg, “Schließe mir die Augen beide” 1925, Universal Edition)...... 80

2-6 Theodor Adorno, Zwei Stücke für Streichquartett, mvt. 2 “Variation”, mm. 1- 18...... 94

4-1 Alban Berg, Lyric Suite, Mvt. 1 “Allegretto gioviale”, m. 1...... 151

4-2 Berg’s main twelve-tone row for the Lyric Suite, mvt. 1...... 151

4-3 Alban Berg, Lyric Suite, movement 1, mm. 2-4, main row in violin 1...... 152

4-4 Row 1 – P7 (mm. 1-4) ...... 160

4-5 Row 2 – P3 (mm. 11-14) ...... 160

4-6 Row 3 – P10 (mm. 25-27) ...... 160

4-7 Seven-Tone Row (mm. 20-21) ...... 160

4-8 Adorno, Two Pieces for String Quartet, op. 2, movement 1 (mm. 1-6) ...... 161

4-9 Adorno, Two Pieces for String Quartet, op. 2, movement 1 (mm. 20-28) ...... 163

4-10 Atonal second theme area; reuse and reorganization of sets...... 164

10 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

DoE Dialectic of Enlightenment

ND Negative Dialectics

PCs Pitch Classes

PoNM Philosophy of New Music

11 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

THEODOR ADORNO AND ALBAN BERG: THE CROSSROADS BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND MUSIC By

Morgan M. Rich

August 2016

Chair: Silvio dos Santos Major: Music

This dissertation relies upon primary source analysis, archival research, and music analysis, to understand the role Alban Berg played in Theodor Adorno’s philosophical thought. Contrary to current scholarly opinion, my research and analysis of unpublished sources has proven that Adorno’s conceptions of “new music” were strongly based on Berg’s music and not solely on that of Arnold Schoenberg. By reassessing some of Adorno’s most famous musicological writings this dissertation will give the community a new perspective on formative works.

Throughout this dissertation I connect two overarching arguments. First, I argue that Adorno saw Berg’s method of composition, particularly composition with twelve tones, as analogous to his own ideas for a new approach to dialectic thought, negative dialectics. While this aspect is largely neglected in the secondary literature. Second, I argue that from his first writing on Berg, Adorno worked to craft a narrative of Berg, to establish his identity as an autonomous composer; this resulted in his monograph Alban

Berg, Master of the Smallest Link. Yet scholars do not address the significance of Berg in Adorno’s writing and thought. Even Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey, editors and

12 translators of the monograph do not regard the book as having great significance beyond Adorno’s personal recollections of Berg.

I come to the conclusion that Berg’s music and Adorno’s analyses thereof manifest themselves into Adorno’s most significant musical concepts and books: particularly his concept of composition with twelve tones, new music, and negative dialectics. Adorno’s Berg-influenced ideas make their way into the infamous dialectic between Schoenberg and Stravinsky in Philosophy of New Music. As I demonstrate, even Adorno’s most original contribution to philosophy—his concept of negative dialectics—which would later develop into lectures and a book of the same title, emerged from his conception of modern music, in particular composition with twelve tones, as early as 1926.

My dissertation is the first to address Adorno’s application of negative dialectics, to music criticism. Indeed, PoNM would not have been viable if Adorno had not formulated his conception of negative dialectics according to his understanding of

Berg’s music and the possibilities of the twelve-tone technique.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Theodor Adorno made Alban Berg’s acquaintance June of 1924 at the Frankfurt premiere of the composer’s Three Fragments from Wozzeck, and decided to study with him thereafter. Aside from Berg, Vienna’s musical legacy, aesthetics, and the lure of its infamous intellectual circles drew Adorno to the city in 1925, after completing the requirements for his PhD, before beginning his Habilitation. He wanted to spend time developing his skills as a composer and pianist, practicing the avant-garde aesthetics

he admired – and to take stock, to explore whether a career as a composer was even a

possibility. Prior to his stay in Vienna Adorno was already a composer, already a music

critic, and already an intellectual figure to be reckoned with.

But there was something about Berg’s music that appealed to Adorno’s aesthetic

sensibilities. It was this point that drew me into this topic. What was it about Berg’s

music that made Adorno choose him as a composition teacher? But even further I have

been striving to formulate answers to the question: How exactly did Adorno translate

musical ideas into philosophy, or philosophy into musical ideas?

After all, he writes to Berg, when discussing the essay he was writing for the

premiere of Wozzeck, stating: “my most secret intention was to make the essay’s use of

language correspond directly to the way in which you compose, for example in the

quartet. This gave rise to a curious encounter between your manner of composition and

my current intellectual stance.”1 The Wozzeck essay is not the only place in Adorno’s

writings on Berg where the philosopher links the way he writes to the way Berg

1 Theodor Adorno and Alban Berg, Correspondence 1925-1935, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 28. Adorno writes this to Berg November 23, 1925.

composes. The curious encounter is where I began my research, examining the crossroads between philosophy and composition, particularly the place where these two fields join in Adorno’s writings on Berg.

Throughout my dissertation I connect two overarching arguments. First, I argue that Adorno saw Berg’s method of composition, particularly composition with twelve tones, as analogous to his own ideas for a new approach to dialectic thought, negative dialectics. This aspect is largely neglected in the secondary literature. Carl Dahlhaus, often Adorno’s sharpest critic, might be the one scholar to get close to understanding

Adorno’s use of negative dialectics – or what he calls an open dialectic. In a review of

Adorno’s Berg monograph, published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (January

25,1969), Dahlhaus writes:

Adorno is not capable of wiping off the dialectic, which has shaped his musical as well as his human experiences. But maybe it is not the worst criteria of an open dialectic, which does not recognize itself as a system or as a doctrine of a hardened thinking, whether it is capable of merging to a narrative, without revealing its philosophical character and demand, or not. In memories about Berg, which in Adorno’s book stands at the place of a biography, the narrative (Bericht) and the conceptual construction interlace.2

2 Carl Dahlhaus, “Errinerung und Reflexion: Theodor W. Adorno über Alban Berg” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 25, 1969.

(The translation is my own.)

Und der Bergsche Ton, der manchmal an Mahler erinnert, ist denn auch das Zentrum, um das die Reflexionen und Analysen in Theodor W. Adornos Buch, der ersten wahrhaft adäquaten Monographie über den Komponisten, kreisen. Versenkt man sich in Bergs Musik, so ist es einem manchmal, als spräche seine Stimme mit einem aus Zartheit, Nihlismus und Vertrauen ins Hinfälligste gemischten Klang: nun ja, eigentlich ist alles überhaupt nichts.

Adorno vermag die Dialektik, von der auch seine primären Erfahrungen, die musikalischen ebenso wie die menschlichen, bereits geprägt sind, niemals abzustreifen. Aber vielleicht ist es nicht das schlechteste Kriterium einer Dialektik, die sich als offenes nicht zum System oder zur Doktrin verhärtetes Denken begreift, ob sie in Erzählung überzugehen vermag, ohne ihren philosophischen Charakter und Anspruch preiszugeben. In den Erinnerungen an Berg, die in Adornos Buch an der Stelle einer Biographie stehen, verschränken sich Bericht und begriffliche Konstruktion: Die unmittelbare Nähe zu Berg, der Adornos

Dahlhaus recognized that Adorno used his own negative dialectics as a model for analysis. A feature of negative dialectics is a mode of thinking or analysis that is anti- systematic, implying it is without the expectations of ideology, or a school of thought.

The second point, I argue that from his first writing on Berg, Adorno worked to craft a narrative of Berg, to establish his identity as an autonomous composer; this resulted in his monograph Alban Berg, Master of the Smallest Link. Yet scholars do not address the significance of Berg in Adorno’s writing and thought. Even Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey, editors and translators of the monograph don’t regard the book as having great significance beyond Adorno’s personal recollections of Berg.

By positing these two connected arguments, I come to the conclusion that Berg’s music and Adorno’s analyses thereof manifest themselves into Adorno’s most

significant musical concepts and books: particularly his concept of composition with

twelve tones, new music, and negative dialectics. Adorno’s Berg-influenced ideas make

their way into the infamous dialectic between Schoenberg and Stravinsky in Philosophy

of New Music. As I demonstrate, even Adorno’s most original contribution to

philosophy—his concept of negative dialectics—which would later develop into lectures

and a book of the same title, emerged from his conception of modern music, in

particular composition with twelve tones, as early as 1926.

My dissertation is the first to address Adorno’s application of negative dialectics,

to music criticism. Indeed, PoNM would not have been viable if Adorno had not

formulated his conception of negative dialectics concurrent to learning Berg’s music and

the possibilities of the twelve-tone technique.

Lehrer und Freund gewesen ist, wird durch Reflexion zugleich bewahrt und so weit aufgehoben, daß sie ohne Peinlichkeit mitteilbar wird.

Negative Dialectics

First, I would like to address negative dialectics, the idea – made famous in the

1966 book of the same name. Adorno writes a definition of negative dialectics in his first

lecture on the subject, in 1965.

“A rather meager, formal definition is that it sets out to be a philosophical project that does not presuppose the identity of being and thought, nor does it culminate in that identity. Instead it will attempt to articulate the very opposite, namely the divergence of concept and thing, subject and object, and their reconciled state.”3

He goes on to highlight one of the key elements of negative dialectics, and the element

crucial to linking the philosophical project with Berg, “the concept of contradiction will

play a central role here, more particularly, the contradiction in things themselves,

contradiction in the concept, not contradiction between concepts.”4

Negative dialectics provides a new way of thinking, a changed philosophy as

Adorno calls it, or multiple modes of thinking, thinking in thought models. It can provide

meaningful analysis without dissolving into absolutes. Or as Adorno writes:

A changed philosophy [negative dialectics] itself would be infinite in the sense of scorning solidification in a body of enumerable theorems. Its substance would lie in the diversity of objects that impinge upon it and of the objects it seeks, a diversity not wrought by any schema.5

His changed philosophy, allows a diversity of interpretations to any given object. But

more than that it works to understand the residues of concepts as they go into their

3 Adorno, Lecture 1 “The Concept of Contradiction” 9 Nov 1965, Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008), 6.

4 Adorno, Lecture 1, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, 7.

5 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 13.

objects.6 Thus multiple elements, multiple concepts, and multiple objects can be

analyzed using thought models to understand experience.

Negative Dialectics is at its core a critique of systems, systems in Adorno’s

parlance is synonymous with dogmatic or ideological ways of thinking. Thinking in

models is a way to combat systematic thought. It allows multiple philosophical and

analytical methods to be held in concert, or to be used as appropriate for a given topic.

The demand for system-less engagement is the demand for thought models. These thought models are not merely monadological. The model satisfies the specific and [also] exceeds the specific without it vanishing into a generic concept. Thinking philosophically is tantamount to thinking in models; an aggregate of the analyses of these models is negative dialectics.7

Adorno asks that we consider multiple models, and not search for an origin in a

monadological approach. From Negative Dialectics we know that what he means by a

monadological approach is akin to dogmatism. In ND Adorno has particularly emphatic

warnings against the dangers of dogmatic, or ideological thought. Thinking in multiple

models asserts that thinking philosophically requires networks of understanding to avoid

thought or concepts that become an absolute unit, a simple being. The key to Adorno’s

warning is the phrase “merely monadological;” he uses the idea of the monad, here and

elsewhere, to warn against oversimplification. This idea also serves as a warning

against falling victim to dogmatic thought.

6 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 4-7.

7 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, GS band 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag), 36.

This translation my own.

Die Forderung nach Verbindlichkeit ohne System ist die nach Denkmodellen. Diese sind nicht bloß monadologische Art. Das Modell trifft das Spezifische und mehr als das Spezifische, ohne es in seinen allgemeineren Oberbegriff zu verflüchtigen. Philosophisch denken ist soviel wie in Modellen denken; negative Dialektik ein Ensemble von Modellanalysen.

Anti-system thinking, that which avoids universal concepts, as it is presented in

ND, is also linked to Adorno’s dismissal of ideological thought and practices. Ideology is linked to empirical or positivistic ideology, not a liberal ideology.8 The type of ideological

thinking Adorno was critiquing in his works was a version more akin to our

contemporary understanding, a definition of which was set forth by Marx and Engels in

The German Ideology.9 Marx and Engels suggest that ideology “represents the

production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness” that all people “say, imagine,

conceive” to include laws, morality, religion, cultural constructions, and metaphysics.

Ideology serves as a governing force of a ruling class to make it appear natural.10 For

Adorno (positivist) ideology became a confirmation of reality by its duplication, it no

longer had any truth of its own.11 In other words, thinking, objects, systems or styles that

maintain the necessity of their existence because they exist are dogmatic and non-

speculative. While this idea is expressed in its most “mature” state in the 1966 book, as

previously discussed, Adorno works out this idea from as early as 1925. One way to

approach analysis of concepts and objects requires the thought-models be based in experience of the specific object as well as in theory.12

8 Deborah Cook, “Adorno Ideology, and Ideology Critique,” Philosophy Social Criticism 27 (2001). Here Cook parses different definitions and usages of ideology.

9 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology Part One, with Selections from Parts Two and Three (New York: International Publishers, 2001).

10 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 47.

11 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (London: New Left Books, 1974), 211.

12 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 31.

Negative dialectics is a philosophical idea that transforms and critiques Hegelian dialectics. Figure 1-1 shows a model of the Hegelian dialectic – the conflict between thesis and antithesis that resolves to a unity or Absolute Truth.

Figure 1-1. Illustration of three-step Hegelian dialectical process.

Negative Dialectics does not seek the absolute truth or a universal, as the Hegelian

outcome requires. Adorno proposed an idea that would retain the identities of the

contraries, this in turn represents a shift from the Hegelian totality or unity of identities.13

In Figure 1-2 we can see a representation of Adorno’s ND. In Adorno’s negative

dialectics, a synthesis is not as important, and does not necessarily unify the elements,

but recognizes that the thesis is irreducibly different from the antithesis, and the

“reconciliation” process allows the two to remain different from one another, but also

dependent on one another.

13 Alison Stone, “Adorno and Logic,” in Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts, ed. Deborah Cook (Stocksfield, UK: Acumen Press, 2008): 47-62; Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998).

Figure 1-2. General model of Adorno’s negative dialectics.

It is this idea that informs Adorno’s concept of composition with twelve tones, as based

on Berg’s music, but not totally excluding other versions of the technique.

Adorno’s Berg

Adorno understood Berg’s method of composition analogous to his own ideas for

a new approach to dialectic thought, negative dialectics. While Adorno’s negative

dialectics has been understood as part of his late works, as this dissertation examines

Theodor Adorno’s musical-philosophical thought owes much to the relationship with

Alban Berg and Berg’s music. Indeed, Adorno introduces a prototype of negative

dialectics in a letter to Berg from August 1926, at the end of his study with Berg. In the

letter he discussed his conceptions of twelve-tone music as a product of both his

analytical study and compositional work with the composer.14

In an extraordinary letter Adorno offers not only an insight into his thinking about

the compositional praxis of twelve-tone techniques, but also an early application of

negative dialectics to his explanation of composition with twelve tones. This letter is

14 His analysis and work with the technique was for a forthcoming essay on twelve-tone technique for Frankfurter Zeitung, published later, in 1927.

from August, 19, 1926. Adorno explains some ideas on twelve-tone compostion to Berg based on an analysis of Scheonberg’s Wind Quintet op. 26.

I refuse to accept that it should be forbidden, bad or ‘willful’ to write something like the end of the 5th orchestral piece (Schoenberg’s op. 16). As a regulative for keeping away tonally cadential residues, the twelve- tone technique is necessary in its lucid rationality, and appeared at its own rightful time. But it cannot and should not dictate a positive compositional canon. This is why I currently believe: that there is only a ‘negative’ dodecaphony, being the utmost rational borderline case of dissolution of tonality (even when tonal elements appear within dodecaphony; for then they, as a construction, are coincidental in their tonality, being simply dictated by the row!). Positive dodecaphony as a guarantee of music’s capacity for the continuation of objectivity does not exist [Adorno’s emphases].15

Strikingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, Adorno criticizes the rigidity of Schoenberg’s

“rules,” warning that such a system should not lead to a compositional canon. Adorno’s

invocation of positive and negative dodecaphony recalls other philosophical usages of

the two terms. Positive dodecaphony implies that the dodecaphony could lead to some

sort of collective or authoritarian control over the act of composition; Adorno warns that

this type of compositional thinking could lead to a “positive compositional canon.”16 This

criticism of a mode of thinking about composition is related to the idea of a “school” of

composition centered on Schoenberg. The danger of a school of composition, for

Adorno, is that internal factors affect the degree to which individuals act autonomously.

Adorno warns as early as 1925 of the dangers of calling the circle surrounding

15 Adorno and Berg, Correspondence 1925-1935, 71-2.

16 This choice of terminology recalls writers discussing freedom, positive or negative freedom or liberty, particularly Kant in Critique of Pure Reason, as described and analyzed later by Isaiah Berlin in relation to political philosophy. As stated in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of one's life and realize one's fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.”

Schoenberg a school; he writes, “to speak of an Arnold Schoenberg School, misjudges the truth, the truth of the compositional instruction otherwise perhaps as coming from the works.”17 Using these terms he puts forth a judgment of the methods of composing

twelve-tone music and their development into standards for composition or

compositional canons.

The concept of composition with twelve tones he puts forth is one of the earliest

instances of negative dialectics, which allowed Adorno to defend Berg’s work against

Schoenberg’s criticisms. Schoenberg’s 1946 recollection summarizes his critiques of

the composer’s methods of composing.

I have to admit that Alban Berg, who was perhaps the least orthodox of us three—Webern, Berg and I—in his operas mixed parts of pieces of a distinct tonality with those which were distinctly non-tonal. He explained this, apologetically, by contending that as an opera composer he could not for reasons of dramatic expression and characterization, renounce the contrast furnished by a change from major to minor. Though he was right as a composer, he was wrong theoretically.18

But for Adorno, seeing the interaction behind tonality and twelve-tone composition

under negative dialectics it would not be wrong for a composer to explore the properties

and possibilities of the twelve-tone technique so that it could yield “tonal elements.”

From his initial engagement with Berg’s music, Adorno found in it a direct

correlation between his own dialectical thought and Berg’s musical structures. By

examining Adorno’s relationship with Berg it is possible to understand the allusions to

Berg’s teachings in Adorno’s writings and the role they play in the development of his

dialectical approach to the philosophy of music. Berg’s music was essential in the

17 Theodor Adorno, “Alban Berg, Zur Uraufführung des Wozzeck,” in Theodor W. Adorno Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt: Surhkamp Verlag, 2003), 462.

18 Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley: University of California Press), 244-5.

development of Adorno’s concepts of new music, composition with twelve-tones, and his musical aesthetics. It led to Adorno’s seminal methods of music criticism as well as his major philosophical works. The musical logic Adorno learned from Berg through composition lessons and analytical exercises prompted him to apply the logic of composition to philosophical thought.

In his writings on music, Adorno argues that a work should be understood on its own terms, not measured against a school of thought or according to expectations for a genre or style. This idea was particularly apt in discussing Berg’s music because Berg’s

music had been judged based on its deviations from the Schoenbergian model. In his

first publication on Berg, “Alban Berg, Zur Uraufführung des ‚Wozzeck’,” (1925) Adorno

criticized the concept of a “Schoenberg School,” arguing that Wozzeck should be

understood on its own terms.

Although Adorno studied composition with the Berg in Vienna for only a brief

period between 1925 and 1926, they maintained a strong relationship through

correspondence and occasional meetings until Berg’s death in 1935. Indeed, my

research demonstrates that, from their initial engagement, Berg played a critical role in

the development Adorno’s philosophy of music and musical aesthetics.

Berg’s contemporaries called him a composer rooted in the past, a romantic,

which became a common trope in the historical narrative of the composer.19 Berg’s

music, particularly his twelve-tone compositions, did not fit within the Schoenbergian

models of composition. In 1946, Schoenberg wrote of Berg that he was “perhaps the

19 See, for example: Hans Redlich, Alban Berg: The Man and His Music (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1957). This book is, as Redlich writes, “a transcription and condensation” of his earlier book Alban Berg- Versuch einer Würdigung.

least orthodox” of the three Second Viennese School composers.20 About Berg’s use of

tonality within twelve-tone works, he goes on to say, that “though [Berg] was right as a

composer, he was wrong theoretically.21 While expressed in the 1940s, this sentiment

was the prevailing notion of Berg. René Leibowitz, champion of the Schoenberg School,

performing and writing about the works throughout the twentieth century, wrote of

Berg’s tonal elements in twelve-tone composition, that his method was “the most radical

way of creating a firm bond between Schoenberg’s work and the past.”22

The prevailing notion of Berg the romantic may have started in the 1920s and

30s, but continued throughout the 1970s and 80s, an era which saw some of the most

sophisticated theoretical analyses of Berg’s music in the literature. Douglas Jarman,

George Perle, and David Headlam all reveal the intricate workings of Berg’s pre-

compositional work, including row structures, derivational processes, cycles, and tropes.

These seminal figures play into the now established convention of labeling Berg’s music

as romantic, eclectic, historicist, or idiosyncratic to justify his style as it relates to the

Schoenbergian technique. Jarman writes, “Berg’s music belongs emotionally to the

world of late nineteenth-century romanticism and its melodic and harmonic language is

more reminiscent of that of earlier tonal music than is the music of Schoenberg and

Webern.”23

20 The Second Viennese School composers were: Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), Anton Webern (1883- 1945), and Alban Berg (1885-1935).

21 Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea, 244-5.

22 René Leibowitz, Schoenberg and His School: The Contemporary Stage of the Language of Music, trans. Dika Newlin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), 162.

23 Douglas Jarman, The Music of Alban Berg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 2.

More recent scholarship has sought to understand Berg’s identity as more than a product of Schoenbergian techniques, and examine what other influences were important to forming Berg’s compositional language. Arved Ashby has brought attention to the false dichotomy of a Schoenbergian system of twelve-tone composition as opposed to Hauer’s version of composing with twelve tones. Ashby draws attention to the multiple versions of composition with twelve tones in the compositional culture during the twenties, and notes that while Berg knew the Schoenbergian technique, he was in fact influenced by the twelve-tone theories of his own student Fritz Klein.24 This

work redraws important elements of the historical narrative, revising the fallacy of a

Schoenberg centered compositional life. More recently Silvio dos Santos has presented

a new way of understanding of Berg’s identity as constructed autobiographical

narratives in his works, particularly Lulu among others.25 One key feature of this work is

a new understanding the Wagnerian references and allusions in Berg’s works; dos

Santos argues that Berg constructed elements of his life and works to resemble

Wagner’s characters and personal relationships.

Each of these authors, from Perle and Jarman to Ashby and Hailey, use

Adorno’s writings about Berg to further understand or justify the aspects of Berg’s music

and identity that they are expanding upon. Adorno’s thought, because of his in-depth

understanding of Berg’s music, offers a link to the most difficult elements of Berg’s

music and personality. It is no coincidence that in the same year Adorno studied with

24 See Arved Ashby, “Of Modell Typen and Reihen Formen: Berg, Schoenberg, F. H. Klein, and the Concept of Row Derivation,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 48 (1995): 67-105; Arved Ashby, “The Development of Berg’s Twelve-Tone Aesthetic as Seen in the Lyric Suite and Its Sources,” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1995).

25 Silvio J. dos Santos, Narratives of Identity in Alban Berg’s ‘Lulu’ (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2014).

Berg was the period in which Berg was adopting his own method of composing with

twelve tones. Berg’s “Schließe mir die Augen beide” and the Lyric Suite were composed

between 1925-26.26

His idiosyncratic musical language allowed Adorno to experience the dialectical

processes he advocated, and then express these experiences through writing but also

in composition. Adorno took so much aesthetic understanding from his studies with

Berg. Adorno’s practical engagement, through lessons and active composition after his

stay in Vienna, shaped his detailed understanding of how Berg’s music worked, but also

informed his ideals of what new music could and should be. By analyzing Adorno’s

works on their own terms, it is possible to understand how he workout his own

aesthetics in composition. It is crucial to see Adorno as a subject and ask the question:

what does it mean to be a subject? Adorno was learning how to “do” atonal composition

and his understanding of this was mediated through analysis.

From his earliest writings on Berg, Adorno crafts a method for explaining

dialectical interplay in music and as a mode of criticism of music. As he honed his

compositional language with Berg, learning Berg’s version of the twelve-tone

techniques, he also began to shape his conception of the twelve-tone techniques on

what he learned from Berg and Berg’s music. Adorno’s numerous and consistent

references to Berg in other essays reveal a greater understanding of how his training

with Berg played a larger role in his philosophical writings. Indeed, it becomes clear that

26 For varied analyses of these works in light of Berg’s twelve-tone procedures see: Arved Ashby, “The Development of Berg’s Twelve-Tone Aesthetic as Seen in the Lyric Suite and Its Sources” (PhD Diss., Yale University 1995); Silvio J. dos Santos, Narratives of Identity in Alban Berg’s ‘Lulu’ (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2014), Patricia Hall, A View of Berg's ‘Lulu’ Through the Autograph Sources (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); David Headlam, The Music of Alban Berg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); George Perle, Style and Idea in the Lyric Suite of Alban Berg 2nd ed. (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2001).

his conception of new music relied on Berg and his music; not on Schoenberg as is commonly presumed.

In his letters, early essays, and documents Adorno left some relevant evidence that shows the way he perceived Berg’s music and affected the development of one of his most mature ideas, negative dialectics. In the 1920s Adorno understood Berg’s

music in a way that took scholars decades, and new analytical tools, to understand. It is possible to view Adorno’s late philosophical thought as an elaboration of several aspects of his early musical training with Berg—these include his conceptions of contradiction, experience, discontinuity, progress and regress and history, as well as concepts of negative dialectics and metaphysics. The concept of contradiction, inherent in dialectic logic, is particularly important to Adorno’s writings on Berg. Berg is one of six composers who Adorno subjects to dialectical logic in book length studies, the others include Wagner, Mahler, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Beethoven.27 He addresses

progressive and regressive elements in each of these composers; yet, only Berg

survives the criticisms, earning a tone of deference and admiration. Berg’s music

created problems for Adorno’s logic, particularly when the philosopher tried to justify

aspects of Berg’s music that he would normally condemn in any other composer.

My reevaluation of Adorno’s theories is based on an examination of his early

writings on music, published between 1921 and 1925, to show a shift in style from

before and after his work with Berg. I also examine Adorno’s writings and compositions

in published and manuscript forms. With this information it is possible to reinterpret

27 Theodor W. Adorno, Die musikalischen Monographien (Versuch über Wagner; Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik; Berg: Der Master des kleinsten Übergangs), Gesammelte Schriften vol. 13 eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971). Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik, Gesammelte Schriften vol. 12 eds. Rolf Tiedemann, Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975).

Adorno’s later works, particularly Philosophy of New Music (1949/2006),28 Negative

Dialektik (1966),29 and Alban Berg, Master of the Smallest Link (1968/1994).30

Published in 1949, PoNM is considered an early work, the excursus to Dialectic of

Enlightenment (1944/47),31 and is a product of Adorno’s musical study and criticism,

which he began as a teenager and continued in earnest throughout his life.32 Neither of

these important works, DoE nor PoNM, could have been conceived without his study in

Vienna and engagement with the musical, intellectual, and publishing circles in that

city.33 ND and Alban Berg, Master of the Smallest Link (1968) are late works, products

of his life’s work.

The goal of this dissertation is to show that Berg’s music and Adorno’s analyses thereof manifest themselves into his most significant musical concepts, such as his

infamous dialectic between Schoenberg and Stravinsky in PoNM. As I demonstrate,

even Adorno’s most original contribution to philosophy—his concept of negative

dialectics—which would later develop into lectures and a book of the same title,

emerged from his conception of modern music in particular twelve-tone techniques as

28 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

29 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Band 6, Theodor W. Adorno Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2013).

30 Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg, Master of the Smallest Link, trans. Julianne Brand and Christopher Hailey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

31 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

32 Throughout this dissertation I will use published translations when available and reliable, and thus refer to those text in English. When working from a text either not translated or not reliably translated I will use the German title, and all translations are my own. Navid Bargrizan has helped me with difficult translations, but any mistakes are my own. From this point I will use the following abbreviations for Philosophy of New Music (PoNM), Negative Dialektik (ND), and Dialectic of Enlightenment (DoE).

33 This is not to discount the other circles and relationships that Adorno maintained during this time, all of which play into his output.

early as 1926. My dissertation is the first to address Adorno’s application of negative dialectics, often considered to be a concept that emerged late in Adorno’s life, to music criticism as early as 1925. Indeed, PoNM would not have been viable if Adorno had not formulated his conception of negative dialectics according to his understanding of

Berg’s music and the possibilities of the twelve-tone technique.

Approaches to Adorno’s Writings on Music in the Literature

That there is a vast amount of secondary literature devoted to Adorno and his thought is an understatement. Yet Adorno’s work on music still receives less attention than other topics. First, I will address how this project expands upon the scholarly literature on Adorno’s musical aesthetics, which in turn will also address common approaches to Adorno’s relationship to Berg, and Adorno as a composer.

My research would have been nearly impossible without Rose Subotnik and Max

Paddison’s contributions to the musicological literature on Adorno. Subotnik brought

Adorno’s methods of criticism to the forefront of American musicology at a time when critical theory was not a mainstay. The essays included in Developing Variations at once make a case for what Adorno’s style of music criticism has to offer to musicology, all the while using Adorno’s methods to formulate her own critiques and readings.34 She

sees Adorno’s method as an attempt at establishing a connection between music and

his readers; Adorno was “trying to remove music from its technical isolation and

reintegrate it into a totality of human relationships.”35 This perspective greatly informs

the way I approach Adorno’s relationship with Berg. While the literature on Berg often

34 Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

35 Subotnik, Developing Variations, 41.

mentions Adorno in passing before addressing technical analysis, authors of the literature on Adorno often ignore Berg all together. Bringing back the importance of this human relationship with musical analysis will enliven Adorno’s writings and philosophy.

It is common to approach Adorno’s writings to analyze the concepts he addresses as part of a larger critique or analysis of his aesthetic, philosophical, historical, or sociological perspective. Max Paddison’s work is invaluable to understanding the thinker’s aesthetics and modes of critique on a large-scale level.

Paddison’s book, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, uses a method informed by Adorno’s own mode of critique to analyze the concepts and ideas that make up Adorno’s aesthetics of art generally and of music specifically.36 As the title suggests, the work

takes into account, and analyzes or explains, a number of Adorno’s concepts but mainly

from the perspective of his major works Philosophy of New Music, Aesthetic Theory,

and many essays to include those on Schoenberg and Berg. Viewed from the

perspective of Adorno’s writings, regardless of time written or conceived, as well as

from deep within any given work Paddison pulls the relevant “force fields” of Adorno’s

thought out for contemplation and to examine relations between fields.

Paddison does briefly examine Adorno’s relationship with Berg and Berg’s music

as a biographical introduction and within the text, but as in other texts on Adorno and

music, the focus is on Adorno’s critiques of Schoenberg among other composers. With

the ideas Paddison presents it is possible to proceed in a different manner, as I will,

examining Adorno’s texts as historical documents and how concepts or “force fields”

come out as a part of their history and experience.

36 Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Philosophy of New Music is important to the Adornian force-fields Paddison analyzes, even if it is not an overt explication of that specific work. Paddison highlights that Adorno’s philosophy aims to contextualize, not define concepts and thus to problematize the concepts is to interpret them. He notes that some of the ideas that develop in Philosophy of New Music come out of earlier essays, those of the early 20s, but he does not elaborate on these developments. His discussion of Adorno’s dialectical method is significant because he claims that the critique in PoNM offers no resolution, it betrays its Hegelian structure. This is one of the major points I will contend with in the following chapters. While Paddison offers keen insights on the dialectic method, and particularly the role of mediation in Adorno’s writing, he does not ask the question: if

Adorno’s dialectic in PoNM does not offer any resolution, why might this be?

In his chapter, in Apparitions: New Perspectives on Adorno and Twentieth-

Century Music, Daniel Chua addresses one of the main misunderstandings of Adorno’s

PoNM. Chua’s work is essential because it calls into question the common interpretation of PoNM as a failed dialectic. The Darmstadt composers and theorists who lauded Adorno’s work as a “theoretical and philosophical legitimation for their experiments with multiple serialism,” missed the dialectical movement in Adorno’s critique.37 Chua develops a critique of Philosophy of New Music that is reliant upon knowledge of the dialectical play at all levels; in particular, he acknowledges Adorno’s intense critique of Schoenberg throughout the first half of the book. Chua reads PoNM as an appendix to the DoE, drawing analogies between Odysseus in DoE and

Schoenberg and Stravinsky in PoNM. His analysis examines how Adorno addresses

37 See Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 265.

subjectivity and objectivity in both composers without starting from a point that gives preference to either Schoenberg or Stravinsky. Chua argues for a “negative state” throughout the chapter, because through Adorno’s dialectics neither composer “wins” out as more truthful and the two cannot be subsumed into sameness. Because they cannot construct “new” works both composers constructed works out of a longing for the new.

Adorno scholars often analyze the abstract concepts or ideas developed in the philosopher’s writings, in some cases making abstract ideas even more removed from their subject. Richard Leppert, like Subotnik, focuses on the fact that Adorno’s musical criticism is “defined by what is specifically musical,” all the while providing critical commentary on how Adorno’s critiques of society, modernity, and technique manifest themselves.38 But scholars writing about Adorno’s work on Berg differ from those writing

more generally about Adorno’s musical aesthetics in that they do bring the technical

analysis back to human relations, to adapt Subotnik’s phrase. Paddison addresses the

importance of Berg’s music on Adorno’s writings in order to raise problems with

Adorno’s approach to musical analysis. Taking Adorno’s critique of Berg’s Sonata op. 1

as a case study of Adorno’s analytical style, Paddison comes to the conclusion that

Adorno’s essay does not shed light on Berg’s music and that Adorno does not approach

analysis from a technical or systematic perspective.39 Throughout his book Paddison often uses Adorno’s writings on Berg to emphasize that while Adorno asserts key ideas about modernist music through his analysis of Berg, the actual analyses are

38 Richard Leppert, “Commentary: Composition, Composers, and Works,” in Essays on Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 515.

39 Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 159-169.

unsatisfactory. I use Paddison’s critiques and ideas to understand what aspects of

Berg’s music helped Adorno formulate key concepts.

There is also a tendency in Adorno scholarship to claim that most of Adorno’s major concepts are “fully formed,” thus few authors trace ideas from earliest forms to see their growth and potential origins.40 Consequently, scholars rely on Adorno’s

Gesammelte Schriften and other published editions. As I will show, the materials in

Adorno’s archive are vital to understanding the development of his music criticism as well as philosophical ideas such as negative dialectics. Stefan Müller-Doohm’s monumental Adorno biography is a vital addition to the literature, but, at times, when dealing with Adorno’s life in the 1920s he tends to conflate ideas Adorno published much later (1960s) within the biographical sketch, as though the later ideas are evident in the extant early sources. This is dangerous because while Adorno’s own reflections are likely trustworthy, they are also colored with conceptual ideas he is working with at any given moment.

Key Concepts

Crucial to this study is contextualizing the problems and questions that led to the year of apprenticeship with Berg and Adorno’s lifelong work on the composer. To do so

I will introduce key concepts here that are important to understanding Adorno’s writings and ideas on musical subjects as they are integral to the arguments in following chapters. Adorno’s writing is intentionally difficult. He constructed his texts in such a

40 See, for example: Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Stefan Müller- Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005); or Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

way as to resist quotation, summary, and uncritical exploitation.41 Beneath the surface

of Adorno’s writings is a complex, interconnected web of aesthetic, philosophical,

historical, social, cultural, and political concepts. As I proceed throughout this

dissertation I subject Adorno’s ideas to a critical examination, acknowledging that

separating out ideas to analyze them leaves remainders behind, unexamined. It is

difficult to fully separate the key ideas for this dissertation precisely because Adorno’s

thought was written or conceived as constellations; ideas share concepts. The key

ideas are: truth content, dialectics, concepts, progress, history, and narrative.

Adorno approached musical works from a philosophical perspective to

understand the truth content (Wahrheitsgehalt). Artistic truth is dialectical; each art

work, for Adorno, has its own internal truth because of an internal dialectic between

content (Inhalt) and form (Form).42 To judge the truth content one must analyze both the

artwork’s complex internal dynamic and the dynamics of the socio-historical totality to

which the artwork belongs.43 In Philosophy of New Music, as well as his writings on

Berg, Adorno calls for an approach to the works that does not subsume them into genre

or style categories, because the truth or untruth is not found in explications categories

rather in the structure of the music itself.44

To judge the truth content of a work Adorno used dialectics to examine the

internal and external dynamics. Adorno’s dialectic is rooted in the Hegelian system,

41 The introductions to nearly every secondary source on Adorno address the difficulty of Adorno’s writing and the issue of translation. Please see, particularly: Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 13-15.

42 Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991),

43 Zuidervaart, Lambert, "Theodor W. Adorno", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2015), accessed 9 January 2016, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/entries/adorno/.

44 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 8

although he does break from the Hegelian tradition with his own concept of negative dialectics. As an overview, Hegel’s dialectics served the pursuit of truth, philosophical truth that recognized contradiction as a part of the whole. The three key component parts are the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Every thesis contains its own antithesis, a contradiction, defined by a negation of the affirmation and differentiation. The thesis,

Leppert explains, “is dogmatic (as it were received wisdom), antithesis is skeptical, and structured by ‘negative reason.’”45 The synthesis is where the dialectic turns positive

again, resolving the skepticism and negation is overcome. Resolving dialectics to a

whole or, a predetermined truth is dogmatic for Adorno, and this is where he breaks

from Hegel. “Adorno’s dialectic,” Martin Jay writes, “was unremittingly hostile to the

moment of triumphant reconciliation that traditionally capped a dialectic process.”46 The

hostility to reconciliation is most clearly seen in PoNM where Adorno does not offer a

resolution between the two structural, dialectical, poles of the book (Schoenberg and

Stravinsky). Adorno, as I will discuss throughout the dissertation, puts forward a

different kind of dialectic, which relates to his understanding of contradictions in music,

Berg’s music in particular.

“A successful work,” Adorno writes, “is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradiction, pure and uncompromised, in its inner most structure.”47 This phrase, alluding to negative dialectics, can be turned around back to

45 Leppert, “Introduction,” in Essays on Music, 35.

46 Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 15.

47 Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 32.

Adorno to understand the construction of PoNM. Adorno retained elements of the

Hegelian dialectic, particularly the thesis and antithesis. His significant change is that the synthesis would retain the identities of the contraries, this in turn represents a shift from the Hegelian totality or unity of identities.48 In Adorno’s negative dialectics, a

synthesis does not necessarily unify the elements, but recognizes that the thesis is

irreducibly different from the antithesis, and the “reconciliation” process allows the two

to remain different from one another, but also dependent on one another. Adorno

proposed, in the previous quotation, that contradictions should be embodied in a work,

his own and art works.

Woven into Adorno’s quest to find the truth content of a piece of music, via a

dialectical construction or analysis, are concepts. The concept, for Adorno, is the result

of dialectical thinking. As Max Paddison writes, the concept is, “neither the abstract

universal nor the concrete particular, but instead a product of the interaction of the two,

which serves fleetingly to reveal the complex relations between the part and the

whole.”49 If we translate this to Adorno’s musical writings it is possible to argue that

Adorno formed a concept of composition with twelve tones based on his dialectical

analysis of works. This concept goes beyond a mere definition of the technique as

developed by Schoenberg and adherence to its rules, and is able to change based on

experiences with analyses of other works. Concepts, for Adorno, should not become

universals, or dogmatic, but outcomes of the dialectic, that will be mutable as a result of

contradictions. In Negative Dialectics Adorno writes:

48 Stone, “Adorno and Logic,” 47-62; Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998).

49 Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 15.

No object is wholly known; knowledge is not supposed to prepare the phantasm of a whole. Thus the goal of a philosophical interpretation of works of art cannot be their identification with the concept, their absorption in the concept; yet it is through such interpretation that the truth of the work unfolds. What can be envisioned, however—whether as the regularly continued abstraction or as an application of the concepts to whatever comes under their definition.50

Understanding objects in the face of concepts is key Adorno’s musical writings, but also

to understanding his modes of analysis.

One concept essential to Adorno’s writings on art and music is progress

(Fortschritt). While this term has Hegelian implications, Adorno means technical

progress of an artwork. In “Fortschritt” (1964) he writes: “All progress in the cultural

sphere is that of domination of material, of technique…Progress in the domination of

material is in no sense identical to the progress of art itself.”51 The notion of technical

progress is woven into Adorno’s analyses of Berg as well as the Schoenberg portion of

PoNM.

Adorno’s philosophy of history and how that informs his narrative methods are

the final two key concepts that link back to unraveling the truth content of an artwork. As

previously stated, to analyze the truth content of a work it must be from both the

perspectives of the internal workings of a piece as well as the socio-historical dynamics.

It is important to note that after World War II Adorno’s philosophy of history is reshaped,

but the ideas he sets for in the 1930s are relevant to the ways in which he approaches

50 Adorno, ND, 14. Erkenntnis hat keinen ihrer Gegenstände ganz inne. Sie soll nicht das Phantasma eines Ganzen bereiten. So kann es nicht die Aufgabe einer philosophischen Interpretation von Kunstwerken sein, ihre Identität mit dem Begriff herzustellen, sie in diesem aufzuzehren; das Werk jedoch entfaltet sich durch sie in seiner Wahrheit. Was dagegen, sei’s als geregelter Fortgang der Abstraktion, sei’s als Anwendung der Begriffe aufs unter ihrer Definition Befaßte, sich absehen läßt, mag als Technik im weitesten Sinn nützlich sein: für Philosophie, die nicht sich einordnet, ist es gleichgültig. (GS, band 6, 25)

51 As included in: Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 113. See: Adorno, “Fortschritt,” in GS 10, 634.

Berg. Before the war, Brian O’Conner claims, “Adorno’s approach to the concept of history might be construed as radical hermeneutics, one that set out to demonstrate the failure of philosophical pretentions to have achieved a totalistic grasp of the world.”52

His conceptions of history dealt with the remainders of German idealist philosophies of

universal history, or philosophies of progress. Generally, universal history presupposes

that time has a particular structure, which Adorno opposed because it related back to

the Hegelian search for the Truth or teleological thought.53 Adorno saw history as

discontinuous, but not an unstructured collection of disconnected events. “The notion of

discontinuity,” Brian O’Conner writes, “tries to capture the idea that events and their

actions are not intelligible simply as moments of time would be, that is as transition

points in between past and future. Events possess a significance – a structure…”54

His philosophy of history is intrinsically linked to understanding and analyzing musical works. Throughout Aesthetic Theory Adorno argues that authentic works of art embrace their historical substance: “history is not external to the work.”55 As I will

discuss in the following chapters Adorno addresses the dialectical strain of history with

Berg’s works in particular. Finding a way to analyze history, progress, and truth content

in Berg’s work Adorno had to contend with the technical aspects of the work as they

played against the socio-historical dynamics of the time. All of the key concepts I

introduced are interrelated and interdependent. As Adorno developed a philosophy of

52 Brian O’Conner, “Philosophy of History,” in Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts, ed. Deborah Cook (Stocksfield, UK: Acumen Press, 2008), 180.

53 O’Conner, “Philosophy of History,” 181.

54 O’Conner, “Philosophy of History,” 182.

55 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 182-3.

music that encompassed musical material and history he also used the music he dealt with as practical, experiential objects to inform his abstract philosophical thought.

Scope and Methodology

This dissertation relies upon primary source analysis, archival research, and

music analysis, to understand the role Alban Berg played in Adorno’s philosophical

thought. Contrary to current scholarly opinion, my research and analysis of unpublished

sources has proven that Adorno’s conceptions of “new music” were strongly based on

Berg’s music and not solely on that of Arnold Schoenberg. By reassessing some of

Adorno’s most famous musicological writings this dissertation will give the community a

new perspective on formative works.

In the five chapters of this dissertation I have focused on grounding my

arguments first, in a singular moment of significance in Adorno’s relationship with Berg,

and then expanding on that pivotal moment to analyze its significance in Adorno’s

thought and writings. Underlying every chapter is the argument that Adorno’s concept of

dialectical analysis was changing with his conceptions of new music in the 1920s,

particularly linked to composition with twelve tones.

Part 1 is historiographical, establishing the story of the relationship between Berg

and Adorno as well as re-examining the narrative Adorno creates of Berg.

Chapter 2 explores the relationship between Adorno and Berg in a pivotal year

between 1925 and 1926. This year was a landmark year for Berg with the completion of

the Lyric Suite and the premiere of Wozzeck, but 1925 also brought some of the most

significant transformations in Adorno’s composition and concepts of music as voiced in

his music criticism. One of the most important contradictions that drew Adorno to Berg’s

music was the combination of two compositional systems: atonality and tonality—the latter pushed to its functional limits.

Compositionally, the early 1920s to 1926 brought major developments in Berg’s compositional techniques, the shift from atonality to twelve-tone composition. It was during this shift in methods and aesthetic that Adorno found Berg’s music most compatible with his own changing aesthetics. The most indicative works of this period

are the atonal Chamber Concerto (1923-5), “Schließe mir die Augen beide” (II) (1925),

Berg’s first and only Schoenbergian twelve-note composition, and the atonal and twelve-tone Lyric Suite (1925-6). Adorno studied the scores Berg was working on as he

was working on them, and was witness to shifts in Berg’s compositional techniques.

Adorno’s own compositional methods were affected by the techniques learned

from Berg. He assimilated atonal techniques from Berg into his own compositions; one

such work that I address is his Two Pieces for String Quartet op. 2 (1925/26). In

addition to assimilating atonal techniques into his own compositions, Adorno’s musico-

philosophical writings are directly related to the compositional and analytical guidance

he received from Berg. As I argue throughout the chapter, Berg’s music and personality

were of seminal importance in the development of Adorno’s musical aesthetics – which

is something commonly overlooked in the secondary literature, such as in important

works by Martin Jay and Max Paddison.

Chapter 3 moves from the starting place of that pivotal year and examines

Adorno’s lifelong writings on Berg. Adorno continually wrote about Berg from 1925 until

his death in 1969. All of Adorno’s writings on Berg are an attempt to construct a

continuous identity of Berg as a composer, to erase the conventional labels of

eclecticism or “Berg the romantic” in order to know how and why the music was constructed the way it was. In 1968 Adorno published his monograph, Alban Berg,

Master of the Smallest Link, which was in some senses a consolidation of Adorno’s writings on the composer. Adorno acknowledged that he adapts older writings for the book, but, that the most important materials are newly written. In this chapter, based on archival evidence, I argue that Adorno had conceived of a monograph on Berg since

1935 but only in the 1960s was able to construct a monograph because it linked his work on negative dialectics to his analyses of Berg.

This chapter is reliant upon previously unexamined manuscripts by Adorno, housed in both the Theodor W. Adorno Archive (Frankfurt or Berlin)56 as well as the

Alban Berg Archive at the Austrian National Library Music Collection in Vienna, I demonstrate that this monograph was planned as early as 1935, but underwent periodic changes, being reshaped until its publication in 1968. By presenting the stages of production for this book we can better understand the processes by which Adorno shaped Berg’s identity as an avant-garde composer and what new ideas he presents from a lifetime’s worth of study.

I interpret Adorno’s narrative of Berg through historian Jörn Rüsen’s conception of historical narration. Historical narration, he writes, “has the general function of orienting practical life in time by mobilizing the memory of temporal experience, by developing a concept of continuity and by stabilizing identity.”57 Adorno uses historical

56 The autograph sources of the Theodor W. Adorno Archive are located in Frankfurt at the Institute for Social Research. The Archive has a partnership with Akademie der Kunst, Walter Benjamin Archive in Berlin and has made photocopies or scans of most of Adorno’s material. I have accessed materials in Frankfurt but the archivists strongly advise researchers use the materials in Berlin because they are easier to access due to institutional operating hours and staff availability.

57 Jörn Rüsen, “Historical Narration: Foundation, Types, Reason,” History and Theory 26 (1987): 90.

narration within the conventions of a musical monograph to orient Berg in his time, all the while establishing Berg’s musical continuity – the idea of the “smallest link.”

Subsequently he stabilizes Berg’s identity by presenting a new mode of analysis that

challenges prevailing views of Berg.

While Part 1 analyzes the historiographical narrative of Adorno’s relationship with

Berg, Part 2 analyzes how negative dialectics is related to Berg’s method of composition with twelve tones. Knowing how Adorno conceived of the technique, and used it to formulate a concept of new music I then apply this knowledge to an analysis of Philosophy of New Music. I come to the conclusion that that seminal text uses

negative dialectics as its underlying mode of analysis.

How did Adorno find a direct correlation between dialectical thought and music?

Berg’s music offered conflict and tension between opposing systems (tonality and

atonality, eventually including twelve-tone techniques). The conflicts inherent in Berg’s

music were not musical or dialectical failures but elements that did not need synthesis

or reconciliation from a system, nor did they need “unity.” One concept Adorno develops to further deal with the conflict and tension, corresponding to his time studying composition with Berg, is a prototype of negative dialectics; this system does not require homogenous resolution of two objects, as a Hegelian model might.

In 1926 Adorno introduced to Berg a new way of conceptualizing composition with twelve tones. He wrote:

I currently believe: that there is only a ‘negative’ dodecaphony, being the utmost rational borderline case of dissolution of tonality (even when tonal elements appear within dodecaphony; for then they, as a construction, are coincidental in their tonality, being simply dictated by the row!) Positive

dodecaphony as a guarantee of music’s capacity for the continuation of objectivity does not exist [Adorno’s emphases].58

This view, that dodecaphony could encompass more than just Schoenberg’s version of the technique, offers a more inclusive view of what composition with twelve tones could be. Adorno’s concept of “negative” dodecaphony includes Schoenberg’s techniques so long as they are not used to create an ideological system, or a “positive compositional canon.”59 But more important negative dodecaphony does not demonize Berg’s

methods of composing with multiple rows, derivations, and tonal sounds. In this

conception Berg’s techniques are just as acceptable as Schoenberg’s. The broader

conception of composition with twelve-tones that Adorno adopts comes as a byproduct

of studying with Berg, knowing his scores, and working on twelve-tone compositions

himself. Adorno did not see a way forward with Schoenberg’s “positive dodecaphony”

because it was being taken as a systematic approach to composing. Adorno criticizes

the rigidity of Schoenberg’s “rules,” warning that such a system should not lead to a

composition canon.

Adorno was interested in Berg’s ability to combine musical materials while not

strictly adhering to a “school,” which corresponds to “negative dodecaphony.” “Progress

in art,” Adorno writes, “is not located in the individual works but, rather, in their

material.”60 His term positive dodecaphony implies one that stops the progress and is

systematic or ideological. But negative dodecaphony allows him to understand the interaction between tonality and twelve-tone music in Berg’s musical grammar. It helped

58 Adorno and Berg, Correspondence 1925-1935, 71-2.

59 Adorno and Berg, Correspondence 1925-1935, 71.

60 Theodor W. Adorno, “Reaction and Progress,” in Night Music: Essays on Music 1926-1926, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Wieland Hoban (London: Seagull Books, 2009), 219.

shape his views on the progress of musical material. Adorno found in Berg a partner for

thinking about musical structures and material as signifiers for philosophy, which is one

reason he favored Berg over Schoenberg.

Adorno’s understanding of twelve-tone composition, as based on practical engagement with Berg’s music evidenced in his own compositions and writings, complicates our understanding of Adorno’s position on the subject. Negative and positive dodecaphony, a prototype of negative dialectics, gave Adorno a philosophical

framework to express what he understood about Berg’s music in a music analytical

sense. Berg’s evocations of the past were not ad hoc insertions but deliberate workings-

out of the twelve-tone techniques that incorporate tonality and atonality, rather than replacing them.

If Adorno’s conceptions of composition with twelve tones are strongly informed by Berg’s version of the technique, as I have argued, then this understanding calls for a reassessment of Philosophy of New Music, particularly Schoenberg’s negative reaction to that work.

The final chapter analyzes Philosophy of New Music in light of the concepts I have already addressed. Analyzing this infamous text with knowledge of the ideas

Adorno expressed in his works on Berg allows me to highlight elements of negative dialectics than become an integral part of Philosophy of New Music. Scholars

addressing Philosophy of New Music, from Max Paddison to Lydia Goehr and Raymond

Geuss to Lucia Sziborsky have accepted this text as emblematic of Hegelian dialectics.

While the book is commonly analyzed for its Hegelian concepts, I argue Adorno uses a

Hegelian perspective to present this dialectic, but on a deeper level it is his concept of negative dialectics that governs the book.

At the end of the introduction of PoNM, Adorno critiques the basic tenant of the

Hegelian dialectic, questioning its validity. Adorno writes:

The dialectical method, and precisely the one turned from its head onto its feet, cannot consist of treating particular phenomena as illustrations or examples of something preexisting and exempt from movement of the concept; thus the dialectic degenerates to a state religion. On the contrary, it is necessary to transform the strength of the universal concept into the self-unfolding of the concrete object and to resolve the social puzzle of its image by the power of its own individuation.61

This quotation serves dual purposes in the course of the section, it condemns modes of

understanding which seek to situate pieces of music into larger categories of what it

should or should not do based on socio-cultural history and expectations. In a larger

view he criticizes the dialectical method, based on Hegelian conceptions which, in the

process of turning a simple concept/proposition into its opposite, devolves into a school

of thought or ideology. An alternative, as Adorno describes in the “Preface” of ND is to,

with logical consistency, substitute the unity principle, or ideology, with the “idea of what

would be outside the sway of such unity.”62

Analyzing how PoNM is rooted in negative dialectics helps to solve some of the

problems scholars have with the book. Interpretations and analyses of PoNM are

predicated on understanding Adorno’s methods as utilizing a Hegelian dialectic.

Working from that perspective, it is possible to find problems with the logic and

methodology in the book. Three problems commonly identified in the secondary

61 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 23.

62 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, xx.

literature are: one, the dialectics do not offer a reconciliation; two, the book lacks concrete musical analysis; and three, that Adorno emphasizes a single historical path in his treatment of music.

It is also possible to see these so-called problems as caused by approaching this book with Hegelian dialectics and not negative dialectics. The Hegelian structure is a trap that causes misunderstandings. Adorno causes a paradigmatic shift in this book by means of a style of critique intended to force readers to juxtapose the two poles of a dialectics – and not to come away with a synthesis. The reader is left to deal with contradictions and negative truth or identity. While Hegel is central to the text, its structure, and Adorno’s thought, Adorno’s own negative dialectics offers a way to see the perceived incongruities as elements that form different constellations in the minds of the readers.

In this chapter I use Adorno’s own concept of “thinking in models” as a tool to for analyzing both the Hegelian and negative dialectics in PoNM. First I introduce thinking in models, a part of negative dialectics, to understand what Adorno is doing when he presents Hegelian aesthetics only to criticize the ideas. Thus, both Hegelian dialectics and negative dialects are two thought models in this book.

If we understand negative dialectics as the underlying mode of criticism, we can read what some call the failed or frozen dialectics as the unresolved tension Adorno sees in new music. Negative dialectics helps us to understand the multivalent interpretations and misunderstandings of the book, no synthesis can occur as such in negative dialectics, but a synthesis occurs only with each individual reader. While ND

was published much later than PoNM the critiques and ideas from ND can be seen in

PoNM.

CHAPTER 2 1925, ALBAN BERG AND THEODOR ADORNO IN A PIVOTAL YEAR

Recalling the circumstances that led him to Vienna in order to study composition with Berg, Adorno made the following statement:

If I try to recall the impulse that drew me spontaneously to him I am sure it was exceedingly naïve, but it was related to something very essential about Berg: the Wozzeck pieces, above all the introduction to the March and then the March itself, struck me as a combination of Schoenberg and Mahler, and at that time that was my ideal of genuine new music.1

In this brief recollection Adorno articulates one of the most important contradictions that drew him to Berg’s music, the combination of two compositional systems: atonality and tonality—the latter pushed to its functional limits. Written late in his life, this statement comes when his work with dialectics was most critical, innovative, and original. In fact, he was writing and lecturing on negative dialectics, and published the seminal text of the same name in 1966. As is well known, dialectics were integral to Adorno’s approach to every object he analyzed. He recognized the dialectical play of musical materials from his earliest engagements with Berg’s music, particularly the Lyric Suite, which Berg was composing at the same time Adorno was studying with him.

Berg’s music offered conflict and tension between two ostensibly opposite systems, tonality and atonality. Adorno was primarily interested in the perceived conflict between the combination of tonality and atonal, and the emerging twelve-tone techniques. He was interested in how Berg could combine traditional forms with progressive musical material and make something new, which is why Adorno described

Berg as an avant-garde composer. Most important, Adorno found a direct correlation

1 Theodor W. Adorno, “Reminiscence,” in Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 13. Originally published as Alban Berg: Der Meister des kleinsten Übergangs (Vienna: Verlag Elisabeth Lafite, 1968).

between dialectical thought, one of his key philosophical concepts, and Berg’s music.

While he admired and knew Schoenberg’s works well, he sought out Berg as an instructor.

Adorno made Berg’s acquaintance at the June 16, 1924 Frankfurt premiere of

Drei Bruchstücke aus Wozzeck (for orchestra and soprano).2 After that meeting, and

upon completing his PhD in 1924 he traveled to Vienna for intermittent study with Berg

between 1925 and 1926.3 While he did not reside in Vienna for long — the period of

study spurred a friendship with Berg lasting until Berg’s death in 1935 — this experience

shaped the way Adorno thought about music and philosophy for the rest of his life.

The period between 1925 and 1926 was incredibly productive for both Adorno

and Berg. For Berg, 1925 marked a shift in his public status; he gained attention with

the successful 1924 premiere of his Drei Bruchstücke aus Wozzeck, and subsequently

the 1925 premiere of the opera itself. He was also intently working on two compositions

that would engage the new technique, composition with twelve tones: “Schließe mir die

Augen beide,” a revision of the 1907 setting of the song for Universal Edition’s tribute to

Emil Hertzka, and the revolutionary Lyric Suite.

In 1925 Adorno moved into the Viennese intellectual and musical circles he so

admired. He was already a composer, critic, and thinker, but in Vienna he aspired to the

professional world of composing and music criticism. While studying with Berg, Adorno

completed and had performed his Two Pieces for String Quartet op. 2,4 a twelve-tone or

2 This premiere was conducted by Herman Scherchen as a part of the Tonkünstlerfest.

3 Adorno’s doctoral thesis was “Die Transzendenz des Dinglischen und Noematsichen in Husserls Phänomenologie.”

4 The Kolisch Quartet performed Adorno’s Two Pieces for String Quartet on the program of the ISCM (International Society for Contemporary Music) in December of 1926.

atonal work that, as Berg reported to Schoenberg to be very good.5 His articles “Zur

Uraufführung des Wozzeck” and “Schoenberg: Serenade, op.24 (I)” from 1925

foreshadowed many of his late writings and analytical study that would shape his

thinking on new music. The philosophical approaches and concepts associated with the

mature Adorno blossomed during this time period, and were saliently linked to his

conceptions of music; this was the beginning of the style of writing, critique, and

philosophy for which Adorno is famous.

An important outcome of Adorno’s study in Vienna was Adorno’s push to understand Berg as a part of, but not defined by, the “Arnold Schoenberg School.” He

found the concept of a school of composition homogenizing and detrimental to

individual compositional characteristics and methods. Throughout his publications on

Berg, starting with the Wozzeck essay, Adorno argues for comprehending Berg’s music

from what the music itself presents, not as a derivative of Schoenberg’s system. In a pointed remark to Berg he writes of his goals for the essay: “my aim: this prattling on about the ‘Schoenberg School’ must stop.”6 For Adorno the concept of a Schoenberg

School misjudged the truth of the compositional instruction.7 He believed the label was

being used to enforce loyalty to not only the teacher but also to his rules, when in

5 Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg, The Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence: Selected Letters, eds. Juliane Brand, Christopher Hailey, and Donald Harris (New York: Norton, 1987), 354-5.

Berg writes to Schoenberg: “The performances of Wiesengrund’s incredibly difficult quartet was a coup de main for the Kolisch Quartet, which learned it in 1 week and performed it quite clearly. I find Wiesengrund’s work very good and I believe it would also meet with your approval, should you ever hear it. In any event, in its seriousness, its brevity, and above all in the absolute purity of its entire style it is worthy of being grouped with the Schoenberg school (and no where else!).”

6 Theodor Adorno and Alban Berg, Correspondence 1925-1935, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 28.

7 Theodor Adorno, “Alban Berg: Zur Uraufführung des Wozzeck,” in GS 18 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003), 456.

reality, Adorno argues that true students must break with the teacher’s rules to find an

artistic truth of their own. This argument comes out in his first Wozzeck essay. Adorno’s

musical thought changes as he begins to adopt atonal techniques from Berg. Most

important, as the 1925 Wozzeck essay represents a turning point in the way Adorno

approaches music criticism, his music also changes according to his new aesthetics; his

atonal Two Pieces for String Quartet op. 2 (1925/6) is a turning point in his

compositional aesthetics.

Berg’s music, his developing approach to composition with twelve-tones, and his

personality were of seminal importance in the development of Adorno’s musical

aesthetics. Adorno had access, through their meetings and composition lessons, to

Berg’s scores, drafts, and analyses of music that few others had, giving him unique

insight into Berg’s compositional procedures and thought that were not fully uncovered

by others until Douglas Jarman and George Perle began their analyses in the 60s and

70s. I argue that Berg’s music and personality were of seminal importance in the

development of Adorno’s musical aesthetics. This relationship and the understanding of

musical aesthetics Adorno gains from it helps him to formulate concepts of “new music”

and “composition with twelve-tones” which he would later express in Philosophie der

neuen Musik.

Adorno’s Musical Aesthetics Before Berg

From an early age Adorno approached music as philosophy and philosophy as

music. As a result of rigorous intellectual training from a young age, the combination of

intensive musical and philosophical engagement had a lasting effect on Adorno’s life.

The notion that seeds of Adorno’s mature and most influential philosophical

contributions are rooted in his study from when he was 15 to 21 years old is not new.

Scholars frequently locate concepts from later works, such as Dialectic of

Enlightenment, Negative Dialectics, Aesthetic Theory, in earlier writings.8 Yet what is

often left out is the fact that Adorno approached the music he analyzed, composed, and

wrote about as coded texts that also led to the explication of philosophical concepts.

Using terms like schweben, suspendieren, or aufheben (all implying different versions of

suspension, or floating) to describe his work with the two subjects.9 While his early life

and education is well documented it is important to keep it in mind that with the

intellectual training came musical training, and it was equally important.

The secondary literature commonly focuses on Adorno’s thought, isolating and

analyzing concepts within his writings as objects. But if we are to understand Adorno

the composer, musician, and philosopher fully, it is important to turn the tables and ask:

what does it mean for Adorno to be a subject? How did he do the activity at hand,

composition and analysis? How does compositional praxis inform philosophy? This is

particularly relevant because the act of composing and analyzing stimulated

philosophical ideas. In other words, examining Adorno as a subject, asking what it

means to be a subject and how to do the work of compositions and philosophy tells us

more about development of his philosophical ideas in relation to music.

Intellectual rigor and an intense musical knowledge governed Adorno’s life from a

young age, and colored the way he approached his life’s work. Richard Leppert notes

that “Adorno’s intellectual training was rigorous and came early. By age fifteen, he

began a long period of study — occupying Saturday afternoons — of Kant’s Critique of

8 See Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 1993 and Lucia Sziborsky, Adorno’s Musik- Philosophie: Genese, Konstitution, Pädagogische Perspektiven, 1979.

9 Lydia Goehr, “Adorno, Schoenberg, and the Totentanz der Prinzipien in Thirteen Steps,” in Journal of the American Musicological Society 56 (2003): 596.

Pure Reason mentored by family friend Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966), who at the time was editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung. By Adorno’s own account, the Kant study sessions went on “for years.”10 Stefan Müller-Doohm, in his monumental biography,

even goes so far as to argue that Adorno’s study with Kracauer played an essential role

in the way he approached music as a critic; more specifically, this study affected how he

approached any text. Müller-Doohm writes, “Under Kracauer’s guidance, philosophy

became a set of ‘coded texts from which the historical situation of mind could be read.’

The key idea in their discussions was to interpret the different philosophies as force

fields.”11 The concept of force fields, introduced in the 20s becomes an important mode

of interpretation for Adorno throughout his career, regardless of the subject.

Another mature idea, negative dialectics, as Hauke Brunkhorst argues, appears

as early as Adorno’s Kant studies with Kracauer; the Kant studies are a key work in

work in Adorno’s intellectual development. Brunkhorst writes, “the idea of a negative

dialectic, which is Adorno’s most unique philosophical contribution, owes much to [his

Kant studies with Kracauer].”12 Adorno’s intellectual rigor, through musical and

philosophical study, informed all of his experiences with music and what he wrote, from

journal articles, concert reviews, philosophical texts, or radio addresses among others.

Adorno’s musical home-life gave him a background of performance, composition,

and work as a music critic while he was still attending Gymnasium and through his time

10 Richard Leppert, “Introduction” in Essays on Music by Theodor Adorno, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 2.

11 Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Polity: Cambridge, UK, 2005), 44.

12 Richard Leppert, “Introduction,” 3. Leppert refers to Hauke Brunkhorst, “Theodor W. Adorno: Aesthetic Constructivism and a Negative Ethic of the Non-Forfeited Life,” trans. James Swindal, in The Handbook of Critical Theory, ed. David M. Rasmussen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 207-08.

at the University in Frankfurt. As is well known Adorno had a proclivity toward the

modern music of his period the 1920s particularly, but what needs to be further

examined is the act of composition is related to the formation of aesthetic and

philosophical concepts.

His musical training began in the home, learning to play piano and he became

familiar with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century chamber and orchestral literature by

playing piano duet arrangements with his Aunt Agathe. Adorno writes of this early

practice: “Playing duets made me a present of the geniuses of the nineteenth century at

the beginning of the twentieth.”13 Engaging with and participating in the musical world

was not a passing phase for Adorno, by the end of his Gymnasium he entertained ideas

of becoming a professional musician. During the end of Gymnasium and the beginning

of his studies at the University of Frankfurt, Adorno studied composition with Bernhard

Sekles and piano with Eduard Jung.14

Adorno’s pieces composed between 1918-1924 show that he favored

chromaticism, experimented with atonality, and favored stylistic elements similar to

Schoenberg’s expressionistic compositions. Table 2-1 shows the pieces Adorno

composed prior to his study with Berg.

Table 2-1. List of pieces Adorno composed prior to studying with Berg Date Title 1918 Zwei Lieder nach Gedichten von Theodor Storm für eine Singstimme und Klavier 1920 Klavierstück 1920 Sechs Studien für Streichquartett 1921 Klavierstück 1921 Streichquartett

13 Adorno, “Vierhändig, noch einmal,” in GS 17 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003), 303

14 Bernhard Sekles (1872-1934) was a composer, conductor, pianist, and pedagogue. He taught at the Hoch’sche Konservatorium Frankfurt. One of his most famous students was Paul Hindemith.

1921/22 I. Streichtrio 1921/22 Sonate für Cello allein (Fragment) 1922 II. Streichtrio 1922 Sechs Lieder aus “Der siebente Ring” von Stefan George für eine Singstimme und Klavier 1922 Wenn ich an deiner brücke steh (Stefan George) 1924 Drei Klavierstücke. Für Marie Proelss

While many of these pieces are youthful, the Six Studies for String Quartet and the

1921 String Quartet are rather mature in their integration of atonal techniques.

Completed in 1920, when Adorno was 17 years old, Six Studies for String

Quartet exemplifies the style of composition he admired; it is atonal in the style of

Schoenberg. In 1920 Adorno impetuously wrote to Schoenberg requesting comments

on the piece from the composer. He also mentioned this piece in the letter of

introduction he wrote to Berg in 1925. According to Adorno it was given a private

performance by the Rebner-Hindemith Quartet in 1921.15

Adorno was not totally satisfied with the composition instruction he received from

Bernhard Sekles.16 Sekles seemingly was not “modern” enough for Adorno. He wanted

instruction in atonal techniques he had been hearing and analyzing. In 1920 Adorno

writes to Schoenberg at Sekles’ suggestion, seeking advice on his piece Six Studies for

String Quartet. According to the editorial note in Adorno: Eine Bildmonographie, where

the letter is reproduced, and other archival materials, Adorno likely never sent this letter

or score to Schoenberg.17 The letter captures, nonetheless, an important moment in

15 Adorno and Berg, Correspondence 1925-1935, 3.

16 Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 86.

17 Adorno: Eine Bildmonographie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 64. “Von den Kompositionen Adornos aus der Zeit vor 1921 haben neben zwei der bewunderten älteren Freundin Elise Herzberger gewidmeten Storm-Liedern von 1918 („Die Nachtigall“ und „Schließe mir die Augen beide“, die Alban Berg ebenfalls komponiert hatte) jene im Tagebuch von ihm besprochenen „Sechs Studien für

Adorno’s early compositional career and gives a sense of his aesthetic sensibilities.18

He writes that throughout 1919 and 1920 he Schoenberg’s scores and heard performances of works such as Verklärte Nacht, String Quartet no. 1 (d minor op. 7),

Pierrot Lunaire, and the Orchestral Songs among others. Included below is a translation of the letter to Schoenberg, stated in full.19

5 September 1920 Esteemed Herr Schönberg

Although I know, that your whole attention belongs to all works, not one specifically, I am sending you my Six Studies for String Quartet and request the favor of you evaluating it. Considering that I am only seventeen years old and thus far my compositions have not yet been published, the endeavor seems keen to me. Therefore a few words of justification.

As I, 2 years ago, in the local Verein für Theater und Musikkultur, became acquainted with your F# minor quartet, I sensed almost with fear and great awe that one of the goals of musical creativity was realized, which I already deeply felt as a child, long before I heard your name. At the time, since the large majority of Musikalischen (amateur-) and Allzumusikalischen (expert musicians) were unable to understand the imposing spirit through the mantle of a certainly unprecedented new technique, the experience of your music was bestowed upon me and determined my path. In quick succession I came to know your works. I heard Verklärte Nacht, String Quartet No. 1, the Chamber Symphony, and the Op. 19 Pieces. I studied the aforementioned works (opuses) and op. 11 and 15; the cycle Pierrot Lunaire gave me vital impressions, the score of which I came to know the year before, as well as the new Orchestral Songs op. 22. The cycle op. 21 means, to me, -notwithstanding Mahler- the greatest achievement of new music.

Streichquartett“ erhalten. Am 5. September 1920 schickte er sie Arnold Schönberg mit einem Begleitbrief, der sich im Nachlaß Adornos befindet; sei es, dass er ihn nicht abschickte, sei es, dass er eine Abschrift davon anfertigte.“

18 Adorno’s original letter remains in the Adorno Archiv, and the Schoenberg Archive does not have any record of the letter in Schoenberg’s Nachlaß. Adorno made Schoenberg’s acquaintance in Vienna, during his studies with Berg. The composer never cared for Adorno and throughout Adorno’s career he sends letters or articles drafts to Schoenberg and rarely received responses from the composer. It was not until Schoenberg died that Adorno had more frequent correspondence with the family: the composer’s wife shared brief correspondence with the Adorno.

19 The translation is my own.

Before I became acquainted with your work, and before I ever received composition lessons, my compositions already strayed from conventionality, if not in worth, then in harmony. Then I became totally reliant on your style and wrote a quartet, songs, and piano pieces, which intrinsically cannot be considered valuable. The people to whom I showed them, accused me of plagiarizing Schoenberg, and rightly so; they just misunderstood that I did not become a plagiarist out of fashion, but rather out of necessity. My own ideas made their way in [the music], but the overly-intense effect of your music prompted ambiguity. They (critics) failed to understand [my music’s] effective structure.

In the Studies I believe I have disengaged from these constraints. I have assimilated what they gave into my own character; as if I had found myself for the first time. Thus I played the pieces for my teacher Bernhard Sekles. He agreed and counseled me to send them to you. I wouldn’t dare this on my own impulse, but it was for a long time my secret wish. Herr Sekles requests that you inform me of your opinion. This opinion is essential to me in musical regards. First: for the sake of my personal truth which forces me to appeal to a higher criteria for the Authochthonie (originality) of my construction than my own ability to discriminate which can already be distorted by vanity. I find these higher criteria embodied solely in you, without its impact my development would be illusory. – Then: because you have attained all the freedom and distance in the face of the new system in order to be able to free the irrationality of the spirit from the (apparent) technical complexity of the atonal structure. Because you will hear not the quartet chords, short clashes, and linear overlaps, but the person as he is, or, if the pieces are bad, – it’s the person’s responsibility (Adorno). And it’s after all always about the person.

I have no remarks about the pieces themselves. If they require any comments then they should have given up being music at some point, they should have lost their impalpability to conceptuality and materiality.

Herr Sekles sends you his kind regards.

Accept my most sincere gratitude for your efforts in advance From your most loyal, Theodor L. Wiesengrund20

20 Adorno: Eine Bildmonographie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 64-66.

Hochverehrter Herr Schönberg Obwohl ich weiß, dass Ihre ganze Kraft dem Werke gehört und nicht irgendeinem, übersende ich Ihnen meine „Sechs Studien für Streichquartett“ mit der Bitte um Beurteilung. Da ich erst siebzehn Jahre alt bin und bisher Kompositionen von mir noch nicht veröffentlicht wurden, scheint mir mein Unterfangen kühn. Darum einige Worte der Rechtfertigung.

As the seventeen-year-old composer Adorno admits to using Schoenberg’s pieces as models, to learn the styles he wanted to emulate. He wanted Schoenberg’s opinion because he was the composer to study with at the time, just as Berg was the composer in the mid-1920s. He claimed that learning Schoenberg’s works helped to set his music on a new path, because his own pieces, before knowing Schoenberg’s music, strayed from conventionality. Adorno likely did not make Schoenberg’s acquaintance

Als ich vor nunmehr 2 Jahren im hiesigen „Verein für Theater und Musikkultur“ Ihr fis-moll-Quartett op 10 kennen lernte, spürte ich mit Schrecken beinahe und voll Ehrfurcht ein Ziel musikalischen Schöpfertums verwirklicht, das ich schon als Kind dunkel gefühlt, längst ehe ich nur Ihren Namen vernommen. Zu einer Zeit, da die große Mehrzahl der Musikalischen und Allzumusikalischen nicht fähig war, durch den Mantel einer freilich unerhört neuen Technik hindurch die gebietende Seele zu begreifen, wurde mir das Erlebnis Ihrer Musik zuteil und bestimmte meinen Gang. In rascher Folge lernte ich Ihre Werke kennen, hörte die „Verklärte Nacht“, das I. Quartett, die Kammersymphonie und die Stücke op 19. Die genannten Opera und op 11 und 15 arbeitete ich durch; die entscheidenden Eindrücke gab mir der Zyklus „Pierrot Lunaire“, dessen Partitur ich voriges Jahr kennen lernte, und die neuen Orchesterlieder op 22. Der Zyklus op 21 bedeutet für mich -trotz Mahler- die größte Tat neuer Musik.

Schon ehe ich Ihr Werk kennen lernte, -bevor ich überhaupt Kompositionsunterricht erhielt, wichen meine Kompositionen vom Herkömmlichen wenn nicht im Wert, doch in der Harmonik ab. Dann geriet ich in völlige Abhängigkeit von Ihrem Stil und schreib ein Quartett, Lieder, Klavierstücke, die als Eigenwerte nicht in Betracht kommen. Die Menschen, denen ich sie zeigte, warfen mir Schönberg-Plagiat vor und mit Recht; nur dass sie verkannten, dass ich nicht aus Mode zum Plagiator wurde, sondern unter einem Zwang. Eigene Inhalte drängten sich vor, aber die überstarke Wirkung Ihrer Musik gab ihnen die Gesetze ein und machte sie zweideutig. Gültige Gestaltung blieb ihnen versagt.

In den „Studien“ glaube ich von diesem Zwange gelöst zu sein, das, was Sie mir gaben, eigenem Wesen assimiliert zu haben. Mir ist, als ob ich mich zum ersten Male gefunden hätte. Also ich die Stücke meinem Lehrer Bernhard Sekles spielte, stimmte er zu und riet mir, sie und Sie zu senden. Aus eigenem Antrieb hätt’ ich es kaum gewagt, obwohl es längst mein heimlicher Wunsch war. Herr Sekles bittet Sie, mir Ihr Urteil mitzuteilen. Dies Urteil ist mir in musikalischer Hinsicht notwendig. Einmal: um der Wahrhaftigkeit mir selbst gegenüber willen, die mich zwingt, für die Autochthonie meines Gestaltens ein höheres Kriterium anzurufen als mein eigenes Unterscheidungsvermögen, das von Eitelkeit verfälscht sein kann. Dies höhere Kriterium finde ich einzig in Ihnen verkörpert, ohne dessen Wirkung meine Entwicklung illusorisch wäre. – Sodann: weil Sie allen Freiheit und Distanz der neuen Formung gegenüber gewonnen haben, um aus der (scheinbaren) technischen Komplexität atonaler Gebilde die Irrationalität der Seele lösen zu können. Weil Sie nicht Quartettakkorde hören werden, Sekundzusammenstöße, lineare Überschneidungen, sondern den Menschen wie er ist oder, wenn die Stücke schlecht sind, -sie gebärdete. Und es handelt sich schließlich immer um den Menschen.

Zu den Stücken selbst bemerke ich nichts. Bedürften sie eines Kommentars, dann müssten sie an irgend einem Punkte schon aufgehört haben, Musik zu sein, müssten ihr Ungreifbares an Begrifflichkeit und Dinglichkeit verloren haben. Wären wertlos.

Herr Sekles bittet mich, Ihnen die herzlichsten Grüße zu übermitteln.

Nehmen Sie im voraus für Ihre Bemühungen den wärmsten Dank Von Ihrem ganz ergebenen – Theodor L. Wiesengrund

until he went to Vienna in 1925, and then Schoenberg did not care for him or his writings on music. As early as April 1925 Adorno mentions Schoenberg in a letter to

Siegfried Kracauer, discussing Schoenberg’s “uncanny” and “obsessed” temperament.21 Schoenberg bluntly rejected Adorno’s published reviews and made no

attempt to conceal his disapproval of Adorno’s writing on music because of their

difficulty.22 While Adorno uses Schoenberg’s music as the subject of many writings,

there was distinct lack of a relationship.

Six Studies for String Quartet is the work, Adorno claims, that breaks from the

cycle of learning though copying Schoenberg’s ideas and instead presents his own

compositional character. It focuses on short, interrelated movements that explore non-

functional harmony and atonality. Each of the short movements makes use of binary or

ternary formal organization to focus on integrating atonal or chromatic motivic ideas

throughout the given movement.

While I will not detail each movement, I will discuss a key movement to illustrate

Adorno’s practical understanding of contemporary compositional techniques. Movement

one illustrates Adorno’s understanding of atonal construction. The simple structure, A

(mm. 1-11) B (12-20) A’ (21-32), juxtaposes the melodic exchange of a short motive

(01469) in the A sections with a freely atonal B section characterized by paired voice

polyphony. Example 2-1 shows movement one with the set analysis of each section.

Measures 1-10 are characterized by the exchange of the (01469) motive moving

through the voices. While measures 12-20 show the use of multiple sets to make up the

21 As included in: Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 90.

22 Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 97.

paired voice statements. In Example 2-1 PC sets are show in boxes: (01469) red,

(0147) green, (0125) blue.

Example 2-1. Theodor W. Adorno, Six Studies for String Quartet, mm. 1-20. (Theodor W. Adorno, Kompositiononen, Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1980)

Adorno’s musical aesthetics were developed in tandem with his critical academic studies in the 1920s, but they were also informed by the thriving musical community in

Frankfurt. He combined his musical knowledge and his critical sensibilities with his intellectual training and the results were a plethora of concert, play, and art exhibit

reviews, published in his late-teenage years as an active participant in Frankfurt’s cultural scene.23

One key piece that links together Adorno’s academic and critical study with his

aesthetics is his first publication, “Expressionism and Artistic Truthfulness: Toward a

Critique of Recent Literature” from 1920.24 In this essay he tackles the historical and

stylistic shift in literature specifically, but as in his later writings he addresses aesthetic

ideas generally so they can be applicable to art, literature, or music. The main points of

his essay are that “pre-Expressionist art” had lost sight of individual truthfulness and

that while Expressionist art might not be the solution to finding truthfulness it will enact a

revolution to “give birth to new truthfulness.”25 Adorno opens the essay, “As the

expression of a new form of soul in the process of development and as the result of a

rigid stylization that has lost its roots, as both creation and reaction, Expressionism

makes the self absolute and demands pure expression.”26 For Expressionism to cause

a shift in artistic thinking, it had to ignore the divide between art and life, but also to

resist the old idea and forms which, to Adorno, no longer served a purpose.

Throughout the short writing he emphasizes the importance of the development

of truthfulness, which balances the world and the self without losing control. He seems

to hint at this in his letter to Schoenberg when he writes: “you have attained all the

23 For more information on Adorno’s biography please see: Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography; Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music; Adorno, Leppert, Essays on Music.

24 This essay is included in the appendix to Notes on Literature vol. 2 (257-59), but was originally published: “Expressionismus und künstlerische Wahrhaftigkeit,” in Die Neue Schaubühne, vol. 2, no. 9 1920: 233-36.

25 Theodor Adorno, “Expressionism and Artistic Truthfulness: Toward a Critique of Recent Literature” in Notes on Literature vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 258-59.

26 Adorno, “Expressionism and Artistic Truthfulness,” 257.

freedom and distance in the face of the new system in order to be able to free the irrationality of the spirit from the (apparent) technical complexity of the atonal structure.”27 In this passage from the letter, and in the early essay, Adorno emphasized

that artwork that balances the world and the self without creating illusions or giving in to

“the irrationality of the spirit” will ultimately succeed. Finally, the essay ends with Adorno

questioning what art can be, or rather how it can continue to exist and be meaningful,

which is a continual thread in Adorno’s writings and also comes out in his early concert

reviews and musical essays. He writes:

The art of our time is faced with the question of its continued existence. Its necessity threatens to fade into illusion and, when it is streamed out, to become a lie. What has become subjective and contingent remains subjective and contingent in its effect as well. We are all in danger of becoming guilty toward spirit. It is time to recognize that. The days to come, which we look toward in fascination, will tell us whether the new will has the strength to give birth to new truthfulness.28

He took on Expressionism at its peak, before it gave way to different genres and styles

and is most concerned with artistic progress and truthfulness. This is constant theme in

his writing.

Between 1922 and 1925 Adorno published concert reviews for Frankfurt

performances Neue Blätter für Kunst und Literatur, Die Musik, Zeitschrift für Musik, und

Musikblätter des Anbruch.29 The main ensembles and organizations about which he

writes are the Verein für Theater- und Musikkultur (VfTM), the Frankfurt Opera and

Opera Orchestra, as well as festivals. Adorno studied scores as earnestly as he studied

Kant, and he was an avid member and critic of Frankfurt’s cultural life. The pieces and

27 Adorno, Bildmonographie, 66.

28 Adorno, “Expressionism and Artistic Truthfulness,” 259.

29 He continued to write concert reviews of Frankfurt performances through 1932.

concerts he reviewed give insight into the aesthetic and musical atmosphere in which he immersed himself. Table 2-2 comprises the dates and piece Adorno reviewed between 1922 and 1925.

This list of reviews highlights some of the pieces Adorno heard in the active

Frankfurt musical scene. He also makes a point to criticize the institutions and directors, and sees a crisis in Frankfurt musical life. He writes:

The musical life of Frankfurt has survived during the crises, already for many years, and here, each new solution is provisional, once it causes conflicts with such an established real power, to which, anybody who wants to survive, should submit himself/herself.30

His first published musical review, on Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire nonetheless, shows

Adorno’s blend of critique and musical analysis.

30 Adorno, Musikalischen Schriften VI, in GS 19 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003), 43.

Seit Jahren schon schleppt sich das Frankfurter Musikleben mit Krisen dahin, und jede neue Lösung wird zum Provisorium, sobald sie Konflikte bringt mit dem nun einmal Bestehenden, der wahren Macht hier, der sich fügen muß, wer bleiben will.

Table 2-2. Adorno’s Frankfurt Music Reviews between 1922 and 1925. Date of Review Occasion or Ensemble Pieces February 1922 3. Kammermusik Abend Arnold Schoenberg, Pierrot lunaire im VfTM 4. Kammermusik Abend W.A. Mozart, F-Dur-Quartett Rebner Quartet L.v. Beethoven, C-Dur 59,3 Egon Kornauth, Violinsonate (premiere) May 1922 Frankfurt Opera Paul Hindemith, 3 one act operas premiere) Sept. 1922 10. Kammermusik Abend Béla Bartók, Sonata for Violin and Piano Bartók, 1st Quartet op. 7 Frankfurt Opera Béla Bartók, Bluebeard’s Castle Kammermusik Abend Hans Pfitzner, C Dur Quintett op. 23 Philipp Jarnach, String Quartet op. 10 August 1923 Frankfurter Ernst Křenek, Concerto grosso Kammermusikwoche Die Coplas Lieder, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco Herbert Windt, Kammersinfonie Béla Bartók, Suite op. 14 Heinz Tiessen, Kaberettstücklein Eduard Erdmann, Sonate für Violine Wilhelm Peterson, Klavier-Violin Sonate Schreker, Lieder Alexander Jemnitz, Die Sonate für Cello und Klavier Hindemith, Bläserquintett op. 24,2 Friedrich Hoff, Lieder Hindemith, die Marienlieder Kurt Weill, Streichquartett Stephan Wolpe, Drei Klavierstücke Rudi Stephan, Musik für sieben Saiteninstrumente Schoenberg, George Liedern Ernst Toch, Kammersymphonie Delius, zwei Chöre Schoenberg, “Friede auf Erden” February 1924 Frankfurt Opera Leoš Janáček, Jenufa May 1925 Orchester Max Reger, die Hiller Variationen and Romantic Suite Rudi Stephan, Musik für Violine und Orchester Strauss-Abend, Heldenleben Schoenberg, Orchesterlieder op. 8 Stravinsky, Pulcinella Suite Pfitzer, Romantic Cantata Kammermusik Phillip Jarnach, Streichquartett op. 16 Amar quartett Lenzewski quartett Debussy, Quoartett Bartok, op. 17 Sekles, op. 17 Frankfurt Opera Mussorgskij, Chowantschtschina December 1924 (Rückblick) February 1925 Über Clemens Krauss New opera intendant March 1925 Opera Tchaikovsky, Pique Dame Orchestra Max Reger, Ballett-suite op. 130 Hermann Wetzler, Visionen

Throughout the review he highlights the main technical features that make the work exceptional, and also hints at social and cultural critiques. He writes:

The astonishing (element) was not the technique. We know that is Schönberg’s unique ability. Here he moves between apparently strictly organized forms and thematically intangible figures, of which the necessity of the visual development of the musical events is rarely comprehended any more. “The Cross”, the turning point of Pierrot, acts as the compositional technique of the 3rd movement of Piano Piece op. 11, tying together the two [other] plain and urgent types; the Passacaglia and the double-crab cannon of “Mondfleck” show strictly forms dictated from outside full of content.31

Adorno’s analysis in this essay does what he continues to do throughout his writings on

music: he makes links between the given piece and either the composer’s earlier works or other composers’ pieces. But these links he makes are more than comparisons or reference points: Adorno shows the development of technique and musical material through these seeming comparative moments.

Beyond concert reviews, he also published at least ten individual texts between

1921 and 1925. Table 2-3 indicates the titles of the essays and their respective publications.

31 Adorno, “Kammermusik im Verein für Theater- und Musikkultur, Dritter Kammermusikabend: Arnold Schönbergs “Pierrot Lunaire,” Musikalische Schriften VI, in GS 19 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003), 11.

Das Erstaunliche war nicht die Technik. Wir wissen, daß Schönbergs Können einzig ist. Er wechselt hier zwischen sichtbar straff organisierten Formen und thematisch ungreifbaren Gebilden, deren Notwendigkeit im visuellen Verlauf des Musikgeschehens kaum mehr abzulesen ist. Die „Kreuze“, der Peripetie des „Pierrot“, vertreten, satztechnisch an das dritte der Klavierstücke op. 11 anknüpfend, den zweiten Typus rein und zwingend; die Passacaglia und der krebsgängige Doppelkanon des „Mondfleck“ zeigen strenge, von außen gesetzte Formen ganz durchseelt.

Table 2-3. Adorno’s Early Writings on Music, 1921-25. Date Title Source 1921 Die Hochzeit des Faun: Basic Observations on Neue Blätter für Kunst und Bernhard Sekles’ New Opera Literatur 1922 Bèla Bartók NBfKL Paul Hindemith NBfKL Bernhard Sekles Frankfurter Zeitung 1924 Richard Strauss Zeitschrift für Musik Gebrauchsmusik Frankfurter Programmheft 1925 Bèla Bartók’s Tanzsuite Pult und Taktstock Some works of Bèla Bartók Zeitschrift für Musik Folk song collections Die Musik Schönberg: Serenade, op. 20 (I) Pult und Taktstock Alban Berg: On the Premiere of Wozzeck Anbruch Hans Eisler: Duo for Violin and ‘Cello, op. 7 Nr. 1 Anbruch On the Problem of Reproduction Pult und Taktstock

His essay on Sekles’s opera engages heavily in dramatic theory but little discussion of

the music and the Bartok essays discuss what he might call “surface relations.”

While Adorno was working on all of the materials and ideas just discussed he was also in the middle of his studies at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in

Frankfurt. He took courses in philosophy, sociology, psychology, and music. Adorno’s philosophical thought was shaped by his work with Hans Cornelius, professor of philosophy, a neo-Kantian. From Cornelius’ work Adorno became more well versed in the application of sociological perspectives focusing on human subjects in the context of

their social relationships.32 It was at university where he made the acquaintance of

Walter Benjamin, and Max Horkheimer, both influential to his Adorno’s philosophical

work. Horkheimer was Cornelius’s assistant and Adorno attended many of his seminars

including those on: phenomenology of consciousness, historical materialism, and

history of metaphysics among others.33 According to Stephan Müller-Doohm

32 Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 72.

33 Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 75.

Horkheimer and Adorno had a connection due to their interest in similar philosophical questions, namely: “What answer does philosophy have to the growing evils of society?”34 Adorno’s dissertation was “an analysis of contradictory elements in Husserl’s

theory of things and knowledge.”35 According to Müller-Doohm, Adorno’s main critique

of Husserl was that “he thought Husserl had failed to make clear whether objects could

be grasped by reducing them to what was given, or whether they existed as ‘absolute

transcendent things’, independent of consciousness.”36 All of the ideas Adorno explored

during his time at university, while concurrently engaged in the artistic and cultural life of

Frankfurt, led him to search for a philosophy of history and social, aesthetic, and

political theories to understand the age of change in which he lived.

In 1924, while finishing his dissertation, Adorno met Alban Berg for the first time,

at a Frankfurt performance of Drei Bruchstücke aus Wozzeck. Soon after the encounter

Adorno decided to further his compositional studies with the famous Viennese

composer in order to move beyond the “academic” instruction he had received in

Frankfurt and expand his interest in atonality and other modernistic compositional

styles. Adorno wrote that his compositions, even before knowing Schoenberg’s music,

strayed from conventionality and it was precisely this factor along with his aesthetics of

progress that made him a good fit to be Berg’s student. Berg’s music and mindset, while

respecting tradition, strayed from conventionality.

34 Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 75.

35 Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 78.

36 Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 79.

Berg’s Pivotal Year

Only by meeting and studying with Berg in 1925 could Adorno have gained the

musical and philosophical insights into the composer’s music that were not otherwise

understood until recently. The personal and aesthetic changes swirling around Berg’s

life in the mid-1920s are well documented.37 Bringing Wozzeck to its 1925 premiere involved a variety of commitments for the composer, including: editorial, rehearsal, production and promotional commitments.38 In 1924 Berg travelled for performances of

the Wozzeck orchestral fragments (1924), most notably the ADMV (Allgemeiner

Deutscher Musikverein) festival in Frankfurt am Main where Adorno made his

acquaintance. The orchestral pieces, and subsequent premiere of the opera brought the

composer a sense of celebrity in the compositional world, and strengthened ties with his

publisher, Universal Edition.

Compositionally, the period from 1923 to 1926 brought major developments in

Berg’s compositional techniques, notably the shift from atonality to twelve-tone

composition. It was during this shift in methods and aesthetic that Adorno found Berg’s

music most compatible with his own changing aesthetics. The most indicative works of

this period are the atonal Chamber Concerto (1923-5), “Schließe mir die Augen beide”

(II) (1925), Berg’s first and only Schoenbergian twelve-note composition though he does use Klein’s Mutterakkord, and the atonal and twelve-tone Lyric Suite (1925-6). Finally, in

37 See Arved Ashby, “The Development of Alban Berg’s Twelve Tone Aesthetic as seen in the Lyric Suite and its Sources (PhD diss., Yale University, 1995). See also Neil Boynton, “Compositional Technique 1923-6: the Chamber Concerto and the Lyric Suite” in The Cambridge Companion to Berg, ed. Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See also Christopher Hailey, “Berg’s World,” in Alban Berg and His World, ed. Christopher Hailey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Douglas Jarman, The Music of Alban Berg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). George Perle, Style and Idea in the ‘Lyric Suite’ of Alban Berg 2nd ed., (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2001).

38 Berg composed Wozzeck between 1914-1922 and it received its premiere on December 14, 1925 by the Berlin State Opera.

1925 Berg begins his well-documented affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin. All of these elements are keenly important. Adorno studied Berg’s works in progress, and he

witnessed the shift in Berg’s compositional techniques. In the case of Hanna Fuchs

Adorno served as liaison between the two; Berg trusted him with this secret, a

somewhat open secret.

That Berg adopted composition with twelve tones and still allowed tonal elements

to be prevalent betrayed the expectations of his contemporaries and led him to be

labeled the most Romantic of the Second Viennese School. By the time Berg composed

“Schließe mir” and started the Lyric Suite in 1925 knew Schoenberg and Webern’s

forays into composition with twelve-pitch classes. Subsequently, Schoenberg’s famous

Suite for Piano op. 25 was well known to the circle around the composer before it was

premiered (1923) or published.39 Berg knew Joseph Hauer’s principles for composition

with twelve tones as well as Fritz Klein’s innovations.40

Prior to 1925 Berg had experimented with twelve-note series. The 1912

Altenberg Songs contain a twelve-note collection, and his passacaglia theme in

Wozzeck is also a twelve-note collection. Berg also had a tendency, throughout his

oeuvre, to employ twelve-note chords or clusters. These instances of a twelve-tone set

or chord occurring in atonal pieces do not necessarily indicate a precursor to twelve-

tone composition, but do indicate a need to find alternative organizational methods for

pitches.

39 Schoenberg composed the piece between 1921-1923 and it was premiered by Eduard Steuermann in February of 1923

40 See Arved Ashby, “The Development of Berg’s Twelve-Tone Aesthetic as seen in the Lyric Suite and its Sources” PhD Diss Yale, 1995, 2. As cited in Ashby, see also Bryan Simms, “Who first Composed Twelve-Tone Music, Schoenberg or Hauer?”, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 10 (1987), 114- 15.

It is common, in the secondary literature and scholarship surrounding the Second

Viennese School, to assume the primacy of Schoenberg’s version of composition with twelve tones. “Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method” as John Covach states, “has come to define classic-twelve tone practice, with its ordered series and forty-eight row forms based on transposition, inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion.”41 But between

1920-1930, Berg contended with multiple models.

Josef Matthias Hauer’s (1883-1959) version, the “twelve-tone idea” or “the

twelve-tone law,” can be explained as “a systematic circulation of all the twelve pitch

classes (pcs) in which no pc is repeated before all twelve have sounded.”42 His solution

for pitch classes organized around a twelve-note series was published in 1920,43 and he

published further articles describing his theories and aesthetic ideals.44 Paul Lansky and

George Perle describe Hauer’s system, Zwölftongesetz, as follows:

The twelve pitch classes are divided into discrete, mutually exclusive segments. The order of the segments within a twelve-note set and the order of the pitch classes within each segment are not pre-compositionally defined. Each such set and its twelve transpositions represent what Hauer called a ‘trope’. The only tropes that Hauer investigated systematically are those that divide the pitch classes into two hexachords.45

41 John Covach, “Twelve-Tone Theory” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 609.

42 Covach, “Twelve-tone theory,” 604.

43 Hauer’s initial publication describing his theories was: Hauer, Vom Wesen des Musikalischen (1920).

44 For further information on Hauer see John Covach’s aforementioned chapter, but also his entry on Hauer in Oxford Music Online.

45 Paul Lansky, et al. “Twelve-note composition.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed January 27, 2016, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/44582.

The reason behind Hauer’s quest for his Zwölftongesetz sets his ideas apart from

Schoenberg and others, and as Kovach argues, it is important to understand Hauer in a

broader music-cultural context. Kovach writes:

A fundamental premise in Hauer’s many arguments is that music, when conceived and perceived in the proper way, is essentially a mental- spiritual (geistig) phenomenon. An important distinction must be drawn between music in its pure form, which Hauer maintains is its spiritual form, and music as it occurs in the physical world around us, which constitutes its material form.46

Hauer prescribed music mystical and spiritual aspects and thought of the development

of his Zwölftongesetz as teleological: atonality supersedes tonality, and twelve-tone

music would be the highest spiritual level possible.47 While Hauer’s theories are not

regarded today as influential, it is important to keep in mind that he was actively

publishing articles in publications widely circulated among musicians at the time. Hauer

was part of the Schoenberg circle and had conversations with Schoenberg about their

similar compositional ideas. This was an important impetus for Schoenberg to put forth

his own “law” in 1923.

Schoenberg’s method, as Hauer’s, imposes a teleological view on the history of compositional materials. While Schoenberg was notoriously silent on his discoveries and techniques for twelve-note composition, his student Erwin Stein published an

explanation of the composer’s ideas in the September 1924 issue of Musikblätter des

Anbruch, the issue celebrating Schoenberg’s fiftieth birthday.48 Stein describes

dodecaphony as historically inevitable and the natural result of the crisis of modern

46 Covach, “Twelve-tone theory,” 604.

47 Covach, “Twelve-tone theory,” 606.

48 Covach, “Twelve-tone theory,” 610.

composition, wherein the collapse of tonality provided means for chromaticism, which gave way to atonality, which was ultimately leading to dodecaphony. This is also a sentiment Adorno echoes throughout his writings. Key to Schoenberg’s version of twelve-note composition is that the twelve pitch classes, as a row, provide motives and melodic transformations (with inversions, retrogrades, and retrograde inversions).

Where as Hauer found the mystical aspects of the new compositional techniques,

Schoenberg was interested in the unity and organization of musical material. Crucial to

Schoenberg’s version of the technique was, as is well known, his thought that it is important to only use one row per composition.

While others put forth their own ideas on compositions with twelve-tones or used

their own theoretical writings to explicate Schoenberg’s ideas, Berg’s student Fritz Klein

provided theoretical ideas that proved pivotal to Berg’s manifestations of the twelve-tone

techniques.49 Knowledge of the importance of Klein’s experiments with twelve-tone

compositional techniques would not be possible without Arved Ashby’s important

archival discoveries, dissertation, and article on Berg, the Lyric Suite and its sources,

which link Berg’s style of multiple, systematically derived rows to Klein.50

At the surface, it may seem that Berg’s use of multiple rows is a combination of

Hauer’s tropes and Schoenberg’s pre-compositional work on single series of interval

classes. But while containing characteristics of both Schoenberg’s and Hauer’s systems

Berg’s music has a different conception. In contrast to the Schoenberg system, where

49 John Covach recognizes Herbert Eimert as another important figure who published an early treatise on twelve-tone theory. Josef Rufer also wrote articles on Schoenberg’s works, explaining the 12-note system, and eventually published a treatise on the subject in 1952.

50 Arved Ashby, “The Development of Berg’s Twleve-Tone Aesthetic.” Ashby, “Of ‘Modell-Typen’ and ‘Reihenformen’: Berg, Schoenberg, F. H. Klein, and the Concept of Row Derivation,” Journal of the American Musicological Society vol. 48, no 1 (Spring 1995): 67-105.

the twelve-note series is a self-contained succession of intervals from which the totality of the piece is constructed, Berg’s twelve-note music suggests something different. As

Douglas Jarman writes of Berg’s twelve-note music:

Berg’s twelve-note music frequently suggests criteria outside those of the set, and the set itself is regarded as having other characteristics in addition to those of interval succession. Thus, rather than being regarded as an abstract self-sufficient interval sequence, the Bergian set is usually associated with a particular melodic contour. Berg also chooses sets that include formations reminiscent of tonal music and employs these sets in a way that emphasizes these traditional associations. 51

Jarman analyzes how Berg’s music is distinct from all of the other twelve-tone

compositional techniques available to him, but his point that Berg emphasized traditional associations is problematic. With his row construction Berg is toying with

precepts of tonality. But there is rarely a sense of tonality. He does not establish a

“traditional” harmonic pattern. As Adorno writes:

It is not enough to establish analytically the constituent elements, nor even the

most concrete primary cells, the so-called “inspired ideas.” Above all it is necessary to

reconstruct what happens to those ideas, or to use Schoenberg’s phrase, to write the

“history of a theme.” With Berg, in particular, traditional analysis of elements misses the

mark because – and this is an extremely characteristic feature – structurally his music

does not consist of elements in any commensurably traditional sense. It is, by its

inherent nature, in a constant process of disintegration. It strives toward the individual

element as its goal, that is, toward a threshold value bordering on nothingness.52

51 Douglas Jarman, The Music of Alban Berg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 81.

52 Adorno, Alban Berg, 37.

Adorno argues at every turn that Berg eschews notions of tradition, even if the music sounds traditional or is constructed in such a way as to appear traditional. Adorno identifies Berg’s Chamber Concerto for Piano, Violin, and Thirteen Winds (1925) as a turning point in the composer’s oeuvre. “He would not be the master of the smallest link,” Adorno writes, “if the new life beginning with that work were easily identifiable; yet it is unquestionably the archetype of everything he wrote thereafter.”53 One of the main

points Adorno recognizes is that in the Chamber Concerto Berg succeeds in mastering

a large-form composition without resorting to formal mannerisms, as in Wozzeck.54 In his chapter on the piece, Adorno focuses on the importance of Berg’s experimentations with the formal conventions and expectations of a concerto as well as his development of themes. Douglas Jarman also recognizes the Chamber Concerto a pivotal moment in

Berg’s compositional output:

Much of the material of the concerto results from the systematic application of various methods of organizing the twelve notes of the chromatic scale; only occasionally, however, do these methods correspond to those of the Schoenbergian twelve-note system. This correspondence is most clear in the Adagio second movement of the concerto, each distinct section of which presents repeated horizontal statements of a different twelve-note series.55

Jarman discusses the piece as a link between Berg’s freely-atonal works and his

twelve-note compositions.

The opening of the Chamber Concerto, mm. 1-30, contains the key elements to

highlight Berg’s pivot from freely atonal works to composition with twelve tones as well

as elements essential to Berg’s characteristic style. The opening 30 bars move from

53 Adorno, Alban Berg, 89.

54 Adorno, Alban Berg, 89.

55 Jarman, The Music of Alban Berg, 73.

being organized by a twelve-tone row, to atonality (or as Berg calls the section, dissolved tonality), then a tonal section. Figure 2-1 is an adaptation of Douglas

Jarman’s analysis of these bars.56

mm. 1-8 mm.8-12 mm. 16-20 mm. 20-24 mm. 25-30

Twelve-note row Chromatic field Chromatic fields Whole tone Melody based on based the of major thirds of minor thirds hexachord plus major thirds. famous (mm. 8-10), plus and perfect minor thirds. “Schoenberg minor thirds (10- fourths. motto” 12), plus perfect fourths. Example 2-4.

Twelve-tone row Dissolved tonality Tonal

Figure 2-1. Analysis of Lyric Suite mm. 1-30.

In a open letter to Schoenberg about the piece Berg writes that there are long sections

of dissolved tonality, as well as “individual short passages with a tonal flavor, and also

passages that correspond to the laws set up by you for ‘composition with twelve notes

related only to one and other.’”57

The work is preceded by a five-bar motto, which is derived from the musical

equivalents of the letters of the names Arnold Schönberg, Anton Webern, and Alban

Berg (see Example 2-2, the capitalized letters indicate the corresponding notes of each

composers’ motif).

56 Jarman, The Music of Alban Berg, 78.

57 As quoted in Willi Reich, Alban Berg, 147.

Example 2-2. Alban Berg, Kammerkonzert, Motto. (Alban Berg, Kammerkonzert Universal Edition)

In measures 1-8 Berg transforms the eight-note Schoenberg motto that precedes the movement into a complete twelve-note row. Example 2-3 shows the twelve-tone row adapted from Schoenberg’s name in blue, mm. 1-4 in English horn, continuing in mm. 4-

5 in the trumpet and horn. Because Berg has segmented the Schoenberg motive and subsequent row in such a way that the “Berg” and “Webern” motives are embedded within it, he can then derive motives and segmentations of the row to feature these motives as the serial section breaks down. These motives are highlighted and labeled in

Example 2-3.

Example 2-3. Alban Berg, Kammerkonzert, Thema, mm. 1-7. (Alban Berg, Kammerkonzert Universal Edition)

Berg’s constructions, the calculated row construction, its intervallic contents, and subsequently calculated breakdown into tonal sounding material also support Adorno’s argument that the Chamber Concerto is the beginning of Berg’s turning point. Of the work, Jarman asserts that much of the material results from “the systematic application of various methods of organizing the twelve tones of the chromatic scale; only occasionally, however, do these methods correspond to those of the Schoenbergian system.”58

If the Chamber Concerto is the start of a new style of composing which led to

Berg’s own style of twelve-tone composition as seen in the Lyric Suite and ultimately

Lulu then “Schließe mir die Augen beide” is the pivot point. “Schieße mir” employs a

somewhat strict presentation of row structures, and Berg only uses two forms of the row

– a prime and inverted form. As Arved Ashby has revealed, Berg does use the all-

interval row discovered by Klein, as the series (P-5) (Example 2-4).

Example 2-4. Alban Berg, “Schließe mir die Augen beide.” All-Interval Row (P-5). (Alban Berg, “Schließe mir die Augen beide” 1925, Universal Edition).

Throughout the piece Berg uses only the prime form of the row in the voice, and

continually rotates P-5 so that it does not align with the beginnings of verses or stanzas

of the poem, aside from the starting point. In Example 2-5 the row is highlighted, with

boxes surrounding each statement of P-5 in measures 1-10 in the voice, while also

noted in the piano, the verse and stanzas are indicated by vertical lines. The piano,

58 Jarman, The Music of Alban Berg, 73.

instead of beginning with the first hexachord of the row, begins with the second to avoid pitch repetition (see Example 2-5).

Example 2-5. Alban Berg, “Schließe mir die Augen beide.” All-Interval Row (P-5). (Alban Berg, “Schließe mir die Augen beide” 1925, Universal Edition).

While Berg explores the possibilities of Klein’s all interval row in this song,59 he saw that

following the Schoenbergian rules for composition with twelve-tones did not offer a way

forward. He writes briefly to Adorno about this song as he is composing it:

I am composing a song: an occasional composition. For a collection in honour of Hertzka being published on the occasion of 25 years of U.E. 2 songs on the same text printed on 2 facing pages. The first composed in C major almost 25 years ago, the 2nd composed today in the strictest 12- tone style [note-row!]. So 25 years of U.E.! But the later is giving me little joy, although it is progressing relatively easily. Too easily, I fear!60

This is the first and last time Berg uses the strictest twelve-tone method. While he continues to use the all-interval row, in the Lyric Suite and pieces thereafter, Berg uses

his own twelve-tone methods. As Adorno saw it, the strict twelve-tone style stopped the dialectic process of music; Schoenberg’s “laws” for composition stopped the work from making a way forward. For Adorno this strict style is analogous to a positive dialectic.

Berg finds a way forward with his compositional style and aesthetics in the Lyric

Suite. The combination of the twelve-tone technique and free atonality represents the combination of aesthetics and techniques that led Adorno to study with the composer; the combination is, for Adorno, analogous to a negative dialectic and a way forward with musical material. Adorno highlights Berg’s paradoxical nature when writing about this piece, he writes: “Berg’s insatiable appetite for paradox unites within the work’s over-all outline the minimal step with extremes of contrast.”61 Adorno highlights the work’s

numerous paradoxes, which included not only the way Berg constructed rows but also

59 For further analysis of Berg’s use of the all interval row in “Schließe mir die Augen beide” and then in the Lyric Suite see: Arved Ashby, “The Development of Berg’s Twelve-Tone Aesthetic as seen in the Lyric Suite and its Sources” PhD Diss Yale, 1995. Ashby, “Of ‘Modell-Typen’ and ‘Reihenformen’: Berg, Schoenberg, F. H. Klein, and the Concept of Row Derivation,” Journal of the American Musicological Society vol. 48, no 1 (Spring 1995), 67-105.

60 Adorno and Berg, Correspondence, 17.

61 Adorno, Alban Berg, 107.

the way he shaped the formal elements. A basic outline of the movement structure of the piece follows in Table 2-4 showing the titles, formal structure, and how the pitch material is organized.

Table 2-4. Formal Outline of the Lyric Suite. Movement Pitch Organization I. Allegretto gioviale Twelve tone II. Andante amoroso Free III. Allegro misterioso – trio estatico Twelve tone (trio free) IV. Adagio appassionato Free V. Presto delirando Free (trios twelve tone) VI. Largo desolato Twelve tone

The most commonly addressed paradox is that Berg’s work violates Schoenberg’s

principles. As George Perle writes, “It is impossible to comprehend the first movement

of the Lyric Suite in terms of the twelve-tone system unless we recognize from the outset its apparent violation of Schoenberg’s principle that a twelve-tone piece should be based on only one series.”62

In the Lyric Suite Berg constructed rows to allow tonal chords, and he was expressly focused on Klein’s “all interval row” which through transformation governs the piece’s structural architecture. The all interval row

B♭, B> is present in varying forms in the first, second, third, and fifth movement.63 The

significance of the row is that the two hexachords have tonal implications. The

hexachords are symmetrical and separated by a diminished fifth, as Berg writes in his

62 George Perle, Style and Idea in the Lyric Suite of Alban Berg 2nd ed. (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 2001), 6.

63 Adorno, Alban Berg, 106-7. Also see: Jarman, The Music of Alban Berg. Although Jarman mentions the same ideas and source as Adorno, he does not include the information on Klein; Arved Ashby, “The Development of Berg’s Twelve-Tone Aesthetic”; Ashby, “Of ‘Modell-Typen’ and ‘Reihenformen.’

introduction to the piece for the Kolisch Quartet.64 The first hexachord has F major

embedded within, while the second has B (or C flat) major.

Both Douglas Jarman and Patricia Hall establish that, while Berg’s adaptation of

composition with twelve-tones was new for him the technique was a way for Berg to

extend his already established compositional techniques. Jarman approaches Berg’s

development from an analytical perspective:

In many respects the twelve-note system was simply a codification of some of the techniques which had been a feature of Berg’s music from the period of the Altenberg Lieder onwards. What this codification did afford him, however, was some indication of the ways in which his already established technical procedures could be extended so as to include both the largest and the smallest pitch elements and, thus, a further, more rigorous means of organizing the total musical structure.65

Throughout his book Jarman shows analytically what Adorno was claiming since 1925,

that Berg’s construction of musical materials was constantly developing to allow the

smallest pitch materials to govern the whole. In Patricia Hall’s chapter, “Compositional

process in Wozzeck and Lulu: a glimpse of Berg’s atonal method,” she argues the same

point as Jarman, but evidenced through Berg’s sketches for the operas. While Berg

emphasized contrasting systems in his writings on his operas, the sketches tell us

otherwise.66 She observes that the sketches for both operas, “have identical formats,

and that Berg used these formats to accomplish similar goals. This suggests a

continuity not only in his working methods, but also between the two compositional

64 Alban Berg, “Nine Pages on the Lyric Suite,” in Pro Mundo – Pro Domo: The Writings of Alban Berg, edited by Bryan Simms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 206-7.

65 Jarman, The Music of Alban Berg, 79,

66 Patricia Hall, “Compositional process in Wozzeck and Lulu: a glimpse of Berg’s atonal method,” in The Cambridge Companion to Berg, ed. Anthony Pople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 180.

systems – atonality and dodecaphony.”67 She goes on to suggest that “as Berg’s

twelve-note technique evolved forward it also circled back, enabling him to once more

achieve the expressive effects of his earlier atonal and tonal works.”68 1925 was a

turning point for Berg because he found the means to incorporate the compositional

techniques and aesthetic principles he had been developing since his early works into

composition with twelve tones.

Adorno’s Pivotal Year

In 1925 Adorno underwent important intellectual shifts – from his approach to

philosophical thought to his approach to musical aesthetics. While he studied with Berg

Adorno observed the shifts in the composer’s style, and transferred what he saw in Berg

that mirrored his own ideas into concepts for musical analysis and philosophy. He saw

in Berg a way to transcend the compositional system -Schoenberg’s system- to create a viable new approach that Adorno found analogous to negative dialectics. During this time in Vienna, Adorno was also shifting away from the neo-Kantian mode of though of his youth to Marxist leanings,69 through the influence of Horkheimer.70 Also important to

Adorno’s history with Marxism and materialism is his study of George Lukács’ History

67 Hall, “Compositional process in Wozzeck and Lulu,” 180.

68 Hall, “Compositional process in Wozzeck and Lulu,” 188.

69 In the 1920s Adorno met Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) and embarked upon weekly meetings with the elder scholar involving study of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel, and Kierkegaard among other texts and authors. It was with Kracauer that Adorno learned, as Müller-Doohm writes, to approach philosophy as coded texts.

70 See Stefan Müller-Doohm’s monumental biography of Adorno for more on this point. Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, 79-80. Aside from Horkheimer’s, and other members of the Frankfurt school, particularly Benjamin, influence on Adorno’s thought and critical leanings towards Marxism in the mid 1920s Adorno’s study of and discussions with Lukács are notable.

and Class Consciousness (1923) and his subsequent meetings with the author.71 One

of the lessons Adorno takes from Lukács is to understand the background and history of

a subject and, in turn, seeing the subject separate or in contrast to the background. This

is directly pertinent to his analyses of Berg. While scholars such as Stefan Müller-

Doohm, Martin Jay, and Tom Huhn address intellectual shifts in Adorno’s career, they

do not examine how this plays a role in the way Adorno approaches music.

Scholars like to point out that the years between 1925-28, from the completion of

his doctorate until he finishes Habilitation -the years when Adorno was cultivating his

craft as a composer and music critic- were a time that seriously detracted from his

philosophical work, as though the two pursuits were not inextricably linked. Already a

composer and published critic since his teenage years, Adorno’s whole academic life

consisted of intertwining or balancing his musical and philosophical ambitions. During

these pivotal years he worked to understand twelve-tone techniques in practice,

theoretically, as well as philosophically, as a result of the progression of modern life.

Many of his music critiques of this period also contain the germs of philosophical ideas

to become more explicit in later, solely philosophical works.

Wozzeck was the first of Berg’s works to make a lasting impression on the young

Adorno as a composer, philosopher, and music critic. In 1924 Adorno met Alban Berg,

for the first time, at a Frankfurt performance of Three Fragments from Wozzeck. He

writes of the performance, “Over come by the music I begged Scherchen [the

conductor], with whom I had contact, to introduce me to Berg, in a few minutes it was

71 See, Simon Jarvis, “Adorno, Marx, and Materialism” in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 83.

agreed that I should come to Vienna as his student.”72 Although Adorno officially studied

with Berg in Vienna from 1925-26, this experience turned into a lasting relationship

between the two men, as recorded in their extensive correspondence between 1925

and Berg’s death in 1935. After Adorno left Vienna in 1926, he returned sporadically

thereafter. With a newly minted PhD, it seems Adorno escaped academic life, the

looming pressure of a Habilitation, moving instead to Vienna to pursue musical aims.

From his initial engagement with the Wozzeck pieces in 1924 and throughout the

entirety of his life, Adorno actively analyzed and wrote about Alban Berg’s music;

Adorno treated Berg’s music as an original idea. He often argued that Berg’s style was

the embodiment of modern music. Adorno saw Berg’s music as an expression of the

dialectical process: Berg was able to advance convention to the point of destruction and

yet reformulate the past into new music. The inherent contradictions in Berg’s music

drew Adorno to the composer, and his synthesis of two compositional systems, atonality

and tonality pushed to its functional limits. Benjamin’s words, from The Origin of

German Tragic Drama, ring true to Adorno’s approach to Berg and to his general

approach to musical objects;73 one must understand fully, analytically, socially,

politically, or culturally, a musical work on its own terms, then work out concepts based

on knowledge of individual ideas. In Benjamin’s words:

“The world of philosophical thought does not evolve out of the continuum of conceptual deductions, but in a description of the world of ideas. To

72 Theodor Adorno, Alban Berg, 13. This quotation is included in the 1968 monograph but also in an earlier version of the essay “Erinnerung” from “Erinnerung an den Lebenden” published in the music journal 23 under Adorno’s pseudonym Hektor Rottweiler.

73 Adorno was familiar with Benjamin’s text at the time he was studying with Berg. Benjamin had been in Frankfurt during Adorno’s PhD trying to get the book approved as his Habilitation document. In a later study it will be important to address how Benjamin’s ideas about concepts, aesthetics, history, and philosophy presented in this book play a role in Adorno’s thinking about music at this time.

execute this description it is necessary to treat every idea as an original one.”74

Adorno was not the only person in 1925 to treat Berg’s music as an original idea, but he

is among few who sought to understand Berg’s music for more than an allegiance to or

divergence from Schoenberg’s techniques. Moreover, Berg’s works, and the approach

Adorno took towards them, served as a tool and catalyst for Adorno to describe his own

world of ideas—often philosophical or social ideas. Understanding ideas as original, parsing them out, and describing the world of ideas was key to Adorno’s approach to musical aesthetics in 1925 and throughout his career.

It is well known that Adorno had a tendency to seek out mentor relationships throughout his life, to include: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Max

Horkheimer. Detlev Claussen’s study of Adorno focuses on the role of influential figures; he states that Adorno had a habit of “identifying with a self-chosen elder brother as a part of a pattern that recurs in a number of Adorno’s friendships.”75 Adorno worked out

many of his key theories with those friends and mentors; one such example is the

Dialectic of Enlightenment, written with Horkheimer. Although Claussen does not

recognize Berg in this role, Berg too fills the role of respected mentor. It is Berg with

whom Adorno maintains an extended dialogue on new music. Other biographers and

analysts prefer to discuss Adorno’s time in Vienna in relation to Schoenberg and his

circle. Martin Jay’s seminal biography addresses Adorno’s Viennese sojourn:

Arriving in January 1925, Adorno soon entered the circle of innovative composers around Arnold Schoenberg, whose controversial ‘new music’ was

74 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 43.

75 Claussen, One Last Genius, 36.

then already leaving behind its atonal phase for the serialism of the twelve-tone row.76

Although Adorno’s connection to Schoenberg is important, particularly in light of the

Philosophy of New Music, it was actually through Berg that Adorno acquired new

Schoenberg works to analyze. Berg’s own analyses of Schoenberg’s works informed

Adorno’s own interpretations of Schoenberg’s compositions. Moreover, Schoenberg

could not stand Adorno. Max Paddison briefly points out the relationship of Adorno and

Berg by emphasizing how important composing was to Adorno and thus noting that his

compositions deserve critical analyses.77 Richard Leppert’s commentary in the Adorno collection Essays on Music conveys the importance of Berg’s music to Adorno’s

compositions and conceptions of new music: “Alban Berg, Adorno’s composition

teacher, profoundly affected Adorno and his understanding of music, music’s social

responsibility, and music’s capacity, and that of art more generally, to tell the truth—

indirectly.”78 Leppert’s brief analysis addresses the breadth of concepts Berg’s music

effects, beyond just composition lessons. In other words, Berg and his music were

catalysts for Adorno’s prolonged engagement with philosophies of music.

During the two years of study in Vienna the two exchanged at least 53 letters,

representing the time they were not in the same city. Throughout the letters Adorno,

who contributes more to the exchange, frequently airs philosophical theory based on his

musical analyses. He also explains his conceptions of modern music to Berg. As

76 Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984): 27.

77 Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 5-6.

78 Theodor W. Adorno, Richard D. Leppert, and Susan H. Gillespie. Essays on Music (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002): 546.

Adorno prepared the first Wozzeck essay in 1925, he wrote to Berg describing the article that he was writing at Berg’s request; Adorno states,

My most secret intention was to make the essay’s use of language correspond directly to the way in which you compose, for example in the quartet. This gave rise to a curious encounter between your manner of composition and my current intellectual stance. You can imagine how eagerly I await your opinion.79

Adorno’s reference to his “current intellectual stance” refers to his method of analyzing

the dialectical processes; in this case he was using Freudian psychology in combination

with dialectical logic to analyze the musical text. Throughout the essay Adorno

consistently writes about how Berg transformed various elements of the opera. He

states, “the dialectic of this musical style, which everywhere translates the consistency

of what has been into the alien perspective of what is becoming.”80 Adorno sees

dialectical processes in at least three aspects of the opera: 1) in the construction of the

work, particularly the transformation of forms within, 2) in the distillation of the story

through music, and finally 3) in relation to the history and theory of opera. As their

correspondence continues, Adorno’s views of Wozzeck change and adapt, and he

frequently writes to Berg of the importance this work plays in his thought.

Berg’s reactions to Adorno’s “meta” level analyses are often supportive and affirmative but on the other hand he often coached Adorno on publications discussing his own compositions, particularly those essays intended for Viennese music journals.

He often asks the young Dr. Wiesengrund to avoid overly philosophical matters because his audience was uneducated in those terms. In one such case from 1925

Berg writes,

79 Adorno and Berg, Correspondence 1925-1935, 28.

80 Adorno, Leppert, and Gillespie, “Wozzeck,” in Essays on Music, 624.

I am greatly looking forward to [the Wozzeck essay]. But one request!! Do not write anything difficult! I want those who read it to learn all that from you. But they can only do that—as they are mostly just musicians & and music-lovers… if you express yourself in generally comprehensible terms. I am sure this will pose no problem for you.81

This sentiment is not an isolated incident. Berg frequently responds to Adorno’s articles with immense praise and admiration, but coupled with a phrase explaining that he understood “most” of the material after several times through.

Throughout the correspondence, Adorno also frequently makes literary and theoretical suggestions to Berg. If Adorno did not directly influence Berg, later, to choose Wedekind’s Lulu texts for his next opera, he did indeed work to convince Berg that Hauptmann’s Und Pipa Tanzt was not a text that would meet Berg’s literary standards. The two also frequently exchanged opinions on the new musical works he had heard or studied. Finally, throughout the correspondence, the two maintain a personal relationship; Adorno regards Berg throughout his writings with the greatest of deference, a trait not commonly associated with the philosopher.

The most overt outcome of Adorno’s study with Berg is his shift in analytical writing style with the 1925 Wozzeck essay. As the quotations above have indicated

Adorno engaged with Wozzeck on many levels, and the ways in which he approached the work changed throughout his career, as represented in the revisions and republications of the essay. The essay for the Viennese periodical Anbruch in 1925 was

81 Adorno and Berg, Correspondence, 25.

intended for the premiere of the opera.82 But as Kevin Mooney describes, “it was a

carefully timed profession de foi.”83

Adorno, from the first sentence, seeks to problematize the importance given to

the “Schoenberg School” notion. From the beginning of the essay establishes this

theme: “To speak of an Arnold Schoenberg School, misjudges the truth, the truth of the

compositional instruction otherwise possibly as coming from the works.”84 Adorno

seems to be fighting against the notion that a school of composers implies a consistent

style, or that each individual student echoes the teacher’s style. He goes on to write:

Alban Berg by choice put himself to Schoenberg and learned compositional techniques from him. Yet neither [did he allow] the proximity (Nachbarschaft) to these determining intentions, nor did he permit himself to derive the contents of his music from the pedagogical relationship. Schoenberg’s students are by choice and decidedly still implied as in by means of technical loyalty: his students are not, identical to him, in the break with all aforementioned objectivity and under the drawing (Zeichnen) of solitude to begin and the force of recognition alone in that truth leaves, but rather loneliness commands.85

Berg had asked Adorno to write the essay and wanted him to discuss why he had set

Büchner, and secondly, to give greater detail to hexachord in the suicide scene as it

82 Wozzeck was premiered by the Berlin State Opera 14 Dec. 1925.

83 Kevin Mooney, “A Night at the Opera: Benjamin, Adorno, and the Premiere of Wozzeck,” (paper presented at Music, Marxism, and the Frankfurt School, Dublin, IE, July 2-4, 2014), 1.

84 Adorno, GS band 18, 456. (translation is my own) Von der Schule Arnold Schönbergs reden, heißt die Wahrheit verkennen, die vom Unterricht des Komponisten nicht anders wohl als von den Werken ausging.

85 Adorno, “Zur Uraufführung des Wozzeck” GS band 18, 456. (Translation is my own). Alban Berg hat in Wahl zu Schönberg sich gestellt und bei ihm die Technik des Komponierens erlernt. Jedoch weder aus der Nachbarschaft der bestimmenden Intentionen, noch aus dem pädagogischen Verhältnis lassen sich die Gehalte seiner Musik ableiten. Schüler Schönbergs sein aus Wahl und entschiedener noch als in handwerklicher Treue besagt: sein Schüler nicht sein, sondern, gleich ihm, im Bruch mit aller vorgegebenen Objektivität und unter dem Zeichen der Einsamkeit zu beginnen und die Macht der Bestätigung allein in jener Wahrheit zu belass, die Einsamkeit.

relates to Schoenberg, thus giving the potential audience a greater understanding.86

Instead the essay has two goals: 1) to show Berg’s compositional style in its own light and not as a derivative of Schoenberg; and 2) to use his analysis to show the continuity of the underlying thinking.87 Adorno achieves his goals by weaving together analyses of

Berg’s method of thematic integration and variation as it relates to the psychological

content of the narrative.

By weaving these elements together, Adorno sets Berg’s compositional style

apart from Schoenberg’s, all the while analyzing the unfolding of large- and small-scale

elements of the composition. Adorno writes of Berg’s work, “The technical economy of

Wozzeck is the economy of transformation.”88 Berg integrated compositional, dramatic,

and psycho-analytical theories to give the essence of the truth of the work not just

“surface elements” of its component parts; Adorno, too, is concerned with the economy

of transformation in his prose. As stated in the earlier quotation, Adorno sought to fully

reflect Berg’s musical concepts in his prose. It is the integration of all of the analytical

elements that fulfills Adorno’s quest and sets this writing apart as a shift in the way he

formulated musical analysis.

Adorno’s practical engagement with modernistic compositional techniques is

another outcome of his experience with Berg. When Adorno began his study with Berg,

he believed the free atonality of the second Viennese school to be the radical highpoint

of the 20th century. His published compositions echo this interest; a general assessment

86 Adorno and Berg, Correspondence, 25.

87 Adorno and Berg, Correspondence, 28.

88 Theodor Adorno, “Alban Berg: Zur Uraufführung des Wozzeck,” 462. “Die technische Ökonomie auch des Wozzeck ist Ökonomie der Verwandlung.”

of his works indicates the following features: traditional forms, gestural economy, and

small motivic cells.

The second movement, “Variations,” of Adorno’s Two Pieces for String Quartet

was written in Vienna, completed April 9th 1925, during his study with Berg. It

presumably indicates the changes Adorno wished to make in his compositional style.

The organizing form is theme, twelve variations, and a coda, further divided into a larger

ternary structure. Within the atonal idiom are models for this formal structure, one which

Adorno was familiar. In Walter Levin’s analysis of the composer’s use of form in this

movement he discusses the third movement of Schoenberg’s String Quartet no. 2

(1907-8) and Zemlinsky’s String Quartet op. 19 (1924) as structural models.89 These

models should be considered alongside the variations in Wozzeck, the work Adorno

spent much of 1925-6 analyzing for subsequent publication, as well as the Theme and

Variations in the Chamber Concerto.

The pitch material of the theme is a modified 12-tone row with an internal repetition as well as non-sequential repetition of pitches after the initial row statement; the initial row is marked by Xs above the pitches in Example 2-6. Like the form the row divides into three sections—three distinct melodic fragments that are subject to variation techniques throughout. The melodic fragments are distinguished by color in the example.90 Adorno does not approach composition with twelve-tones strictly, and

throughout the movement approaches the compositional technique more like Berg and

Klein.

89 Walter Levin, “Adorno’s Zwei Stücke für Streichquartett op. 2,” Musik Konzepte: Theodor W. Adorno Der Komponist 63/64 (1989): 95.

90 Theodor W. Adorno, Zwei Stücke für Streichquartett op. 2, “Variationen,” edited by Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich: Edition + Kritik, 1980), 1925.

Example 2-6. Theodor Adorno, Zwei Stücke für Streichquartett, mvt. 2 “Variation”, mm. 1-18.

Variation 1, mm. 6-11 restates the row and motives, but Adorno again allows for repetition of pitches and extra tones. In Variation 2, mm. 11-18, Adorno uses the retrograde version of the row, and sticks to the order of pitches, without extra tones.

When Adorno writes about this piece to Berg, as he is editing it in 1926, he stresses that his use of a row is not intended as strict but rather, as a part of

overarching structural relationships in the piece. He writes to Berg:

I permit myself the acoustic liberty of choice-interruption of the row; freely following the harmonic tendency—and reserve this right at all times, and tie the movement’s large-scale dimensions purely to the formal architecture, which is certainly related to the row’s manifestation, but not identical.91

Adorno’s discussion of his own work echoes his writing in the Wozzeck essay, where he

emphasizes that “no one part of the whole should emancipate itself.”92 In his own work,

he describes a technique he used that must be altered for the sake of the piece as a

whole, not as recognizable parts. The brief view of the first piece Adorno composed with

Berg gives a fitting overview of Adorno’s concept of new music at the time; original new

music was not the formulaic repetition of a system such as tonality or 12-tone, but rather

the combination of these normative elements with non-normative elements to produce

something new. His composition and his anecdote about it gives a sense that he

worked to employ the techniques of composition he was learning, thus seeking to make

his practical application mirror his philosophical concepts.

Throughout his life, Adorno writes at least thirty essays and articles analyzing

Berg’s music and the concepts behind it, one of which is the monograph length study.

Table 2-5 shows the writings Adorno devoted to Berg; as a point of comparison he

wrote approximately twenty on Schoenberg.

91 Adorno and Berg, Correspondence, 72.

92 Adorno, Essays on Music, 622-3.

Table 2-5. Theodor Adorno’s writings on Alban Berg. Date Title 1925 Alban Berg: On the Premiere of Wozzeck 1929 Alban Berg’s Early Songs Berg: Seven Early Songs The Opera Wozzeck Night Music (for Alban Berg) 1931 Berg and Webern—Schoenberg’s Heirs 1932 The Instrumentation of Berg’s Early Songs 1934 (ph) Three Pieces from the Lyric Suite for Orchestra 1936 Remembering the Survivors – “23” / also “In Memory of Alban Berg” (ph) Berg Memorial Concert on Radio London 1937 (8 analytical essays for Willi Reich’s Alban Berg) Piano Sonata, op. 1 4 Songs, op. 2 7 Early Songs String Quartet, op. 3 4 Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, op. 5 3 Orchestral Pieces, op. 6 Lyric Suite for String Quartet Der Wein, Concert Aria 1951 For Alban Berg 1954 (ph) Alban Berg’s Chamber Concerto 1955 In Memory of Alban Berg (reworked, from 1936) 1956 Alban Berg Wozzek in Partitur 1959 (Klangfiguren 2 chapters) Alban Berg – (1956) The Instrumentation of Berg’s Early Songs (reworked, from 1932) 1960 Talk on Berg’s Lulu 1961 Observations on Berg’s Compositional Techniques (in Quasi una Fantasia) 1968 Berg: Master of the Smallest Link 1969 (ph) Alban Berg: Opera and Modern

In addition, numerous essays devote a paragraph or short aphorism to the composer in the course of a larger analysis. Adorno was more than a champion of Berg’s works, although he did just that in the first Wozzeck essay as he sought to set Berg in his own spotlight, not just in the shadow of Schoenberg. Like the Berg scholars after him,

Adorno grapples with the difficulty of Berg’s music and is by all accounts a skilled analyst of the composers’ music. The difficulties for Adorno often occur when Berg’s music does not meet the standards of dialectic logic he finds in Wozzeck or the quartet, or those standards he enumerates in Philosophy of New Music.

This initial account and reassessment of the relationship between Adorno and

Berg leads to a larger reassessment of Adorno and the development of his concepts of new music and musical aesthetics. It is pertinent to have more detailed accounts of

Adorno’s compositions, sketches, and analyses, through these materials that Adorno actively engaged and technically studied the music he critiques. A thorough analysis of his writings and compositions in this period, as they relate to his extended oeuvre and as they reflect his time with Berg will give a more comprehensive view of his application of philosophical concepts in musical writings.

CHAPTER 3 ADORNO’S NARRATIVE OF BERG AND HIS MUSIC

“Narration is a process of poiesis, of making or producing a fabric of temporal experience woven according to the need to orient oneself in the course of time. The product of this process of narration, the fabric capable of so orienting, is ‘a history.’” —Jörn Rüsen “Historical Narration” 1

In Alban Berg, Master of the Smallest Link (1968) Adorno posits a revolutionary understanding of Berg’s idiosyncratic musical language, portraying Berg as a composer able to construct a grand totality of a piece from an atomistic detail. As a result of forty years of writings that sought to understand Berg’s music on its own terms, Adorno challenges prevailing views of Berg, particularly those that claimed he did not compose twelve-tone music the right way, or that he was more a romantic than a modern composer. The purpose of Adorno’s lifelong engagement with Berg’s music was, as the title of the book claims, to place Berg as the master of his contribution to modern musical techniques, as master of his craft. Adorno’s developing narrative of Alban

Berg’s music and his identity as an authentic composer, culminated in the monograph.

Yet in the scholarly literature this monograph is often misunderstood because of

Adorno’s seemingly nostalgic view of the composer. Many consider it a vehicle for the aging Adorno to reflect fondly upon his teacher. Because of its highly personal tone,

Adorno is criticized for omitting detailed analysis and for ignoring many elements of

Berg’s musical language. Julianne Brand and Christopher Hailey, for example, give the following assessment in the opening to their English translation of the monograph:

Theodor Adorno’s study of Alban Berg is not a central work of his music- aesthetic oeuvre. It has neither the breadth of his Mahler and Wagner monographs, nor the didactic focus of his Philosophy of Modern Music

1 Jörn Rüsen, “Historical Narration: Foundation, Types, Reason,” History and Theory 26 (1987): 88.

and Introduction to Sociology of Music. It is, instead, a personal document, consisting of reminiscences about a mentor who became a friend, and analysis of works with which the author had lived a lifetime.2

This comment epitomizes scholarly approaches to Adorno’s writings on Berg,

misunderstanding how Adorno’s friendship with Berg affected his analysis of the

composer. It was precisely the personal relationship that allowed Adorno to perceive

aspects of Berg’s music that were incomprehensible to others.

More than his books on Wagner, Beethoven, or Mahler, Adorno plays with the

conventions of a musical monograph in Alban Berg Master of the Smallest Link. While

he addresses the life and works aspects conventional in monographs, it is through the

combination of philosophical analysis and historical narrative that Adorno develops a

sense of musical continuity. Adorno argues that Berg’s continuity comes from his ability

to simultaneously use and destroy traditional forms and genres, crafting his materials

from the smallest musical links, to create something new. The contradictions embedded

in Berg’s music and aesthetics allowed Adorno to notice a practical application of his

ideas for a new dialectic model, negative dialectic. There is a causal link between

Berg’s music and Adorno’s development of negative dialectics, which directly links to

Adorno’s modus operandi, understanding Berg’s works without the shadow of

Schoenberg. He knew that Berg’s music was not just “eclectic,” but rather intricately

designed to allow seemingly irreconcilable ideas to exist together, for example tonal

elements in twelve-tone compositions. Adorno in turn uses negative dialectics to

formulate a new concept of analysis, which informs his new monograph on the

composer.

2 Julianne Brand and Christopher Hailey, “Translators’ Introduction” in Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), viii.

In fact, all of Adorno’s writings on Berg are an attempt to construct a continuous identity of Berg as a composer, to erase the conventional labels of eclecticism or “Berg the most Romantic of the Second Viennese School” in order to know how and why the music was constructed the way it was. This book consolidates Adorno’s writings on the composer, establishing Berg as a pivotal composer of his own right, disassociated from

Schoenberg. The prevailing view of this book is that it is just a consolidation of materials that allowed Adorno to pay homage to Berg in the 1960s, but autograph sources tell us something different.

The manuscripts housed in both the Theodor W. Adorno Archive (Frankfurt and

Berlin)3 as well as the Alban Berg Archive at the Austrian National Library Music

Collection in Vienna demonstrate that this monograph was planned as early as 1936, undergoing periodic changes, and reshaped until its publication in 1968. Even Adorno played a part in the misconceptions of this book, stating that its genesis was the result of a request from the publisher Elisabeth Lafite in the late 1960s. He also states that while a few materials were adapted from analytical essays published in a 1937 volume on Berg edited by Willi Reich, the most important materials were newly written in 1968. I examine what is actually newly written for this text, because it provides the framework for Adorno’s new book.

These materials provide new access to the progression of Adorno’s works over time. They show Adorno’s edits ranging from grammatical corrections to substantial content changes. While scholars often claim Adorno’s thoughts and analyses are “fully

3 The autograph sources of the Theodor W. Adorno Archive are located in Frankfurt at the Institute for Social Research. The Archive has a partnership with Akademie der Kunst, Walter Benjamin Archive in Berlin and has made photocopies or scans of most of Adorno’s material. I have accessed materials in Frankfurt but the archivists strongly advise researchers use the materials in Berlin because they are easier to access due to institutional operating hours and staff availability.

100

formed” in his earliest publications, they actually go through slow and incremental

changes only evidenced by examining the autograph sources, not just the Collected

Works. It is correct, as Max Paddison claims, that:

In the main, the Berg analyses date from the 1930s—a period when Adorno was consolidating his theory of musical material in relation to the music of the composers of the Second Viennese School, and when he was still very much under the influence of Berg as both composer and teacher. (Most of the analyses in fact date from 1937, when the memory of the composer and his untimely death was still acute). Most were published initially as part of Willi Reich’s book on Berg and included in the 1968 Berg book.4

While many of the Berg analyses are from the 1930s, Adorno was consolidating more than a theory of musical material. As I further analyze in the following chapters,

Adorno’s philosophy of music and his concepts of dialectics were undergoing significant changes due to his study with Berg and work on his music. Paddison’s parenthetical statement implies that Adorno’s memory governed his writings on Berg, and by 1968

that might have faded. In fact through the autograph sources we see Adorno was

constantly engaged with analyzing Berg’s music and crafting his narrative on the

composer. Adorno consistently, while at times subtly, reworked these analytical essays

for publication throughout his career.

By presenting the stages of production for Alban Berg Master of the Smallest

Link we can understand the processes by which Adorno shaped Berg’s identity as an

avant-garde composer and what new ideas he presents from a lifetime’s worth of study.

The development of the monograph traces the development of Adorno’s aesthetics and

philosophy. For the first time, I offer a detailed look at previously unexamined

documents, from handwritten drafts from 1936 to multiple typed drafts and pre-

4 Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 158.

101

publication exemplars from the 1950s through 1968. Adorno’s continual efforts to construct a narrative of Berg, which came to fruition in the 1968 monograph, coincide with the development of his key dialectic, aesthetic, philosophical, musical concepts.

Adorno’s narrative of Berg can be interpreted through historian Jörn Rüsen’s conception of historical narration. Historical narration, he writes, “has the general function of orienting practical life in time by mobilizing the memory of temporal experience, by developing a concept of continuity and by stabilizing identity.”5 Adorno uses historical narration within the conventions of a musical monograph to orient Berg in his time, all the while establishing Berg’s musical continuity – the idea of the “smallest link.” He stabilizes Berg’s identity by presenting a new mode of analysis that challenges prevailing views of Berg.

Adorno had a somewhat playful relationship with the Austro-Germanic monograph tradition mainly due to his own analytical perspectives. In each of his monographs Adorno takes a different approach, as befits the subject, and offers a new model for monographs on each composer. The approach to musical monographs or biographies common at the time meant working with a conventional structure.

Monographs on the life and works typically gave objective biographical facts in the first section then descriptive analyses of a composer’s works in the second; often the works were divided thematically by genre or chronologically. That is not to say that authors did not have an overarching focus or goal for their narration. Common tropes for the most popular Beethoven monographs discussed his personality as it related to his compositional genius. Wagner monographs focused on many elements of the

5 Jörn Rüsen, “Historical Narration,” 90.

102

composer’s personality, output, nationalism, or religious views. While Adorno’s monographs all take different approaches to the composers, they all focus on the truth content of works in relation to modernity and state of the subject.

Aside from the Berg monograph, Adorno penned three other composer monographs on figures who exemplified profound musical, ideological, or aesthetic changes, the respective subjects were Wagner, Mahler, and Beethoven. The work on

Wagner, Versuch über Wagner was written between the fall of 1937 and spring of 1938, published in 1952, and was a product of work produced during the years of the Institute for Social Research.6 Adorno’s Marxist critique of Wagner’s aesthetics is a polemical attack on one hand, but as Max Paddison argues, on the other it did not seek to dismiss

Wagner’s music.7 At the core of Versuch is the thesis that ideology is inseparable from the aesthetics of the artwork. Wagner’s process of composition makes him the agent of ideology.8 Adorno argues throughout that Wagner is a link between the ideals of the past (Romanticism) with Modernity. Yet in the realm where Wagner’s aesthetics present similar ideals to early genres and concepts, as in the traditions of German Idealism or

Romanticism, he does not follow a system or logic from the past or of his own accord.

This aspect is problematic for Adorno; he writes:

Even though Wagner’s music is thoroughly perfected as style, this style is not a system in the sense of being logically consistent totality, an immanent ordering of parts and whole. But this very fact is not without its revolutionary implications. In art, as in philosophy, the various systems strive to create a synthesis out of diversity. In the process they always let themselves be guided by an existing, but now questionable, totality whose

6 Theodor Adorno, Versuch über Wagner (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1952).

7 Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 253.

8 Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner (London: Verso, 2009), 28.

103

immediate right to exist they dispute even while they indirectly reproduce it. And that is as far as Wagner gets.9

Adorno’s critique is not that Wagner is anti-systematic, a trait he generally lauds; his critique is that the works do not have a self-guiding logic or system in their own right.

Throughout, Adorno critiques the lack of dialectical movement in Wagner’s works as well as a lack of musical development. The concepts and techniques that Wagner presents to codify his aesthetics, particularly Leitmotiv and Gesamtkunstwerk, are the links to modernity via commodification. Adorno analyses the rise of commodification of art through Wagner’s processes and works, and in this vein “the commodity character of music first becomes clearly apparent, so Adorno argues, as an aspect of music ‘coming of age’ in a society dominated by the exchange of commodities.”10

Due to the era in which Adorno’s book was conceived, in the late 1930s when

Adorno was working on ongoing explorations into the ideological roots of Nazism,11 his

criticisms are quite different than the other monographs, but not outside the purview of

Adorno’s critical practices. First, it was written in a short period of time, and does not

represent Adorno’s changes in emphasis on Wagner from the late 30s to 1966; later he

seeks to rehabilitate Wagner from the claims he presents in this text. Second, the

aesthetic and social critiques woven throughout the Wagner book are more like a

snapshot of his mode of critique in a given moment; it is also more cohesive in the

sense that it was written largely as a whole, although published in parts in Zeitschrift für

9 Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 38.

10 Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 253.

11 Savoj Žižek, “Forward: Why is Wagner Worth Saving” in In Search of Wagner, viii.

104

Sozialforschung. Wagner stood in as a critique of modern commodity culture and

ideology.

Adorno’s Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, like the Berg book, was also

completed at the end of his life, published in posthumously in 1971 but completed in

1963.12 It is at once a densely philosophical yet deeply musical analysis of Mahler’s

music, with ideas reminiscent of Negative Dialectics without the totally abstract

philosophical language. Though it contains no musical examples, it has the most

references, via footnotes, to all of the pieces he discusses. The crux of Mahler is

Adorno’s understanding of how Mahler’s music is meaningful in the face of the

compositional techniques he uses and the wider social- and historic context in which the

music is conceived. Mahler is guided by tonality, but according to Adorno, “not by

traditional principles of form, but by the specific musical content of and his conception of

the overall progression of each piece.”13 Yet Mahler revolted against tonality’s

associations to bourgeois musical conventions.14 Adorno argues for a “material theory

of forms” that would deal with Mahler’s structures, the essential “genres in his idea of

form are: breakthrough (Durchbruch), suspension (Suspension), and fulfillment

(Erfüllung).15 This “theory of forms” is in some sense a hermeneutical approach to

dealing with Mahlerian technique, particularly the “characters” within that Adorno

12 Theodor Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans., Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1991).

13 Adorno, Mahler, 41.

14 Adorno, Mahler, 37.

15 Adorno, Mahler, 41.

105

elevates an almost metaphysical stature, but were often dismissed as programmatic in

the literature Adorno is working against.

Adorno intermingles the modes of interpretation he finds useful to understand

meaning in Mahler’s music, as is consistent with his constellation approach to criticism.

Woven throughout the book is the idea of how aesthetics and meaning are maintained

in individual art works in the face of prevalent ideology. “After the destruction of a

musical culture debased to ideology,” Adorno writes, “a second whole is shored up from

the fragments and scraps of memory. In it the subjective organizing power allows the

return of culture, which art opposes but cannot eradicate. Each Mahlerian symphony

asks how, from the ruins of the musical objective world, a living totality can arise.”16

Mahler’s symphonies could use an out-modeled system—tonality—to construct

meaning in new ways by revolting against form and the historic social and musical

functions of form and tonality.

In all of Adorno’s monographs he pushes against ingrained or traditional ways of

analyzing, criticizing, and publishing on a given composer.17 In the Mahler work he

begins, in the first paragraph, to argue that the traditional theoretical practices are not

helpful in and of themselves, writing, “Mahler is particularly resistant to theorizing

because he entirely fails to acknowledge the choice between technique and imaginative

content. In his work a purely musical residue stubbornly persists that can be interpreted

in terms neither of processes nor of moods.”18 As in all of his other writings, Adorno is

16 Adorno, Mahler, 39.

17 Although this dissertation does not allow the following inquiry, a subject of later study will inquire as to how much influence Berg had on Adorno’s understanding of Mahler and Wagner.

18 Adorno, Mahler, 3.

106

skeptical that a rigid single-minded approach to analysis will yield fruitful results unless it is true to the musical material. Adorno’s monographs, like all of his music criticism, are defined by understanding what is specifically musical. In his Berg monograph, more than the others, he addresses the works themselves to establish what is new and what is modern about Berg’s music while simultaneously presenting what a modern monograph can accomplish.

Prevailing Views of Berg – The Other Berg Monographs

One of the reasons Adorno writes about Berg is because he saw the arguments other writers and commenters were presenting as incompatible with what Berg’s music actually did. He was concerned about, three main Berg monographs were published during Adorno’s lifetime: Willi Reich (1935 and 1963), Hans Redlich (1957), and Konrad

Vogelsang (1959). Out of these, Reich and Redlich’s books are the most important. The common methodology among the three listed was a life and works approach to Berg.

Adorno, at least for his Berg monograph, worked against the model of other books as he constructed his narrative. While not in monograph form, Schoenberg’s critiques of

Berg were also influential to Adorno; he disagreed with the version of the Berg

Schoenberg presented. In the twenties and thirties Berg was critiqued based on his lack of adherence to Schoenbergian techniques, sounding romantic, or sounding Mahlerian.

In the post-war era, as Adorno notes, the serialists began to use Webern as a measuring stick against Berg was to be judged.

After Berg’s death in 1935 Willi Reich, one of Berg’s former students and a

Viennese music critic, wrote the first work that attempted to assesses Berg’s life and works. Alban Berg, mit Bergs eigenen Schriften und Beiträgen von Theodor

Wiesengrund-Adorno und Ernst Křenek (1937) included essays and analyses by Reich,

107

Adorno, and Křenek.19 It was at once a text in memory of Berg and an analytical account of Berg’s output immediately following his death. Reich states that this monograph comes after 26 years of writings on Berg’s compositions and he works against the idea of Berg as “Klassiker der Neuen Musik”.20 Reich’s stated goal is to

reshape (Neugestaltung) the human phenomenon of Berg and his high level of

intellectualism.21 The book is divided into two parts, as the title indicates, “Life” and

“Works.” The biographical section divides Berg’s artistic life up into chapters, forming a

traditional biography and each chapter is punctuated with an interlude. The interludes

are letters to or from Berg, or excerpts of Berg’s own writings. He discusses the

following works: student works, Drei Orchesterstücke op. 6, Wozzeck, Kammerkonzert,

Lyrische Suite, Der Wein, Lulu, and the Violin Concerto. Reich makes a point to write

his own analyses of works that Adorno and Křenek authored in the 1937 book. His

essays on Wozzeck, Lulu, and the Violin Concerto are the most substantial, giving

lengthy backgrounds to each work, formal overviews, plot summaries in the operas, and

stylistic analyses. In comparison to the other works he discusses, these three receive a

more in-depth analytical treatment. But the section “Das Werk” is generally more

descriptive than analytical; this is the type of analysis Adorno was working to break

away from. Adorno’s own critiques focus on the musical material, often asking, if a piece

is influenced by a Schoenbergian technique or teaching, how did Berg break the mold?

19 Willi Reich, Alban Berg, mit Bergs eigenen Schriften und Beiträgen von Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno und Ernst Křenek (Vienna: H. Reichner, 1937).

20 Willi Reich, Alban Berg: Leben und Werk (Zurich: Atlantis Verlag, 1963), 7.

21 Reich, Alban Berg: Leben und Werk, 7. “Ich habe mir daher bei der vollkommenen Neugestaltung jenes ersten, seit langem vergriffenen Buches vor allem die Aufgabe gestellt, die menschliche Erscheinung von Alban Berg und seine hohe Geistigkeit mit aller nur irgendwie erreichbaren Authentizität darzustellen.”

108

Adorno’s contributions contextualize Berg’s works through analysis and references to

other styles and composers.

Hans Redlich also took the “life and works” approach to in his 1957 Alban Berg:

The Man and his Music.22 Redlich begins by stating that one of his goals is to correct

the notion of the “Second Viennese School” as put forth by Schoenberg apologists

René Leibowitz and Joseph Rufer.23 His strategy is to show the strong contrasts between the respective musical natures of each composer, thus giving a deeper historical appreciation. He produces a teleological type of lineage, placing Berg in a line of an Austro-German musical heritage that presented prototypes of many of Berg’s

stylistic tendencies. Throughout his book Redlich links Berg to an inherited Viennese

classicism, from Haydn and Mozart linking to Beethoven and Brahms which led to the

modes of construction of musical materials Berg learns from his immediate

predecessors Wagner, Mahler, and Schoenberg. He links serial organization materials

to prototypical works such as Beethoven’s late quartet Op. 32 and pieces by Liszt. He

also links Berg’s fascination with musical anagrams to Bach. All of this is to say that

while Redlich strove to expand the notion of an artistically unified “School” he created a

lineage of his own. He relies heavily on comparison, seeking to explain some of Berg’s

“idiosyncratic” traits as also prevalent throughout the lineage to which he is an heir.

As discussed in chapter 2, while there were multiple methods and techniques for

composition with twelve-tones in the cultural milieu, composers who explored the

22 Hans F. Redlich, Alban Berg: The Man and his Music (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1957). This book is similar to Redlich’s Alban Berg: Versuch einer Würdigung (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1957). The author claims the book (the German version) was written in 1955 and the English version is a transcription and condensation “rather than literal translation.”

23 Redlich, Alban Berg: The Man and his Music, 13.

109

possibilities of the technique were, and often are still, held to the standards of

Schoenberg’s rules and thus Berg’s music was not adequately understood. Critical to an

understanding of Adorno’s monograph in the face of those just discussed and the

accepted views of Berg is knowing that he viewed Berg’s music and place in history

through his peculiar use of dialectics—negative dialectics. Carl Dahlhaus, one of

Adorno’s sharpest critics, writes that Adorno’s book is the first adequate monograph on

Berg. In a review published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,24 Dahlhaus writes:

And the Bergian tone (sound), which sometimes recalls Mahler, is at the center where the reflections and analysis in Adorno’s book ---the first adequate monograph on Berg---circle around. When one immerses oneself in Berg’s music, one sometimes has the feeling that his (Berg’s) voice speaks with delicateness, Nihilism, and confidence, with weakest, mixed tone (sounds): Well, it is actually nothing at all.

24 January 25, 1969.

25 Carl Dahlhaus from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung January 25, 1969.

110

What Dahlhaus recognizes as the open dialectic is synonymous with Adorno’s negative dialectics. A feature of negative dialectics is a mode of thinking or analysis that is anti- systematic, implying it is without the expectations of ideology, or a school of thought.

Adorno did not need to reconcile his own autobiographical recollections, while creating a biographical narrative; they are parts of the structure of the work that do not need reconciliation. Adorno’s combined materials established critical dialectical play, using his own negative dialectics as a model for analysis. Negative dialectics, embedded in the way Adorno conceives of Berg’s music, is integrated into his analysis of every piece. Dahlhaus’s review highlights the most important dialectic poles in the book. First, Adorno positioned Berg’s music in relation to other composers to be contrasted by analyzing Berg’s idiosyncratic compositional language in and of itself.

Second, he created a dialectic between the narrative style and philosophical mode of operation.

The Origins of Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link

As a culmination of Adorno’s lifelong work on Berg, the monograph was a calculated combination of essays and analyses intended to form a narrative of Berg’s identity as a composer. Table 3-1 presents the table of contents for the books. About the book Adorno writes,

The bulk of [my] work on Berg consisted of the analyses and reflections [I] had contributed to the book published by Willi Reich in 1937, which was meant to be a preliminary study only. That book has long been out of print. The author deems those contributions, which in his opinion stemmed from a period of break through, worthy of being made available again to the public. He thanks Willi Reich for his generous permission. Of course, the

Lehrer und Freund gewesen ist, wird durch Reflexion zugleich bewahrt und so weit aufgehoben, daß sie ohne Peinlichkeit mitteilbar wird.

111

author considers what he wrote for this book in 1968 its most significant portion.26

Prior to Reich’s 1937 book, Adorno had written at least seven articles or lectures on

Berg’s music that were sophisticated demonstrations of his deep knowledge of the

musical structures. Table 3-2 presents a list of Adorno’s writings dedicated to Berg

before 1937, published before Reich’s book.

Table 3-1. Table of Contents for Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link. Contents Preface Tone Reminiscence The Works Analysis and Berg Piano Sonata Songs on texts by Hebbel and Mombert Seven Early Songs First String Quartet The Altenberg Songs Clarinet Pieces Orchestral Pieces Toward a Characterization of Wozzeck Epilogomena to the Chamber Concerto Lyric Suite Der Wein Experiences with Lulu About the Text Afterward Principle Writings on Berg

26 Adorno, Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, xvii.

112

Table 3-2. Adorno’s Writings on Berg before 1937. Date Title Publication 1925 “For the Premiere of Wozzeck” Musikblätter des Anbruch (VII/10) 1929 “Alban Berg’s Early Songs” Anbruch (XI/2) 1929 “Berg’s Seven Early Songs” Die Musik (XXI/10) 1929 “The Opera Wozzeck” Der Scheinwerfer. Blätter der Städtischen Bühnen Essen (III/4) 1930 “Berg and Webern” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift (XXXIX/6) “Berg and Webern – Schoenberg’s Modern Music (VIII/2) Heirs” 1931 “For the Rundfunkkonzert 8 April Lecture delivered, unpublished until Collected 1931” (Der Wein) Works

Most of Adorno’s essays on Berg make almost cyclical references to his other compositions, to show development of a technique in service of the piece being analyzed. These essays are no different, even though Adorno only discusses three works. The main themes Adorno addresses are Berg as an autonomous composer; the importance of expression in Berg’s early songs; and Berg’s use motif in relation to

Variationsform. Two of the essays in particular deal with understanding Berg in light of

Schoenberg, the 1925 Wozzeck essay, and “Berg and Webern” from 1930.

Problematizing the idea of a Schoenberg school allows Adorno to form an autonomous space for Berg. Or as Adorno writes of Berg in relation to the Wozzeck essay, “my aim: this prattling on about the ‘Schönberg pupil’ must stop.”27 The “Berg and Webern” essays expand upon the point Adorno made in the Wozzeck essay, that a true student should not be strict followers of the teacher’s style, but rather advancing the style by

“following the demands which grew out of technical association with the master.”28

In his essays Adorno deals with his analytical understanding of Berg’s composition in opposition to other perceptions of Berg’s music. In both of the essays on

27 Adorno and Berg, Correspondence, 28.

28 Theodor W. Adorno, “Berg and Webern: Schoenberg’s Heirs” in Modern Music 8 (1931): 30.

113

Berg’s songs, compositions from 1900-1908, Adorno argues that while these songs are

youthful, early compositions, they are not amateur or incomplete in anyway. The songs,

he claims, have a timidity and reserved character that becomes the expressive element

of the songs. The new idea he posits with these essays is that while these songs have a

Romantic quality they are actually a bridge between the Romantic era and

Schoenberg’s atonal works. Berg’s compositions create a dialectic between new music

and the dream of the Romantic styles. He does this through the economy of motif,

which is a theme Adorno addresses in the 1925 Wozzeck essay, and becomes the

theme of the monograph. 29

The most important new perspective Adorno brings out in all of these essays is that Berg, while developing Schoenberg’s principle of continual motivic transformations,

is able to do more with transformations than Schoenberg. In “Berg and Webern” Adorno argues that Schoenberg’s idea of a structural motive is crucial to Berg. Schoenberg’s

method of composing is “fixed dialectically from the outset by the structural motive.”30

While Berg on the other hand, through his “principle of the infinitesimal; the principle of the smallest transition,” is able to create an “organic essence, what unites with the nineteenth century and Romanticism.”31 Adorno goes on to prove the importance of the

smallest transition by analyzing, shortly, its roll in all of Berg’s compositions at that time.

He had taken on the idea of transition, motive, and also variation in Berg’s music in the

Wozzeck essays, both from 1925 and 1929. The argument he makes there is crucial –

29 Theodor W. Adorno, “Alban Bergs frühe Lieder” and “Berg: Sieben frühe Lieder” in GS 18 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003), 465-71.

30 Adorno, “Berg and Webern,” 32.

31 Adorno, “Berg and Webern,” 32.

114

Adorno argues that Berg abandons the distinction between the theme and the variant,

and “that all themes are variations of each other or that all all variations are themes.”32

Adorno writes, “the technical economy of Wozzeck is the economy of transformation.”33

Concerned with the smallest unit of construction with Berg’s music Adorno ties this

innovative feature to understanding Berg’s music in light of misunderstandings. All of

the essays just discussed and in Table 3-2 influenced the monograph as, in 1968, he

used ideas from his previous writings to inform the final version of the monograph.

One of Adorno’s main contributions to our understanding of Berg’s music, the

smallest link idea, came out of his writings from 1920s and 1930s and was reshaped

and reworked to be one of the main themes of the monograph. His early essays on

Berg compliment previously unexamined autograph manuscripts which show that

Adorno conceived of a narrative of Berg, a Berg monograph, as early as 1936.

Adorno claims the idea for the monograph was suggested to him by Elisabeth

Lafite in the 1960s, but the manuscript materials show that as early as 1936 he had

conceived of a Berg monograph. The title “Zur Monographie Alban Berg” or “Toward an

Alban Berg Monograph” appeared in a small red notebook dated 1936,34 a notebook

that contains seven essays on Berg’s music. Some of these essays were used in Willi

32 Kevin Mooney, “A Night at the Opera: Benjamin, Adorno, and the Premiere of Wozzeck,” a paper presented at Music, Marxism, and the Frankfurt School (Dublin, IE, July 2-4, 2014), 8.

33 Adorno, “Alban Berg, Zur Uraufführung des Wozzeck,” in GS 8 (Frankfurt: Surhkamp Verlag, 2003), 462.

34 Theodor Adorno, Red Notebook 15 April 1936, F21 Berg 2493-2496, Musik Sammlung, Österreichische Nationalbibliotek (ÖNB).

115

Reich’s 1937 book Alban Berg,35 but there is no indication they are written for the sole

purpose of Reich’s book.

After Berg’s death in December 1935 Adorno thought of penning his own

monograph in line with the Austro-Germanic tradition in the first half of the twentieth

century; that meant working with a conventional structure. Monographs on the life and

works typically gave objective biographical facts in the first section, then descriptive

analyses of a composer’s works in the second; often the works were divided

thematically by genre or chronologically. While Adorno did not finish his own monograph

in 1936, he did begin shaping a narrative of Berg’s identity that would eventually

become Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link. While structurally it conforms to monograph conventions, its content is governed by dialectical analysis, eschewing conventions of style.

From an extensive list of manuscript sources I will examine three: a handwritten draft “Zur Monographie” (1936), a typed draft of a single essay “The Three Orchestral

Pieces,” and the 1968 Kontrolexemplar. They show different stages and developments of Adorno’s narrative. Both “Zur Monographie” and the Orchestral Pieces essay were completed between 1935-1936 and are part of the Alban Berg estate, housed in the music collection of the Austrian National Library (ÖNB Musiksammlung).36 The drafts

35 Willi Reich, Alban Berg, mit Bergs eigenen Schriften und Beiträgen von Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno und Ernst Křenek (Vienna: H. Reichner, 1937).

36 Adorno, Red Notebook 15 April 1936, F21 Berg 2493-2496, Musik Sammlung, Österreichische Nationalbibliotek (ÖNB).

116

and materials related to the publication of the book from 1954-1968 are housed in the

Theodor W. Adorno Archive.37

The red notebook previously mentioned contains materials Adorno presumably sent to Helene Berg soon after they were completed. The notebook is approximately the size of a contemporary Moleskin notebook, with 104 pages, seven essays, and a section of notes.38 Adorno writes an inscription to Helene Berg on the inner cover on the

inner cover (see Figure 3-1) and title, “Zur Monographie” on the first page followed by

the first essay on Berg’s Piano Sonata op.1 (see Figure 3-2).39

Figure 3-1. Adorno’s inscription to Helene Berg in the red notebook.

37 Adorno, Typoscripts Ts30009-21; Ts17192-17237; Ts17246-17293; Ts17640-17749, Theodor W. Adorno Archiv (TWAA).

38 A note on the pagination of this document: Adorno begins paginating on the inside of the front cover (verso), with the inscription to Helen Berg and dates, this is 1’. The pages are not continuously numbered, but the open verso and recto sides would read 1’-2, 2’-3, 3’-4, etc. One oddity to this manuscript is that after the essay on the String Quartet ends, page 46’, Adorno stops using the book in the manner that has passed from 1’-46’ (front to back). After 46’, although all pages are numbered from front to the back through the last page, Adorno begins using the book backwards, flipping the book over, the back cover is now the beginning and he works on “Notes” from the back up to the aforementioned 46’.

39 Adorno, Folio, F 21 Berg 2493-2496, ÖNB.

117

Figure 3-2. Title “Zur Monographie” and the beginning of the first essay “Op. 1 Sonate für Klavier.

To date, this source has remained unexamined, most likely because it belonged to

Helene Berg.

Adorno wrote the essays in this notebook between February and March 1936, as indicated by the date and place of completion after each essay. This notebook was started only one month after Berg’s untimely death 24 December 1935. Table 3-3 lists the contents of the notebook. Aside from noting the title, date completed as marked in the manuscript, and page range, I have also included a column that indicates whether the given text is included in Willi Reich’s 1937 Alban Berg.

118

Table 3-3. List of contents in Adorno’s Red Notebook “Zur Monographie Alban Berg.” Title Date Completed, as Marked Page Range Reich Klaviersonate op. 1 3 Februar 1936 2–8’ x Vier Lieder op. 2 5 Februar 1936 9–12’ x Sieben frühe Lieder 16. II. 36 12’–17 Vier Stücke für Klarinette 16 Februar 1936 17–21’ x und Klavier, op. 5 Vom allen ------zum 1 März 1936 21’–32 “Wozzeck Kozertarie “Der Wein” London 16 März 1936 32–37’ x Streichquartett op. 3 Frankfurt am Main 31 März 1936 37’– 46’ x NOTES 47–53’

Many of these texts are similar to the versions in Reich’s text, but also to those in

Adorno’s own published monograph. Finally, the two essays on Berg’s songs are new contributions; different from those published in 1929.

Another important primary source is a copiously annotated and corrected typed- draft of the “Three Orchestral Pieces” essay completed in Frankfurt 1936.40 This essay is included in Willi Reich’s Berg book as well as Adorno’s. Here we see the copious editing process, and how he crafted his prose. In this draft edits for clarity of language, changing spelling, grammar, and syntax.

40 Adorno, Folio, F21 Berg 2494, ÖNB.

119

Figure 3-3. Excerpt of “Three Orchestral Pieces” essay draft.

The Red Notebook and the draft of “The Three Orchestral Pieces” were the basis for some of the materials included in Reich’s book, but also the beginnings of his own.

The materials in the Austrian National Library document Adorno’s early work on Berg, which is not found in Adorno’s own archive.

120

The materials from the Adorno Archive contain multiple drafts and edited typed

copies of his major works and letters. These materials prove Adorno was again

reshaping his Berg materials for publication as early as 1954. The Kontrolexemplar is

dated by hand, “Frankfurt 1968,” on the otherwise typed copy.41 He marked the

designation Kontrolexemplar specifically on the “Tone” and “Reminiscence” chapters.42

The Kontrolexemplar version of the book it is not yet given the title, as we know it, but is called Berg: Eine Retrospektive as it had been since the mid-1950s. The structure, however, is as we know it today.43 Table 3-4 shows the Kontrolexemplar table of

contents the only difference from the published version, is that the order of “Tone” and

“Reminiscence” are switched.

Many of the chapters in the Berg monograph were published, in various forms,

before Adorno shaped them into a book. Some texts are used nearly verbatim, while

others, such as “Errinnerung” takes ideas from many sources, before it was shaped into

the chapter. Table 3-5 enumerates key articles or lectures published before they were

crafted into the chapters.

41 Adorno, Typoscripts TWAA Ts 17192-171237, TWAA.

The Adorno Archiv frequently labels every page number successively, but this is not always the case. Often sections of longer, books are given a single number and the successive pages within are not labeled.

42 Because the Adorno Archive only allows access to materials in person, in Berlin or Frankfurt, I cannot provide images of source material. The “Three Orchestral Pieces” essay serves as a good example for what materials in the Adorno Archive look like.

43 Adorno, Typoscripts, TWAA Ts 17193, TWAA.

121

Table 3-4. Table of Contents for the 1968 Kontrolexemplar of Berg: Eine Retrospektive from TWAA Ts 17193. Contents Inhalt Vorrrede Erinnerung Ton Zu Werken Analyse und Berg Klaviersonate Lieder nach Hebbel und Mombert Sieben frühe Lieder Erstes Streichquartett Altenberglieder Klarinettenstücke Orchesterstücke Zur charakteristik des ‘Wozzeck’ Epilegomena zum Kammerkonzert Lyrische Suite Weinarie Erfahrung an ‘Lulu” Zum Text Verzeichnis von Arbeiten des Autors über Alban Berg

If the chapters had appeared elsewhere, for example in Reich’s book or in journals,

Adorno makes edits on a photocopy of the material as previously published This is

particularly the case for all of the previously published essays that went into the

“Erinnerung” chapter, see Table 3-5. From these materials it is possible glean an

understanding of how Adorno critically edited his materials for style, content, and

meaning.

He is editing to adjust individual texts to a narrative and to reflect on his new

understanding of the material. The chapters “Lieder nach Hebbel und Mombert” and

“Sieben frühe Lieder” relate to the two essay I discussed above, from 1929, and are prime examples of how Adorno reshapes essays to fit the narrative of the monograph.44

The earlier essays addressed the importance of the economy of motive as a bridge

44 See, Table 3-2 referring to: Adorno “Alban Bergs frühe Lieder” and “Berg: Sieben frühe Lieder” in GS 18, 465-71.

122

between Romanticism and new music, creating, as Adorno calls it, a dialectic between

Wagner and Schoenberg. The main focus was to establish the importance of the early works to Berg’s style. In the monograph Adorno reshapes theses essays to highlight

“the smallest link.” About the Hebbel and Mombert songs, he writes, “The principles of the Lied are not wholly suited to Berg. Paradoxically enough: the technique of the smallest link is at odds with the small form.”45 He then goes on to link these pieces to the historical narrative of Berg’s compositional development, what Berg is able to do in the songs is anticipate Wozzeck.

The Kontrolexemplar and other autograph sources demonstrate that Adorno was not just compiling old materials but seeking to shape them into the narrative perspective through his famous philosophical renderings. In the “Preface”, as included above,

Adorno states that he considers the new material for the 1968 book the most significant.

But what exactly was new for the final version? Aside from the Preface (Inhalt), About the Text (Zum Text), and “The author’s work on Berg” (Verzeichnis von Arbeiten) the materials suggest “Ton,” “Analyse und Berg,” and the “Altenberglieder” as totally new components. There are three other separate, highly edited versions of the all of the aforementioned chapters in the archive, and these have handwritten dates from the mid

1950s.46

45 Adorno, Alban Berg, 48.

46 Adorno, Typoscripts, TWAA Ts 17638-17748, TWAA.

123

Table 3-5. Contents of Adorno’s Berg monograph, and previous published versions of those chapters. Book Contents Earlier Versions of Contents Vorrede Erinnerung 1936: “Erinnerung an den Lebenden” 23. Einer Wiener Musikzeitschrit 1951: “Für Alban Berg” Die Neue Rundschau 1955: “Im Gedächtnis an Alban Berg” 1959: “Alban Berg,” Klangfiguren Ton Zu Werken Analyse und Berg Klaviersonate 1936: Red Notebook 1937: In Willi Reich’s Alban Berg 1940: “Zum Rundfunkkonzert” Lieder nach Hebbel und Mombert 1929: “Alban Berg’s frühe Lieder,” Anbruch 1936: Red Notebook 1937: In Willi Reich’s Alban Berg 1959: “Die Instrumentation von Bergs frühen Liedern,” Klangfiguren Sieben frühe Lieder 1929: “Berg: Sieben frühe Lieder,” Die Musik 1936: Red Notebook Erstes Streichquartett 1937: In Willi Reich’s Alban Berg Altenberglieder Klarinettenstücke 1936: Red Notebook Orchesterstücker 1936: Typed Draft 1937: In Willi Reich’s Alban Berg Zur Charakteristik des „Wozzeck“ 1925: “Alban Berg. Zur Uraufführung des Wozzeck,” Anbruch 1929: Die Oper Wozzeck, Der Scheinwerfer 1936: Red Notebook 1940: “Zum Rundfunkkonzert” 1956: “Wozzeck in Partitur,” Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung Epilegomena zum Kammerkonzert 1954: “Alban Berg’s Kammerkonzert,” Lecture Lyrische Suite 1934: “Berg: Drei Stücke aus der Lyrischen Suite für Streichorchester” (Lecture) 1936: Red Notebook Weinarie 1931: “Zum Rundfunkkonzert” 1936: Red Notebook Erfahrungen an ‘Lulu’ 1960: “Bergs Lulu-Symphonie,” Melos 1960: “Rede über Alban Bergs Lulu,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Zum Text Verzeichnis von Arbeiten des Autors über Alban Berg

One of the drafts of “Ton”, which Adorno alludes to as new, was actually written in the

1950s. Among the autograph sources is an edited, typed version of the chapter dated 9

124

February 1955.47 But at different points in the pages of this draft there are different

dates; the last pages are dated 29 January 1954.48The essay on the Altenberg Songs

appears to be newly written or adapted from notes he may have had; an annotated

version is in the 1968 Kontrolexemplar. “Analysis and Berg” serves as the conceptual

introduction to the works section of his monograph. This is, by all accounts new. He

originally called this section “Über den Begriff der Analyse und Berg” but the does not

appear in the autograph sources until 26 July 1968 versions of the book.

Only three of sixteen chapters were totally new for this monograph, which

includes the Preface. A new essay on the Altenberglieder was necessary because

Adorno did not write that essay in Willi Reich’s text. The two important sections to

understanding how and why Adorno shaped his narrative, the Preface and “Analysis

and Berg,” serve as frames for the work; the Preface introduces Adorno’s motivations

for publishing this work as a whole and the “Analysis and Berg” chapter serves as an

introduction to the “works” section. That these new framing sections may seem

inevitable based on the genre, but they are important in light of all of Adorno’s

preexisting materials on Berg.

Despite many other works written on Berg from the 1930s through the 1960s,

Adorno finds a legitimate need for the book. In the “Preface” he establishes that the

intentions of post-war musicologists or composer from the Darmstadt School, taking up

Berg, do a disservice to his music and place in history. He writes that while there have

47 Adorno, Typoscripts, TWAA Ts 30009-30022, TWAA.

48 Adorno had a habit of dating drafts at the end, seemingly upon completion. It is also possible to speculate January 1954 was when he finished the typed version, and February 1955 was when he went back to revise the writing.

125

been a number of books published on Berg, his presents a new form of analysis, particularly distinct to Hans Redlich’s book. Adorno writes:

It may be above all several of the more recent publications that legitimize the book. If musicologists who once sought to neutralize Schoenberg historically as a “great isolated figure” and thus intern him in a kind of spiritual solitary confinement, if musicologists who during the years of political darkness prided themselves on their identification with folk music – if these people now begin reaching out toward Berg – then for this author it is nothing but an attempt retroactively to extend the monopoly of their academic discipline to that sphere where decades ago they feared being compromised. The author’s sympathy with that way of thinking is in inverse proportion to his hopes that the book may speak to those younger musicologists who are of a different stamp. Specifically, he would more than welcome a comparison of chapters published in 1937 with the work of H. F. Redlich.49

While Berg respected Willi Reich’s book on Berg he did not appreciate the way authors were opportunistically coopting Berg to their agendas. Throughout Adorno’s writings on the Second Viennese School he works to place Schoenberg’s and Berg’s, among others, musical innovations in their historical moment. Criticizing authors who made

Schoenberg seem like an aberration, Adorno points to the latent socio-political issues in war-time Germany and Austria; Schoenberg could not be a great figure, a product of the lineage of great German composers, due to his Jewish background. That those authors, and he evokes Redlich and implies Stuckenschmidt, went back to Berg after the War, to make him an isolated figure, is detrimental to the historiography of the composer.

To establish Berg’s identity as an innovative and important composer Adorno, in the “Preface”, places the role of his own memory and knowledge of Berg’s music at the surface. Adorno’s own memory and analysis of the music is to counteract the trends in scholarship he finds dangerous. Then Adorno could create a space where his analysis

49 Adorno, Alban Berg, xvii-xviii.

126

expands beyond Berg as an isolated figure, but establishing Berg in history while showing what made him truly innovative. Mobilizing the experience of past time through memory and narration, Adorno can allow, as Rüsen writes, “the experience of present time [to become] understandable and the expectation of future time is possible.” Adorno claims, “[I] do not intend to praise, but rather, as a musician of the Second Viennese

School, from which [I] never strayed, to share experiences relating to the person and oeuvre of Berg. In so doing a new concept of analysis emerged.”50 His new concept of analysis, which is then woven throughout and later expanded upon in “Analysis and

Berg”, thus serves as the tool to create a concept of continuity. Again, Rüsen’s theorizing on narration helps us to understand Adorno’s “Preface”. “An historical narrative,” Rüsen argues, “organizes the internal unity of these three elements of time

(past, present, and future) by a concept of continuity. This concept adjusts the real experience of time to human intentions and expectations.” He goes on to state that, “A historical narrative serves to establish the identity of its authors and listeners.”51 By evoking his own memories of Berg, and arguing against the present state of scholarship on the composer, Adorno posits a new way forward, through analysis. The presentation of a new, critical narrative, in the “Preface” allows Adorno to present many of his previously published essays and speeches as a new pattern, or approach to Berg, through this frame.

The second, new, framing element is the chapter “Analysis and Berg.” Adorno presents a new analytical approach to Berg’s music which he argues comes from

50 Adorno, Alban Berg, xviii.

51 Rüsen, “Historical Narration,” 89.

127

sharing his experiences with Berg and his music. The approach is rooted in the

objectivity of the Schoenberg School itself. He nests his main points about analysis in

an understanding of how the Schoenberg School, and Berg himself, approached

analysis. A brief overview of Berg’s analyses of Schoenberg’s music serve as the

transition to understanding how the Schoenberg school approached music objectively.

Adorno writes, “The Schoenberg School’s concept of the objective quality and object

criteria of something composed is in accordance with the fact that, strengthened by their

own self-critical exertion, they do not surrender musical judgment to the kind of emotion

that is often nothing more than a dull mixture of reactions inappropriate to the object

itself.” Arguing for the style of analysis practice by Schoenberg and Berg, the “objective

quality,” or analysis that draws on the evidence the pieces they analyze, is the most

important. Allen Forte also, later, also addresses the importance of analysis to Berg:

[Berg] was keenly interested in the analysis as well as the composition of music. His annotations on the score of Schoenberg’s monodrama Erwartung, which consist of detailed identification of motives, testify to that interest. Also Berg attended the lecture by his student, Theodor Adorno, on Schoenberg’s orchestral work Opus 16, No. 3, and annotated his score profusely during the talk. These annotations, in colored pencil, identify motivic-thematic elements of the music. Adorno’s lecture was subsequently published in the periodical Pult und Taktstock, which was distributed to conductors of the new music of the period.52

Understanding the objective musical materials was something Adorno emphasized from his earliest writings on music, but that both he and Berg shared this interest, and shared ideas, is key to Adorno’s presentation of Berg’s identity.

An objective approach is counteracted by the subjective approach, which according to Adorno, would be based on emotional reactions to the music, an approach

52 Allen Forte, “Alban Berg’s Piano Sonata Opus 1: A Landmark in Early Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Music,” Music Analysis 26/i-ii (2007): 16-17.

128

which Adorno is entirely against. He also goes on to set the Schoenberg School’s object, rational, evidence (or musical material) based approach against Schenker.

Schenker’s approach, Adorno writes, turns into “bad rationalism” because it reduces musical moments to more or less abstract rules.53

Ideal analysis, for Adorno, an approach that challenges the idea of a “work” as an entity held up to be admired, but not dissected. He writes:

Analysis retaliates against musical works of art by pointing out that they are truly ‘composed,’ assembled from components; the illusion they generate – that of an absolutely integrated being, of the necessary sequence of the whole and its flow – offsets their own constituent parts. Analysis, being the destruction of that illusion, is critical.54

Analysis of any piece has to address the constituent elements and reconstruct what happens to them. Taking this information as the background of Adorno’s approach to analysis, we are still left with the question: how does he relate this to Berg’s music?

If all music affects its own analysis, Berg’s music is no different. Analysis of

Berg’s music for Adorno, however, calls for more than just understanding how the constituent parts develop. “With Berg,” Adorno writes, “probably more than with any other composer, the kind of element that analysis reveals in not a first stop, a point of origin, but rather the result, entire a product of internal mediation. The agenda for future, satisfactory understanding of Berg would be the analysis of mediation [Vermittlung].”55

Adorno goes on to mention that understanding Berg is understanding that while it is

53 Adorno, Alban Berg, 36.

54 Adorno, Alban Berg, 37.

55 Adorno, Alban Berg, 38.

129

correct to state the Berg’s pieces are polarized by extremes, each extreme is “mediated

[vermittelt] by the other.”56 He writes:

The statement that his pieces are polarized between extremes, each of which is mediated [vermittelt] by the other, refers not only to Berg’s tone, to the expression and physiognomy of his works. It is a strict definition of their style [Faktur]. The style cannot withstand the reification of a musical entity [das musikalische Etwas], rather it must objectivize this primary response in order to give expression to it and thereby once again make nothingness into something [Etwas].57

This passage is emblematic of Adorno’s new concept of analysis. At once the analyst of

Berg’s music must understand the evidence of the musical materials, objectively, but

the analyst also has to delve into the extremes. Adorno acknowledges that each piece presents multiple extremes, or polarities, which are under the process of constant mediation but that it is still possible to understand, technically, the essence of the music.

What he is really proposing here is to understand what Berg’s music presents

technically through a philosophical tool, negative dialectics. As previously stated, and

will be further examined, negative dialectics allows two extremes to exist in a dialectical

model without being reconciled. Mediation, as Adorno claims, is one way Berg allowed

elements of two extremes to exist all the while creating something new and

simultaneously destroying convention.

The two new, structural, parts of the chapter allow Adorno to present paths for future approaches to understand Berg and his music. Arguing against common trends in post-war musicology, and Berg scholarship more specifically, Adorno blends personal recollections with objective analysis. Adorno’s narrative, from his first writings through to

56 Adorno, Alban Berg, 38.

57 Adorno, Alban Berg, 39.

130

the finished book, portrays Berg’s music as progressive on its own terms, as well as in comparison to other pieces, genres, and “trends.” All of his work on Berg was intertwined with shifts in his philosophical concepts. Only in 1968, as he was working on a myriad of other aesthetic and philosophical texts, did he find a model with which to organize his thoughts on Berg.

Adorno’s Analysis of Berg’s Music

Using the chapter “Orchestral Pieces”58 as an example from the book, I will discuss Adorno’s understanding of Berg’s music, and his own idiosyncratic analytical style. Interrogating Berg’s stylistic progress, Adorno focuses how the Three Orchestral

Pieces, Op. 6 are the outgrowth of progressive elements presented in earlier works, namely: the Clarinet Pieces Op.4 (1922), the Quartet Op. 3 (1910), as well as the

Orchestral Songs Op. 4 (1912). Linking the current composition to these three pieces,

Adorno’s stylistic overview of these key works is intertwined with the way he relates the

Orchestral Pieces to works by other composers and compositional techniques, particularly those of Debussy, Mahler, and Schoenberg. This aesthetic, historical, and philosophical style of analysis makes up the first half of the chapter, while the second half is music analytical in the sense that he uses themes, phrases, and chordal structures to supplement the argument of the first half. Adorno believes the Quartet and

Altenberg Songs to be pieces in which Berg is acquiring skills that he perfects in the

Three Orchestral Pieces. These two works still have “harmonic shifts and chordal stasis, that nineteenth-century gravitation pull.”59 But he goes on to write that the inheritance to

58 Earlier versions of this chapter are titled “Three Orchestral Pieces,” just as Op. 6 is titled.

59 Adorno, Alban Berg, 72.

131

this tradition lives on at a deeper level.“ Throughout the chapter Adorno addresses how color, timbre, character, and counterpoint become productive. The construction of the work is of great importance. It is based on an instrumental-constructive method that

Berg continued to use after this work; the forms are generated from smallest motive out to largest elements of the structure. As consistent with Adorno’s style of writing these two purposes, the relational analysis and musical analysis, are interrelated. Berg’s stylistic progress is tied to his development of the instrumental-constructive method.

It is the meaningful way Berg navigates between stylistic worlds, his own and the worlds of other traditions that interested Adorno. The “deeper levels” he mentions refers to the history engrained in Berg’s style, what has been learned cannot be unlearned and traces remain, just not overtly or purposefully. The dialectic between Schoenberg (the perceived representative of progress) and music external to Schoenberg (Mahler and

Debussy) comes to the fore in Bergs music, Adorno writes:

Without sacrificing a single one of Schoenberg’s discoveries, Berg’s insistent elaboration upon his own particular techniques brings him into profound proximity with music external to Schoenberg’s orbit: Mahler and Debussy. With these Orchestral Pieces the Schoenberg School merges directly and without detour with the stylistic trends of its time, better yet, reveals itself to be objectively determinant stylistic authority which ever since its evolution it had in truth rightly been: not an esoteric sect with a private idiom and conspiratorial sentiments, but rather the progressive executor of musical understanding. It carries to its logical conclusion what was merely latent in more advanced forces of contemporary composition.60

Adorno’s description of Berg’s music as elaborating on his own idiosyncratic techniques, yet not sacrificing the lineage of Schoenberg, or to music “external to Schoenberg’s orbit” again, as we have seen before, evokes the idea of negative dialectics. The music

60 Adorno, Alban Berg, 73

132

is not beholden to any one style, but the composer finds a way to combine seemingly

antithetical elements. Adorno goes on to write: “Berg, so it seems, drew a retrogressive

connecting line from Schoenberg’s musical language to that which preceded it, thereby

securing the accomplishments at the forefront through contact with the past. But the

retrogressive line extends, as a consequence of its own development, into the future.”61

In this one essay, extracted from the middle of the text nearly identical to the published version, in 1935/1936 – Adorno is constructing a narrative, a dialectical image. The sedimented historical meanings in Berg’s works, and in Adorno’s narrative, presented as references to other compositions, composers, or styles, serve to associate Berg with others only to highlight the shifts in meaning through Berg’s musical understanding – in

Adorno’s works Berg is the “progressive executor of musical understanding.”62 Adorno’s

conceptual and musical understanding of Berg’s compositional language are profound,

if only for the links to larger philosophical concepts, but he continually interrogates the

dialectic interplay in Berg’s music to understand it in and of history.

It may not be coincidental that Adorno was finishing the Berg monograph at the

same time, 1968, that he was also finishing Negative Dialectics. The concept of

negative dialectics that Adorno began articulating in 1925, as a way to comprehend

Berg’s pivotal compositional shift, now governs the argument structure of this book.

In the 1960s Adorno was concerned with publishing as much of his unfinished

work as possible. Table 3-6 shows the list of books he was actively working on at the

same time he was preparing the Berg book for publication. The archival material shows

61 Adorno, Alban Berg, 73.

62 Adorno, Alban Berg, 73.

133

that Adorno’s editing for these books was just as arduous. The titles in with asterisks

contain concepts or ideas integral to the Berg book.

Table 3-6. Materials Adorno was Preparing for Publication in the 1960s. Date Published Title 1960 *Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy 1963 Problems of Moral Philosophy 1963 Hegel: Three Studies 1963,1969 Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords 1964 The Jargon of Authenticity 1965 *Lectures on Negative Dialectics 1965 *Metaphysics: Concept and Problems 1966 *Negative Dialectics 1968 Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link 1968 Introduction to Sociology posth. (1970) *Aesthetic Theory posth. (1993) *Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music

Critical to Adorno’s understanding of Berg’s music and place in history is the way

he uses dialectics to analyze Berg’s music. Referring back to Dahlhaus’ review he

emphasizes that Adorno’s dialectic for this book allowed him to write both a biography,

a narrative, and all the while apply a dialectical mode of analysis; these modes of

thinking and analysis make up the conceptual construction of the book.63 Dahlhaus recognized that parts of this book contain Adorno’s autobiographical recollections, while simultaneously creating a biographical narrative. Adorno’s combined materials established critical dialectical play, using his own negative dialectics as a model for analysis. Dahlhaus’s review highlights the most important dialectic poles in the book.

First, Adorno positioned Berg’s music in relation to other composers to be contrasted by analyzing Berg’s idiosyncratic compositional language in and of itself. Second, he created a dialectic between the narrative style and philosophical mode of operation.

63 Dahlhaus, “Erinnerung und Reflexion” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 25, 1969.

134

More than his monographs on Wagner, Beethoven, or Mahler, in the Berg book

Adorno plays with the conventions of a musical monograph. He presents his version of a “life and works” format to shape his historical narrative of Berg, steeped in the dialectical mode of understanding. While he does address the life and works aspects, traditional to monographs, it is through the combination of philosophical analysis and historical narrative that Adorno develops a sense of musical continuity. Adorno argues that Berg’s continuity comes from his ability to simultaneously use and destroy traditional forms and genres, crafting his materials from the smallest musical links.

135

CHAPTER 4 MUSICAL PHILOSOPHY: ALBAN BERG, THEODOR ADORNO, AND THE FORMULATION OF NEGATIVE DIALECTICS

In a letter from 1926 Adorno introduced to Berg a new way of conceptualizing

composition with twelve tones. He wrote:

This view, that dodecaphony could encompass more than just Schoenberg’s version of the technique, offers a more inclusive view of what compositions with twelve tones could be. Adorno’s concept of “negative” dodecaphony includes Schoenberg’s techniques so long as they do not create an ideological system, or a “positive compositional canon.”2 But more important negative dodecaphony allows for Berg’s

methods of composing with multiple row, derivations, and tonal sounds. In this

conception Berg’s techniques are just as acceptable as Schoenberg’s. The broader

conception of composition with twelve-tones that Adorno adopts comes as a byproduct

of studying with Berg, knowing his scores, and working on twelve-tone compositions

himself. Adorno did not see a way forward with Schoenberg’s “positive dodecaphony”

because it was being taken as a systematic approach to composing. Adorno criticizes

the rigidity of Schoenberg’s “rules,” warning that such a system should not lead to a

composition canon.

Adorno was interested in Berg’s ability to combine musical materials while not

strictly adhering to a “school,” which corresponds to “negative dodecaphony.” Berg’s

1 Theodor Adorno and Alban Berg, Correspondence 1925-1935, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 71-2.

2 Adorno and Berg, Correspondence 1925-1935, 71.

136

combinations of tonality, atonality, and twelve-tone techniques have been perceived as

contradictions in his music, or as “eclectic.” One of the most famous assessments of

Berg’s music comes from Boulez, in the post war era. He discusses Berg’s influence or

lack thereof on modern style, he writes:

It would in any case be superficial to see in Berg no more than a heroic figure rent by contradictions or to think of him merely as the culmination of romanticism on whom it would now be pointless to model oneself. On the contrary, by detaching the contradictions that are key to his work from the particular context that gave them birth, it is possible to learn from Berg an extremely valuable lesson in aesthetics. His work retains intact all its potential for influence; and it is this which makes him indispensable to the musical domain of our time.3

While in this phrase Boulez seems hopeful for Berg, Berg and his contradictions stand

in for stylistic uncertainty. Boulez sees Berg as a modernistic composer with transitory

qualities. To Boulez, Berg is a composer whose work is not easily understandable, yet

not totally forward looking.

Adorno found, however, that these perceived contradictions or conflicts in Berg’s

music were not musical or dialectical failures; rather, way he worked with the materials

showed that the competing elements did not need synthesis or reconciliation from a

system, nor did they need to form a unity. In dealing with such a systematic mode of

composition, one that presented a conflict of systems as the thing itself, Adorno developed a prototype of negative dialectics. According to Adorno’s new approach to

dialectics, Berg’s compositional system would not require homogenous resolution of two

objects, as a Hegelian model might, but rather allows the contradictions to exist. In fact,

Adorno’s new approach depended on conflicts between elements and their separate

3 Pierre Boulez, “Alban Berg” in Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, trans. Stephen Walsh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 243-58.

137

identities. This was indeed one of the most remarkable discoveries because what

Adorno recognized in Berg’s music comes hand in hand with his formulation of major

philosophical concept, not some sort of systematic approach to a technique like Webern

or Schoenberg.

Much of the more scholarship on Berg seeks to understand his compositions

from the position of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method. George Perle and David

Headlam’s books are such examples;4 Perle claims that Berg’s musical language does

not fit within Schoenberg’s model. Perle argues that it “is inconsistent with the definitive

assumptions of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system.”5 While other scholars seek to further

understand and contextualize Berg’s so-called eclecticism. Silvio dos Santos argues for

a more in depth understanding of the way Berg constructed not only his pieces but his

own identity based on Wagner, coming to the conclusion that, “we simply need to

acknowledge that Berg’s compositional process, from row derivation to large-scale

formal organization, is more eclectic than we have recognized in the past.”6 Arved

Ashby, on the other hand, argues for an analytical approach to Berg’s music that does

not hold the standards of “Darmstadt” serialism anachronistically applied to Berg. In

fact, Ashby does not see it totally fit to discuss Berg even within the realm of

“Schoenbergian laws.” After all Berg not only treated the row differently, but his

approach was to treat it as a tool “that needed to be personally re-conceived before it

4 See: David Headlam, The Music of Alban Berg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); George Perle, The Operas of Alban Berg, vol. 2: “Lulu” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Perle, Serial Composition and Atonality: An Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, 6th ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

5 George Perle, The Operas of Alban Berg, 14.

6 Silvio J. dos Santos, Narratives of Identity in Alban Berg’s ‘Lulu’ (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2014), 184.

138

could be appropriated and used.”7 Because of its stylistic contradictions and its unique

treatment of twelve-tone techniques, Berg’s music embodied for Adorno an ideal

prototype of new music.8

Berg, Adorno, and the Negative Dialectics of Composition with Twelve Tones

Adorno’s conception of composition with twelve-tones is encompassing enough

to include Berg’s techniques because Adorno sees the composer’s works as dialectical,

and emblematic of musical progress. This concept of composition with twelve tones is

one of the earliest instances of negative dialectics. The philosophical construct allowed

Adorno to defend Berg’s work against Schoenberg’s criticism. Through this conception it

would not be wrong for a composer to explore the properties and possibilities of the

twelve-tone technique so that it could yield “tonal elements.” “Progress in art,” Adorno

writes, “is not located in the individual works but, rather, in their material.”9

Berg’s techniques for twelve-tone composition, in comparison to Schoenberg’s,

prompted Adorno to distinguish between negative and positive dodecaphony. A strict

use of Schonberg’s laws for twelve-tone composition did not allow dialectical progress.

Of dialectical progress of material Adorno writes:

Rather, the dialectic of the material incorporates the freedom of the composer, and the communication between the two takes place in a strict fashion in the concrete work, measurable by its inner coherence; it is this, as incomparable as the work may be along side another, that determines progress and reaction within its smallest cells without consideration for the other work. For only in its immanent coherence does a work prove itself

7 Arved Ashby, “The Development of Berg’s Twelve-Tone Aesthetic as Seen in the Lyric Suite and Its Sources” (PhD Diss., Yale University 1995): 34.

8 Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 13.

9 Theodor W. Adorno, “Reaction and Progress,” in Night Music: Essays on Music 1926-1926, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Wieland Hoban (London: Seagull Books, 2009), 219.

139

advanced. In every work the material makes concrete demands, and the movement that brings each new one to light in it is the only binding manifestation of history for the author. But a work is coherent if it fulfills this requirement. The author becomes aware of history in the windowless, tightly woven work.10

Following the so-called rules of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone techniques strictly did not

allow for the dialectic between the composer and the material. Adorno’s term positive

dodecaphony implies one that stops the progress just described. But Berg’s music

consisted of many factors necessary for the dialectical process, the musical material,

the composer’s freedom, and an awareness of history in the works. This view allowed

Adorno to justify the interaction between tonality and twelve-tone music in Berg’s musical grammar. It helped shape his views on the progress of musical material.

Adorno found in Berg a partner for thinking about musical structures as signifiers for philosophy, which is one reason he favored Berg over Schoenberg. This was not lost on Berg, but the composer knew that Adorno would have to one day choose between philosophy or composing when he wrote that “one day—yes it is clear—that you will finally have to choose between Kant or Beethoven.”11 Berg gives Adorno this advice to

help focus Adorno on a path. In her analysis of this passage about choosing Kant or

Beethoven, Lydia Goehr interprets Berg’s advice as “recalling an old preoccupation of

German composers with their canonic lineage,” where composers would pair

themselves or be paired with great philosophers.12 She claims that Adorno refused the

advice and went further to even upset its terms, pairing Beethoven with Hegel. Goehr

10 Adorno, “Reaction and Progress,” 220-21.

11 Adorno and Berg, Correspondence 1925-1935, 44.

12 Lydia Goehr, “Adorno, Schoenberg, and the Totentanz der Prinzipien in Thirteen Steps,” in Journal of the American Musicological Society 56 (2003): 598.

140

claims Adorno went one step further and aligned himself with Schoenberg.13 While

Adorno did see an analogy between the structure of musical work and the framework of

dialectic philosophy, he does not dismiss Berg in favor of Schoenberg. Berg fully

understood the profundity of Adorno’s approach to music criticism. In the same letter, at

the beginning of the paragraph, Berg admits that Adorno has fully convinced him that

these profound insights into music must explore “the philosophical, art historical, theoretical, social, historical etc. etc. nature.”14 Adorno’s concept of composition with

twelve-tones, not to mention his musical aesthetics, was formulated so to reflect music’s

exploration of each of these elements often woven together but rarely isolated.

Through positive and negative dodecaphony Adorno presents a notion of

progress in music, or music history, by positing that composers should allow their reality

and experience into the composition, and, as a result of their actions, music would be a

representation of its historical moment. Berg himself seems to echo this sort of idea,

albeit later, yet still latent in his approach to composition in the 1920s. In a note headed

“Composition with Twelve-Tone Rows” Berg writes:

Of course I compose this way (since the Lyric Suite). Also Lulu. But obviously, despite strict conformity, I have worked out twelve-tone row composition for myself, just as was done earlier with major and minor scales (then also with strict conformity), since the “row” provides only a basis (just as key did earlier—strictly to be observed and freely applied), leaving entirely to the older composers the element of originality, the purely personal. And if a twelve tone row, or a major or minor scale or key, is used to create a powerful cohesion, then as now, this cohesion will not ultimately keep what results in this case— where the twelve tones are “related only one to another” —from being something more genuinely Berg (or Klenau or Webern or Křenek) than earlier, when the twelve tones were

13 Goehr, "Adorno, Schoenberg, and the "Totentanz der Prinzipien," 599.

14 Adorno and Berg, Correspondence 1925-1935, 44.

141

related to the seven diatonic ones and the seven to three (I, IV, V), and these three to one among them (also “one to another”).15

In this unpublished note Berg defends his own style and acquisition of techniques as

unique for his own progress; he learned the to compose with twelve-tones on his own

volition, not at someone else’s (read Schoenberg) insistence.

While Berg says he learned this technique on his own he was highly influenced

by his own student Fritz Klein, whose ideas for twelve-tone composition apparently did

originate independently of Schoenberg’s.16 Berg was especially interested in Klein’s

idea that twelve-tone rows were, as Ashby writes, “successions of intervals rather than

interval classes, a practice Berg renounces. Rather, he seemed immediately attracted

by the tonal and derivational capabilities that Klein’s all-interval row offered.”17 From

Klein’s theories Berg made innovative discoveries in row derivation, intervallic

relationships, and segmentation. Berg used these practices on large-scale structural

levels, and small scale through the unfolding of intervals.

Schoenberg, famously, had a different take on Berg’s compositional technique, in

1946 he writes, as a postscript to the “Composition with Twelve Tones” essay:

15 Alban Berg, “Composition with Twelve-Tone Rows,” in Pro Mundo—Pro Domo: The Writings of Alban Berg, ed. Bryan R. Simms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 392.

16 Arved Ashby, Of ‘Modell-Typen’ and ‘Reihenformen’: Berg, Schoenberg, F. H. Klein, and the Concept of Row Derivation." Journal of the American Musicological Society 48, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 73.

17 Ashby, “Of ‘Modell-Typen’ and “Reihenformen,” 75.

142

contrast furnished by a change from major to minor. Though he was right as a composer, he was wrong theoretically.18

Although looking back to Berg’s life and compositions, Schoenberg expresses the most

common critique of Berg’s music; his music did not rigidly follow the right theoretical

system, Schoenberg’s system. For Berg, making progress in each individual

composition meant using the materials in a personal, unique manner as the only path

toward being genuine.

Adorno, on the other hand, sees progress as directly linked to musical material

as discussed above, but it is also linked to a view of music history, that looks backwards

and forward to understand a given moment. But this is not to imply history with a

predetermined path. While, “twelve tone appeared at its own rightful time,” it is only

possible to come to that conclusion relating that given technique backwards to previous

shifts in musical aesthetics.19 Just as it appeared at its necessary moment however, it

should not be mythologized, and given power over the present.20 Progress as it relates

to the use or adaptation of a compositional technique should allow the personal into the

process, and not become ideological.

Adorno’s invocation of positive and negative dodecaphony recalls other

philosophical usages of the two terms. “Positive” implies that the dodecaphony could

lead to some sort of collective or authoritarian control over the act of composition,

18 Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley: University of California Press), 244-5.

19 Adorno and Berg, Correspondence 1925-1935, 71.

20 Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 1977), 48.

143

Adorno calls it a “positive compositional canon.”21 This is related to the idea of a

“school” of composition centered on Schoenberg. The danger of a school of

composition is that there are internal factors affect the degree to which individuals act can autonomously. Adorno warns in 1925 of the dangers of calling the circle surrounding Schoenberg a school, he writes, “to speak of an Arnold Schoenberg

School, misjudges the truth, the truth of the compositional instruction otherwise perhaps as coming from the works.”22 Using these terms he puts forth a judgment on methods of

composing and their development into standards for composition or compositional

canons. About Berg’s role in the Schoenberg School,23 Adorno writes:

Alban Berg by choice put himself to Schoenberg and learned compositional techniques from him. Yet neither the proximity (Nachbarschaft) to the determining intentions, nor did he permit himself to derive the contents of his music from the pedagogical relationship. Schoenberg’s students are so by choice and decidedly still implied as in (by means of) technical faithfulness: his students are not, but rather, identical to him, in the break with all aforementioned objectivity and under

21 This choice of terminology recalls writers discussing freedom, positive or negative freedom or liberty, particularly Kant in Critique of Pure Reason, as described and analyzed later by Isaiah Berlin in relation to political philosophy. As stated in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of one's life and realize one's fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.”

22 Theodor W. Adorno, “Zur Uraufführung des Wozzeck,” in GS (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003), 457.

23 In Joseph Auner, “The Second Viennese School as Concept” in Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern: A Companion to the Second Viennese School (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999). Auner argues for a more nuanced understanding of what the term Second Viennese School implies. As a label, he argues, “the Second Viennese School or any of the other terms by which the school has been known is by no means a neutral act, but has significant ramifications for how we think about each of the composers individual, how we conceive of their relationship to each other, and how we understand them historically, whether in the context of contemporary artistic movements or in reference to broader social political developments. The concept of a ‘school’ can create a false sense of understanding when it is used by such diverse communities as the composers themselves, theorists, musicologists, journalists, publishers, and concertgoers.” It is the false sense of understanding that Adorno highlights in the previous quotation. Without giving the composers an autonomous space the label becomes ideological.

144

the drawing (Zeichnen) of solitude to begin and the force of recognition alone in that Truth to leave, the loneliness to command.24

Berg was certainly Schoenberg’s pupil and oftentimes apologist as well as defender of

the “master and teacher.” But Adorno emphasizes that any diligent student takes what

they have learned from the instructor and pushes beyond the stylistic and aesthetic

guidelines. Adorno wants to establish an autonomous space for Berg and his music

outside of, but yet related to, the Schoenberg circle. While every member of the

Schoenberg circle, even tangentially related, uses the term Schoenberg School, Adorno

is pushing for an autonomous understanding of each composer, specifically Berg.

Further setting Berg’s mode of composing apart from the others, linking Berg’s

style to negative dodecaphony, to negative dialectics, allowed for a way forward in

music. The “negative” here implies that a compositional practice must stand in its

historical moment and not discard anything. It acknowledges all of the elements that

brought about its ontology. 25 For composition with twelve tones this means

acknowledging the dissolution of tonality, even though that moment had seemingly

passed. Tonality and atonality would then be the elements that produce twelve-tone

techniques—the result, that is negative dodecaphony, is a synthesis that acknowledges

its past all the while forging something new, not systematic allegiance to a single

technique, or what Adorno called positive dodecaphony.

24 Adorno, “Zur Uraufführung des Wozzeck,” 457

25 Using negative in this context, one specific philosophical context is important to include: “To promote negative freedom is to promote the existence of a sphere of action within which the individual is sovereign, and within which she can pursue her own projects subject only to the constraint that she respect the spheres of others. Humboldt and Mill, both defenders of the negative concept of freedom, compared the development of an individual to that of a plant: individuals, like plants, must be allowed to grow, in the sense of developing their own faculties to the full and according to their own inner logic. Personal growth is something that cannot be imposed from without, but must come from within the individual. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy “Positive and Negative Liberty” 2. The Paradox of Positive Liberty. Accessed 1.15.2016.)

145

Furthermore, Schoenberg’s music does not need for an idea such as negative

dialectics to emerge; it does not manage two irreconcilable systems, rather works within

its own set of rules (those of the twelve-tone techniques). The implications of Adorno’s

analyses of both Berg’s and, of course, Schoenberg’s music are complex: they allowed

him to express a theory for understanding this new modernistic technique as a part of

history, music becomes a philosophical object in and of itself, but also represents a

product of an individual’s experience of their musical world.

The letter from the opening of the chapter is also extraordinary in that it

represents a major shift from the Hegelian-Marxist models of dialectics. As scholars

Allison Stone and Simon Jarvis argue, Adorno’s negative dialectics transforms and critiques Hegelian dialectics. While these early explanations of twelve-tone music, using

what we might now call negative dialectics are different from a Hegelian approach they

still retain traits of both Hegelian dialectics and dialectic materialism, both of which

Adorno used and explored throughout his career. The goal of Hegelian dialectic is to

reconcile ostensible paradoxes, ultimately arriving at absolute truth or a universal,

through what was later deemed to be a three-step process comprising the movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis, although he never used these words himself. The first step begins with a static, clearly delineated concept (or thesis), next, it moves to its opposite (or antithesis), which represents any contradictions. The thesis and antithesis are reconciled to form an embracing resolution, or synthesis. This triadic structure can then be repeated infinitely. See Figure 4-1.

146

Figure 4-1. Illustration of the three-step Hegelian dialectical process.

Adorno, on the other hand, proposed a synthesis that would retain the identities

of the contraries, this in turn represents a shift from the Hegelian totality or unity of

identities.26 In Adorno’s negative dialectics, a synthesis does not necessarily unify the

elements, but recognizes that the thesis is irreducibly different from the antithesis, and

the “reconciliation” process allows the two to remain different from one another, but also

dependent on one another. This overview of Hegelian dialectics serves to highlight the

differences Adorno proposes, and how his conception of twelve-tone music originated

with a prototype of negative dialectics.

Negative dialectics does not reconcile two items to ultimately show unity, but

rather allows two items, as seen in Figure 4-2, the thesis and antithesis, to remain irreducibly different but reliant upon one another.27

26 Alison Stone, “Adorno and Logic,” in Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts, ed. Deborah Cook (Stocksfield, UK: Acumen Press, 2008): 47-62; Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998).

27 Stone, “Adorno and Logic,” 53-54.

147

Figure 4-2. General model of Adorno’s negative dialectics

Figures 4-2 and 4-3 appear visually similar to the Hegelian figure. Figure 4-2 shows a general model, like Figure 4-1 did for Hegelian dialectics, while Figure 4-3 shows the application of negative dialectics to music with twelve-tones. Negative dialectics in its most mature form advances a critique that might be represented differently but illustrating these ideas as they come from the “prototype” for negative dialectics still retains traces of Hegelian thinking. The synthesis results—in a non-Hegelian fashion— from a possible reconciliation that depends on the conflict between thesis and antithesis and their separate identities. If we apply this notion of negative dialectics to Adorno’s concept of composition with twelve tones, it would be a result of the inherent conflict between tonality and atonality not a synthesis of the two, as in a Hegelian model, see

Figure 4-3.

148

Figure 4-3. Dialectic model for composition with twelve tones.

As the figure above demonstrates, the resulting conceptual model allows twelve- tone music to retain traits of tonality and atonality. An illustration of Adorno’s negative dialectics, as it relates to a conception of twelve-tone music, accommodates the traits of tonality and atonality within the synthesis. In this sense composition with twelve-tones is not an alternative to tonality, nor its antithesis, but rather an overarching structure that comprises the identity and non-identity of both.

This early instance of negative dialectics was a way for Adorno to explain and justify Berg’s approach to twelve-tone composition because it allowed tonality to assert itself within twelve-tone music so long as it emanated from processes. As is well-known

Berg’s pre-compositional work with row structures and derivations thereof allowed for large and small-scale unfoldings of related materials throughout a given work. The case of the Lyric Suite, which was Berg’s first large-scale foray into composition with twelve tones, is no different. He began work on this piece in the fall of 1925, and Adorno was privy to his scores during the time of their lessons and discussions. If we take the premise that Adorno’s burgeoning concepts of twelve-tone composition are related to

149

the way Berg composed, the Lyric Suite provides an apt example of how Adorno’s

thinking, just described, relates to Berg’s musical language.28

Considering the Lyric Suite from the perspective of what both Berg and Adorno knew of twelve-tone music, it is no sheer coincidence that Adorno’s dialectics embed

Berg’s aesthetics. Arved Ashby, and others, discuss all of the different versions of twelve-tone composition Berg encountered before he actually began, in 1925, to compose using any given version of the idea. These would be the compositional practices and theoretical writings of Schoenberg, Webern, Hauer, and Berg’s own student, Klein. Ashby states, “Berg was confronted by various declarations of twelve- tone ‘law’ before he set pencil to paper in an attempt to write music according to

Schoenberg’s principles of ‘compositions with twelve tones related to one another.’”29 It was the matter of Berg’s compositional aesthetics that drew Adorno to Berg, and he spent time learning the techniques not only of Berg but also of Schoenberg, and Hauer,

and through Berg, Klein’s ideas. He was keen to learn practical aspects of atonal and

twelve-tone composition with Berg and did so at the time Berg was composing out

aesthetics.

If there were accepted “laws” to twelve-tone composition at this moment, then

Berg took them as material to be adapted.30 After all, as George Perle has written, “it is

impossible to comprehend the first movement of the Lyric Suite in terms of the twelve-

28 George Perle has written books and many articles discussing the analytical intricacies of this work. His discoveries and analytical work are essential to any analytical and programmatic understanding of this piece, and I will refer to his works throughout.

29 Ashby, “The Development of Berg’s Twelve-Tone Aesthetic,” 3.

30 The polemics of Schoenberg’s techniques have been addressed by many people and are well known. Suffice it to say Joseph Auner’s “The Second Viennese School as a Historical Concept,” in Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern: A Companion to the Second Viennese School tackles much of the important literature on this subject.

150

tone system unless we recognize from the outset its apparent violation of Schoenberg’s principle that a twelve-tone piece should be based only on one series.”31 The first movement, as portions of the third and fifth, as well as the final movement are twelve- tone works. Yet, even the first measures confound expectations of the twelve-tone techniques: the first three chords of movement 1, a twelve-tone collection (Example 4-

1a), are not the main row, and Berg leaves a six-tone collection as the fourth chord only to be taken up later.

Example 4-1. Alban Berg, Lyric Suite, Mvt. 1 “Allegretto gioviale”, m. 1.

Berg’s main row (Example 4-2) in Allegretto gioviale appears in measures 2-4

(Example 4-3), but serves as the background structure for composing tropes, set- collections, motives, and transpositions thereof, fully exploring the material.

Example 4-2. Berg’s main twelve-tone row for the Lyric Suite, mvt. 1.

31 George Perle, Style and Idea in the ‘Lyric Suite’ of Alban Berg, 2nd edition (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2001), 6.

151

Example 4-3. Alban Berg, Lyric Suite, movement 1, mm. 2-4, main row in violin 1.

Adorno writes of this movement, and its row:

The rows themselves are constructed in such a way as to allow for tonal chords, which are no more absent in the Lyric Suite than elsewhere in Berg, and even make the Tristan quotation possible. Berg’s functional way of thinking seizes upon the resources of the row itself: it is not retained in a single form, rather, it is constantly modified form one twelve-tone segment to another. The original row underlying the first movement: F-E - C - A - G - D - A♭- D♭- E♭ - G♭- B♭- B was one with which Berg was frequently preoccupied; it is for instance, used in the second setting of the Strom song, “Schließe mir die Augen beide.” In an analytic outline for the Kolisch Quartet Berg calls it ‘the twelve-tone row discovered by F.H. Klein, containing all twelve intervals.32

Berg made a decision to write twelve-tone music with a strong tonal element, this is to

say nothing of the formal choices which have been given more attention elsewhere.33

The row, which is also Klein’s all interval-series, allowed Berg to segment the row and create derivations, most commonly: hexachordal deviation, fifths, and stacks of thirds up

32 Adorno, Alban Berg, 106.

33 See Perle and Ashby.

152

to six note chords.34 These are the elements that are labeled Berg’s “accustomed free

style” by Schoenberg.35 While Adorno points out seemingly superficial elements of the

Lyric Suite, they are elements that those outside of the Berg/Schoenberg circle were not

widely aware of until published correspondences were made available much later. That

Adorno understood the way Berg used rows to construct and derive materials plays into

the social-historical importance he gives Berg’s music throughout his life and in relation

to the formation of negative dialectics.

Berg’s so-called “accustomed free style”36 has been a problem for theorists.

George Perle’s analysis of the Lyric Suite states, for example:

There is not a single twelve-tone composition by Alban Berg that is remotely consistent with the principles that one can deduce from the twelve-tone practice of Schoenberg and Webern, and as these have been formulated in the literature on the subject.37

While Berg of course learned techniques of composition from Schoenberg, Berg’s

techniques do not fit with the “Schoenberg School,” because his music had more non-

Schoenbergian elements. As Arved Ashby has argued Berg was indebted to his student

Fritz Klein’s notions of Modell-Typen.38 Indeed Klein’s Variation op 14 for piano (1924)

and its analytical preface provided a model on which Berg developed a system for row

34 For more detail on the possibilities of the chord see Ashby “Of Model-Typen and Reihenformen,” as well as “The Development of Berg’s Twelve-Tone Aesthetic.”

35 Juliane Brand, Christopher Hailey, and Donald Harris, eds, The Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence: Selected Letters (New York: Norton, 1987), 348-51. The underlining is Schoenberg’s emphasis.

36 Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg, The Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence: Selected Letters, eds. Juliane Brand, Christopher Hailey, and Donald Harris (New York: Norton, 1987), 351.

37 George Perle, Style and Idea in the ‘Lyric Suite’ of Alban Berg, 2nd edition (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2001), 5.

38 Ashby, “Of Modell-Typen and Reihenformen.”

153

derivation.39 Berg himself wrote to Schoenberg about the importance of Klein’s method

of deriving rows, particularly for the Lyric Suite.40 The all-interval row had the capacity to

produce intervals of fourths and fifths, C major and G flat major chords, and many other

possibilities. In Klein’s methods, Berg was able to confirm ideas he already had in mind

about the possibilities for twelve-note compositions, and was able to workout latent

ideas about the possibilities of reconciling common practice, tonal music, within

compositions utilizing the twelve-tone techniques.

It was precisely Berg’s procedures that prompted Adorno to translate his philosophical views to a musical concept, that of composition. This concept would validate Berg’s musical language and its logical structures, where tonality and atonality were subjected to the structure of twelve-tone procedures. While key to Adorno’s perceived “defense” of Berg, negative dialectics is also immediately tied to Adorno’s critique of a “school” of composition, the so-called Second Viennese School. From as early as 1925 he posited his critiques of ideological systems and their danger.

Berg, Twelve-Tone Methods, and the Historical Process

Another aspect of Adorno’s dialectical conception, relates to composition with twelve-tones inherently related to the progression of music and society. At the moment of its perceived dissolution, tonality could no longer progress in society. For Adorno, the tonal system had reached the end of its possibilities with Wagnerian chromatic saturation. In Philosophy of New Music he writes that the musical material was

39 Ashby, “Of Modell-Typen and Reihenformen,” 76. Ashby writes: “Turning to Klein’s preface, we find nothing less than an encapsulation of Berg’s twelve-tone techniques and a document that defines many of the practices in Berg’s twelve-tone oeuvre as a whole. Klein’s twelve-tone techniques differ from Schoenberg’s in much the same way Berg’s do. Like Berg, Klein selects a row for its melodic capacities as well as intervallic cycles, possible diatonic chords, and other derivational possibilities.”

40 Berg and Schoenberg, The Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence, 349-51.

154

transformed with Wagnerian romantic traditions.41 He goes on to analyze how

Schoenberg’s style emerged from the legacy of Wagner:

Schoenberg was the first to detect the principles of universal unity and economy in the new, subjective, emancipated Wagnerian material. His works adduce the evidence that the more rigorously the nominalism of musical language—inaugurated by Wagner—is pursued, the more completely the language allows itself to be rationally dominated, indeed, to be dominated by virtue of tendencies that are inherent in it, and not by the ability of tact and taste to smooth things over.42

What Schoenberg was able to accomplish was not just an “emancipation of tones,” but

the freedom tonal music, or music composed chromatically within a tonal system, from

extreme subjectivization in the form of dissonance. Atonality, on the other hand, allowed

the autonomy of musical materials as a technique, but not a system. Yet, neither could

maintain itself as history unfolded; the conflict between tonality and atonality yielded

something new that could rely upon elements of the past. Again in Philosophy of New

Music, as he looks back to the 1920s and 30s, he writes, in the section “The Idea of

Twelve-Tone Technique”:

The music becomes a result of the processes to which the material is subjected and which the music itself keeps from being unveiled. Accordingly, the music becomes static. Twelve-tone technique is not to be understood as a “technique of composition,” such as that of impressionism. All efforts to use it in this way result in absurdities. It is more to be compared to the arrangement of colors on the palette than to the painting of a picture.43

His analogy to painting, or the arrangement of colors needed before painting, speaks to

his insistence that the combination of materials available to each given composer and

41 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006): 48.

42 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 48.

43 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 50

155

their background is integral to their approach to the technique. In light of negative

dialectics, the composition with twelve tones would then appear as a synthesis. Arguing

for a more encompassing view of twelve-tone technique, Adorno’s view would differ

substantially from Schoenberg’s, especially because it allowed for tonality and atonality

to exist within the resulting composition.

Adorno’s conception of the technique is closer to Berg’s and Klein’s versions of

the technique. Indeed, Berg affirms such a position as he states, “And if a twelve tone

row, or a major or minor scale or key, is used to create a powerful cohesion, then as

now, this cohesion will not ultimately keep what results in this case— where the twelve

tones are “related only one to another” —from being something more genuinely Berg.”44

Berg was concerned with how he worked out the system for himself, how his version

was “genuinely Berg.” Contrasting Berg’s and Schoenberg’s respective styles Adorno

writes: “Berg’s music may be compared to something that unfolds like a plant. Its

scheme is that of the organism, while with Schoenberg the organic substance is fixed

dialectically from the outset by the structural motive.”45 Schoenberg was a purist who asserted compositions should rely solely on a single tone row and avoid tonal allusions.

Of course, Berg held a different position. It is important to note that often Berg’s public and private expressions conveyed different messages.

As Berg crafted his own image as a composer, he established a difference between what his music conveys, the techniques used, and what it means. In his 1925 dedication of “Schliesse mir die Augen beide” to Emil Hertzka, Berg explained his notion

44 Alban Berg, “Composition with Twelve-Tone Rows,” 392.

45 Theodor W. Adorno, “Berg and Webern—Schoenberg’s Heirs,” in Modern Music 8 (1931): 32.

156

of twelve-tone composition as an end of the teleological process. He recalls, “the

enormous distance which music has traveled from tonal composition to compositions

with ‘12 notes only related to one another,’ from the C major triad to the Mutterakkord

[an all-interval twelve-tone chord].”46 At face value, this dedication presents twelve-tone music as the apex of a historical process. As Silvio dos Santos argues, however, Berg is justifying the use of the Mutterakkord, which was developed by Klein and was completely independent from Schoenberg. In doing so, dos Santos writes, “Berg turns

Schließe mir die Augen beide into an index of the musical developments of the Second

Viennese School.”47 Berg regarded his “first attempt at strict twelve-tone serialism,”48

where the Mutterakkord, with its all-interval twelve-tone series, as the result of a

historical progression toward twelve-tone serialism. Though Berg’s statement on

Schließe mir presents a stricter version of composition with twelve tones, similar to what

Schoenberg was doing at the time, in practice it proved itself unattainable. Sure enough all of Berg’s mature works incorporate atonal and even tonal passages within a twelve- tone musical language as a result of the pre-compositional work with the row structure.

It is precisely the tonal elements, references to other composers, and his

“Romantic spirit” that have caused scholars and critics alike to question the motivations behind Berg’s compositions. His music undergoes a substantial transformation in 1925 with the composition of the Lyric Suite, where he uses multiple twelve-tone row

46 Mosco Carner, Alban Berg: The Man, The Work (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983), 107.

47 dos Santos, Narratives of Identity, 148-9.

48 George Perle, The Operas of Alban Berg volume 2: Lulu (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 9-11. Perle goes on to state the importance of the Mutterakkord to Berg’s work, he states, “the relation between its formal design and the structural implications of the set,” even beyond what Webern was capable of at the time.

157

configurations as well as moments of tonality and free-atonality to structure the piece.

Berg’s identity as an avant-garde composer and his apparent conflicted relationship to

the past was seen as inconsistent by Schoenberg and several other members of the

Second Viennese School.49 And yet, according to Adorno’s negative dialectics Berg

would maintain his identity, perhaps more so than Schoenberg, as an avant-garde

composer whose musical language would be a synthesis of tonality and atonality, and

yet would maintain traits of both.

Berg’s appropriation of music and aspects of individuals from the past gives at

once a trajectory: modern composers acquire a sense of identity according to their

collective musical pasts, in doing so, they also render traits from the past as an integral

part of their own time. It was precisely these ideas that lead Adorno to a wider

understanding of twelve-tone in music history. Analytically, compositionally, and

philosophically Adorno was interested in the ways Berg could logically maneuver

between seemingly antithetical compositional techniques, often evoking the syntax of

the past without succumbing to its grammar. In this light, Berg’s model, not

Schoenberg’s, was a prototype for Adorno’s own negative dialectics.50

Composing out his Conception of the Twelve-Tone Techniques

Adorno’s own compositional practice is akin to that of Berg’s Lyric Suite, the

composition that Berg finished around the same time, in 1925. When Adorno started his

49 dos Santos, Narratives of Identity in Alban Berg’s “Lulu”. In his text, dos Santos analyzes Berg’s relationship to Wagner as one of the identities Berg acquires.

50 Buck-Morss, The Origins of Negative Dialectics, 188. Here I directly contradict Buck-Morss’ assertion that Schoenberg’s “models,” the term he uses to describe thematic material in his music, were directly prototypical of Adorno’s own. While I do not deny that Schoenberg’s music and revolution were integral to Adorno’s understanding of new music, particularly twelve-tone. As I have demonstrated throughout this paper, Berg’s music is the prototype of Adorno’s prototype of negative dialectics.

158

study with Berg he believed the free atonality of the second Viennese school to be the

radical highpoint of the 20th century. His published compositions echo this interest, a

general assessment of his works indicates the following features: economy of gesture,

close motivic and thematic writing in freely atonal works, most pieces are based in free

atonality, and traces of traditional forms.

Much as Berg’s twelve-tone works deviate from the Schoenbergian model, so do

Adorno’s compositions, specifically his Two Pieces for String Quartet op. 2.51 As a result

of his study with Berg, Adorno’s work does not present an orthodox use of

Schoenbergian twelve-tone procedures, but rather a structure based on multiple rows,

secondary arrays, melodic tropes derived from the rows, and transitions to free

atonality. In both movements of his op. 2, Adorno uses twelve-tone techniques to

organize the pitch materials according to a pre-existing formal structure: the first

movement is a sonata form and the second, theme and variations. In analyzing the

quartet, both Hufner and Levin52 consider Adorno’s work as a product of Schoenberg’s

compositional procedures.53 In light of Adorno’s musical conception as related to

negative dialectics, it becomes clear that this piece does not exhibit Schoenbergian

twelve-tone techniques, but rather the techniques he learned from Berg and his music.

51 Theodor W. Adorno, Zwei Stücke für Streichquartett op. 2, eds. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1983). Adorno worked on both movements while he was in Vienna studying with Berg. He completed Movement 1 in Frankfurt, in 1926. Movement two, Variationen, was completed in Vienna in 1925.

52 Martin Hufner, Adorno und die Zwölftontechnik (Regensburg, Germany: ConBrio Verlagsgesellschaft, 1996); Walter Levin, “Adornos Zwei Stücke für Streichquartett op. 2, Musik-Konzepte 63/64 (January 1989): 74-99.

53 Hufner, Adorno und die Zwölftontechnik, 53. In the conclusion of the section on Adorno’s compositions between 1925-1934 Hufner writes, “Adorno dealt theoretically with his own compositions primarily based on his analysis of Schoenberg’s compositions.” (Adorno’s theoretisiche Auseinandersetzung beruht dabei hauptsächlich auf der Analyse Schönbergscher Kompositionen).

159

Using the tone rows for their melodic capabilities, Adorno follows the structural conventions of the sonata form with tone-row melodies. In the first movement Adorno uses three twelve-tone rows and one seven-tone set as seen in Examples 4-4 through

Example 4-4. Row 1 – P7 (mm. 1-4)

Example 4-5. Row 2 – P3 (mm. 11-14)

Example 4-6. Row 3 – P10 (mm. 25-27)

Example 4-7. Seven-Tone Row (mm. 20-21)

These rows fulfill the function of main theme, transition, and secondary theme, following the basic tenets of the sonata-allegro form. This is but one aspect, where the usage of multiple rows, even if only used melodically, would not fit the Schoenbergian model. Example 4-8 illustrates the row functioning as the main theme of the form. Note the row in violin one, enclosed in two consecutive boxes. The first iteration of the row occurs in order, while the second phrase the last two pitches are switched (12, 11 instead of 11, 12).

160

Example 4-8. Adorno, Two Pieces for String Quartet, op. 2, movement 1 (mm. 1-6)

According to Hufner the accompanying material comprises three horizontal arrays, or secondary rows (these are indicated by the dashed boxes).54

In addition to using the row for its thematic properties, Adorno builds the

accompaniment from different row-arrays. In contrast to the twelve-tone main theme,

Adorno uses the seven-tone collection (from Example 4-7) to create an atonal

secondary theme section (mm. 20-30). In this brief section he highlights three different

sets from the initial seven-tone collection. The 1st violin and cello are highlighted in

Example 4-9 (mm. 20-21, 22-23, 25-27 respectively); they play melodic transformations

54 Hufner, Adorno und die Zwölftontechnik, 40.

161

of the set, which I will focus on momentarily. Example 4-10 shows the sets latent in the

initial melodic statement, which Adorno rearranges as the section progresses. The

section transitions back to a twelve-tone row, row 3, through the final cello statement.

Throughout the piece, Adorno shifts between his twelve-tone formations and atonality.

To put this work, with its multiple rows and arrays, within its own historical perspective,

we can contrast it with Schoenberg’s op. 25, which uses only four transpositions of one

single row.

Although it is not clear if or how Adorno used derivational processes to yield new rows or arrays, in this movement he is used numerous rows and gave credence to their

function as a part of the structures of the piece. With Berg, Adorno learned twelve-tone

techniques quite different from those conceived by Schoenberg, especially because

Berg was himself indebted to his own student Fritz Klein and his innovative

techniques.55 His composition and letter to Berg indicate that Adorno worked to employ

the techniques of composition he learned from Berg and thus sought to make his

practical application, or praxis, a mirror of his philosophical concepts.

55 Ashby, Of Modell-Typen and Reihenformen, 117-32.

162

Example 4-9. Adorno, Two Pieces for String Quartet, op. 2, movement 1 (mm. 20-28)

163

Example 4-10. Atonal second theme area; reuse and reorganization of sets.

To be sure, the notion that Theodor Adorno’s conception of twelve-tone music

was modeled after Schoenberg’s method of serial composition still pervades the

literature. This may be a result of Adorno’s forceful proposition in his seminal book, The

Philosophy of New Music, that Schoenberg epitomizes one pole of a dialectical process

in new music, with Stravinsky occupying the other. This book alone would justify the

view of Schoenberg’s centrality in Adorno’s music criticism articulated by scholars such as Max Paddison, Lydia Goehr, Richard Leppert, and Susan Buck-Morss.56 While

Paddison and Leppert both call for more understanding of the role Berg and

composition played in Adorno’s thought, they also emphasize a Schoenberg-centric

musical worldview for the composer. The key to Goehr’s interpretation is that Adorno

56 Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Lydia Goehr, "Adorno, Schoenberg, and the Totentanz der Prinzipien,” 598; Theodor Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).

164

transformed Schoenberg’s life work (a musical Totentanz of theological principles) to

produce his own philosophical principles, what she calls as many others do, a dissonant

philosophy. Her focus is on how Adorno’s later writings and thought are shaped by

Schoenberg. Arved Ashby, however, draws attention to the role Adorno played in an

early, fuller understanding of Berg’s music, on that had been ignored since Adorno’s

writings.

There are two common approaches to analyzing the perceived influences on

Adorno’s concepts of modern music: Ashby uses Adorno to explain Berg, and the other

writers mentioned use Schoenberg to analyze Adorno. As I have demonstrated,

however, this style of critique is a result of Berg as the formative character to Adorno’s

critical philosophy of musical principles. Undoubtedly the role of Schoenberg’s works in

Adorno’s thought is of paramount importance, but Berg and his music helped Adorno to

actualize his study and assessment of ideal new music into writing much earlier. To

evaluate Adorno’s conception of twelve-tone music solely on Schoenberg’s

compositional models limits in fact our understanding of Adorno.

Viewing Adorno’s conception of twelve-tone techniques from a Bergian

perspective allows us to reassess aspects of Adorno’s writing, critique, and composition

that seem contradictory, especially his justification of Berg’s mature works. As Arved

Ashby and Silvio dos Santos have demonstrated, the seemingly incongruous material

was an inherent part of Berg’s musical language from the pre-compositional stages to

the finished work.57 The only way Adorno could justify such an approach to twelve-tone

57 Arved Ashby, "Of ‘Modell-Typen’ and ‘Reihenformen’: 70. Ashby focuses on viewing Berg’s music in a broader environment, rather than the historicist view of the Schoenberg school. He proposes to see Berg’s music with out the “simple and attractive dichotomoy of Schoenbergian systematics as oppsed to Hauerian ‘liberties.’ He writes of Berg, “Like Hauer, Berg violates Schoenberg’s principle of restriction to a

165

composition was through his concept of negative dialectics, where twelve-tone music

would represent a synthesis of tonality and free atonality, but twelve-tone music in itself

was not antithetical to tonality.

Adorno’s understanding of twelve-tone, as based on practical engagement with

Berg’s music evidenced in his own compositions and writings, complicates our

understanding of Adorno’s position on the subject. The early introduction of negative

dialectics to understand Berg’s works and Adorno’s own compositional techniques

prompts the question: Did Adorno find that elements of Berg’s works helped him to

codify his thought on negative dialectics? I would argue for a positive answer. While

Adorno respected Schoenberg’s contribution to the course of music history, he sought

out Berg as a composition instructor because of something latent in Berg’s music. After

only months of study with Berg, Adorno begins the quest to assert the identity of Berg’s

musical language as different from Schoenberg’s.58

Negative and positive dodecaphony, a prototype of negative dialectics, gave

Adorno a philosophical framework to express what he understood about Berg’s music in

a music analytical sense. Berg’s evocations of the past were not ad hoc insertions but

deliberate workings-out of the twelve-tone techniques as an overarching system that

incorporates tonality and atonality, rather than replacing them.

single series of interval classes, a point of reference unaltered by transposition or inversion and altered in order number only by the retrograde operation. This draws too sharp a dichotomy between the interval- class series of Schoenberg and Hauer’s tropes, however, the latter serving as a catchall for writing that does not establish a single series of interval classes as a reference, but which neverthless circulates the total chromatic.”

Silvio J. dos Santos, Narratives of Identity in Alban Berg’s “Lulu”.

58 Adorno and Berg, Correspondence, 28. Adorno writes to Berg (November 23, 1925): “This prattling on about the ‘Schönberg pupil’ must stop.” Many of his essays on Berg and Berg’s music in 1925 and 1926, among others, seek to set Berg apart from Schoenberg and allow the readership to understand Berg’s music for its own sake.

166

Initial impressions of Adorno’s twelve-tone conception are frequently based on the seminal Philosophy of New Music, thus making Adorno a staunch defender of

Schoenberg and his music. Yet, Schoenberg’s own negative reaction to that book might indicate that he understood that Adorno’s premises were not based on his music.

Granted, Schoenberg has been and will continue to be the figurehead of Second

Viennese School. If Adorno’s conceptions of composition with twelve tones are strongly informed by Berg’s version of the technique, as I have argued, then this understanding calls for a reassessment of Philosophy of New Music, particularly Schoenberg’s negative reaction to that work.

167

CHAPTER 5 NEGATIVE DIALECTICS AND PHILOSOPHY OF NEW MUSIC

As one of the most important books in 20th-century musicology Theodor Adorno’s

Philosophy of New Music (1949) is also one of the most misunderstood. This is in part because the polemical language is more apparent than the dialectical approach used.

As is well known, Adorno sets Schoenberg against Stravinsky, where the composers are the epitomes of opposite dialectic poles in new music. While the book is commonly analyzed for its Hegelian concepts, I argue Adorno uses a Hegelian perspective to present the negative dialectic, but on a deeper level it is his concept of negative dialectics that governs the book.

The Hegelian concept of Vermittlung, or mediation, is a crucial bridge between

Hegel’s dialectics and Adorno’s own, as it informs the structure of the work, and even is used to critique Hegel’s ideas.1 Conflict, or tension between extremes is integral to both

Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and Hegel’s positive dialectics. As I have discussed in the

previous chapters, Adorno focused on how Berg’s music was built on the mediation of

extremes. It was Berg’s ability to work with opposing systems of composition to create a

new style, keeping the identities of both systems, that helped Adorno to articulate his

new ideas about a negative dialectic.

Throughout PoNM Adorno relies upon the reader to be the mediator of the

opposites. Vermittlung in a Hegelian sense, as Paddison addresses, is “the interaction

of opposites, whereby all apparently ‘immediate’ givens can be seen on reflection to be

1 Max Paddison explicates the Hegelian concept of mediation in Adorno’s aesthetics in Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, Chapter 3 “The Problem of Mediation” (108-148).

168

the ‘mediated’ products of the all-embracing process of the dialectic itself.”2 In PoNM,

Adorno presents a conflict that can only be resolved but in the minds of the readers. By

presenting the logic of the composers’ works in the two chapters he is not seeking to

come to a truth or resolution, but rather he addresses a negative truth in the new music.

This negative truth, as Daniel Chua claims in a perceptive reading of PoNM, is that “new music must be experienced as unresolved tension.”3 As a framework for his discourse,

negative dialectics allows Adorno to argue for the importance of unresolved tension.

Analyzing how PoNM is rooted in negative dialectics will also help to understand

some of the problems scholars have with the book. Interpretations and analyses of

PoNM are predicated on understanding Adorno’s methods as utilizing a Hegelian

dialectic. Working from that perspective, it is possible to find problems with the logic and

methodology in PoNM. Three problems commonly identified in the secondary literature

are first, the dialectics do not offer a reconciliation; second, the book lacks concrete

musical analysis; third, that Adorno emphasizes a single historical path in his treatment

of music. Authors have been approaching PoNM from a Hegelian perspective and the

problems arise from this vantage point.

One of the main problems of PoNM, as addressed in the secondary literature is

that the dialectics do not function as they should because they offer no reconciliation.

Max Paddison for example writes that the dialectic is frozen due to the extreme

dialectical poles. Paddison writes:

2 Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 109.

3 Daniel Chua, “Drifting: The Dialectics of Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music” in Apparitions: New Perspectives on Adorno and Twentieth Century Music, ed. Berthold Hoeckner (New York: Routledge, 2006), 5.

169

It has been argued so far that Adorno’s theory of material lays its emphasis as much on the ‘disintegration’ of musical material and on the discontinuities of its historical tendency, as on the continuities of its historical dialectic as progress towards the total integration and rationalization of the musical work. While both these emphases are still present in Philosophie der neuen Musik, their extreme polarization in this case causes them to become frozen. The moment of stasis, as denial of the dimension of time which Adorno had recognized in the New Music, is actually written into Philosophie der neuen Musik itself. The dialectic of material is brought to a standstill, like Hegel’s vision of the ‘end of history.’ Unlike Hegel, however, there is no ultimate reconciliation of antitheses within the Whole, as Absolute Spirit, but only an absolutizisng of the antitheses themselves in their mutual and total alienation. The extremes, as total integration and total disintegration, become final, and no way forward is offered.4

Adorno set up the polarization that Paddison describes in this passage; he intended the unresolved tension. But if viewed from a given Hegelian perspective a reading of the book will see flaws if the reader does not see negative dialectics at place. Paddison sees the polarization as essentializing both Schoenberg and Stravinsky, but that is not

Adorno’s intent. Extending his analysis of Adorno’s concepts of musical material to the structure and arguments within Philosophy of New Music, Paddison thus drawings out

Adorno’s use of Hegelian concepts and methods.

Another problem is that PoNM “lacks real grounding in concrete musical examples.”5 This claim is important on one hand because as Max Paddison states, “this abstraction and lack of emphasis on the ‘concrete particular’ of individual works certainly goes against Adorno’s own claims for his approach in the book, made in the introductory essay.”6 This critique is not just leveled at PoNM but most of Adorno’s musical writings. Throughout PoNM Adorno makes continual references to pieces, as

4 Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 265.

5 Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 270.

6 Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 270.

170

they relate to any given section or point he is addressing. The point of PoNM is not to

provide music analysis, in charts and graphs or score excerpts embedded in the text, it

is the job of the reader to examine his references. Adorno writes for an audience that he

believes will check the score references. “Technical analysis,” Adorno writes, “is at

every point presupposed and often presented, but it requires in addition the

interpretation of the most minute detail if it is to go beyond the characteristic cultural

inventorying of the humanities and express the relation of the object to truth.”7 Adorno

uses specific score references as supporting evidence to his larger analyses of musical

material, genres, and the course of new music.

Finally, Carl Dahlhaus and others8 find it problematic that Adorno’s philosophy of

history emphasizes a single historical path predicated on Beethoven and Schoenberg.

And in his Beethoven, Wagner, and Stravinsky discussions, Adorno obscures the particular techniques used in given compositions.9 Adorno’s approach to philosophizing

about music is dependent on historically advanced materials, and Dahlhaus and Alastair

Williams argue that this is problematic. For Adorno’s approach, the most experimental

or avant-garde materials are most important and he examines them in relation to a

given subject, here new music via Schoenberg and Stravinsky, as a reverse, or

retrospective teleology. He uses other pieces and composers to show how we got to the

extremes of new music, not to suggest a Hegelian-like future-oriented teleology.

7 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 24.

8 Alastair Williams, New Music and the Claims of Modernity (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1997), 37.

9 Carl Dahlhaus, “Das Problem der ‘höheren Kritik’” Adornos Polemic gegen Stravinsky,” in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 148/5 (1987): 9-15.

171

It is also possible to see these so-called problems as caused by approaching this book with Hegelian dialectics and not negative dialectics. The critiques just mentioned are based on implications of a Hegelian dialectic and Adorno’s concepts of musical materialism. The Hegelian structure is a trap that causes misunderstandings. Adorno causes a paradigmatic shift in PoNM by means of a style of critique intended to force readers to juxtapose the two poles of a dialectics. The reader is left to deal with contradictions and negative truth or identity. This problem, as Max Paddison, Allastair

Williams, Daniel Chua, Carl Dahlhaus, Martin Jay, Richard Leppert, and many others analyze, is complex and filled with Adorno’s infamous concepts and constellations, which are difficult to analyze and contextualize. While Hegel is central to the text, its structure, and Adorno’s thought, Adorno’s own negative dialectics offers a way to see the perceived incongruities as elements that form different constellations in the minds of the readers.

In this chapter I use Adorno’s own concept of “thinking in models” as a tool to for analyzing both the Hegelian and negative dialectics in PoNM. First I will introduce thinking in models, a part of negative dialectics, to understand what Adorno is doing when he presents Hegelian aesthetics only to criticize the ideas. Thus, both Hegelian dialectics and negative dialects are two thought models in this book. To understand how negative dialectics informs this book I will first examine Adorno’s use of Hegelian ideas.

He presents segments of and extensive engagements with Hegelian aesthetics only to undermine it. I will focus on the epigrams used as structural markers for each chapter.

Finally I will examine how negative dialectics operates at many levels in PoNM, from structural to the driving force behind analyses of the music.

172

If we understand negative dialectics as the underlying mode of criticism, we can read what some call the failed or frozen dialectics as the unresolved tension Adorno sees in new music. I must admit that, analyzing any one given concept in Adorno’s works can be difficult, but illuminating. Negative dialectics, in its most mature form, is an abstract critique of modern philosophy, and thus showing the analogous points in his philosophy of music can be difficult because it requires trying to separate interconnected ideas. But, reassessing Adorno’s most famous text based on the development of his lifelong idea, negative dialectics, allows a deeper understanding of his arguments on new music. Negative dialectics helps us to understand the multivalent interpretations and misunderstandings of the book, no synthesis can occur as such in negative dialectics, but a synthesis occurs only with each individual reader. While ND was published much later than PoNM the critiques and ideas from ND can be seen in

PoNM.

Overview of Philosophy of New Music

Philosophy of New Music, the well-known excursus to Dialectic of Enlightenment, was published in 1949. It was written between 1941-1948 during his exile in the United

States. PoNM is divided into three chapters: Introduction, “Schoenberg and Progress,” and “Stravinsky and the Restoration.” The Schoenberg chapter was completed considerably earlier (1941) than the rest of the book, written in the United States in the

1940s. As a critique of progress in new music, Adorno opposes the two extremes of new music.

In “Stravinsky and Progress,” Adorno outlines the atonal and twelve-tone music of Schoenberg, as well as referencing Berg and Webern. One of the main critiques

Adorno levels against Schoenberg’s music, which I will address later, is that the

173

restrictive technique expresses the decline of human subjectivity. Schoenberg’s music, until the use of the twelve-tone technique became dogmatic, was an embodiment of

Adorno’s ideals for art. But, as Adorno argues in the chapter, rigid adaptations of the new rules for composition stopped the dialectical process.

The polemical “Stravinsky and Restoration,” focuses on how Stravinsky re- appropriates history and destroys subjectivity. One of the key differences Adorno sees between Schoenberg and Stravinsky is their respective approaches to history, while

Schoenberg mainly uses the past as a tool to build on while creating something new.

Stravinsky strips the meaning from what he re-appropriates, destroying meaning and history. Schoenberg’s music expresses the suffering, for Adorno, while Stravinsky’s masks it.

Throughout the text Adorno discusses both Schoenberg and Stravinsky as both dialectical as well as, at times, undialectical composers. When he refers to Schoenberg, in particular, as a dialectical composer it is arguably a Hegelian dialectic that guides him. Adorno is critical of both composers and their styles. The extremes of Schoenberg and Stravinsky are the two most obvious and structural figures of the book. Here I mean structural as in they make up the two context chapters as well as the extremes of the argument.

Thought Models in Philosophy of New Music

Understanding PoNM has proven problematic because the overarching dialectical method is not self-evident; the ideas behind negative dialectics were not formulated yet in a thematic way. Adorno had been working towards a critique of new music based on a prototype of negative dialectics since 1925. In fact, the principle organizing the approach to new music is Adorno’s concept of thinking in models. While

174

this and many other concepts are explained in ND, before continuing we have to delve

into thinking in models. This is one of many key ideas explained in ND, but present as

an organizational concept in PoNM. Thinking in models, rather than thinking in systems,

allows multiple philosophical and analytical methods to be held in concert, or to be used

as appropriate for a given topic. A statement from the introduction to Negative Dialectics

clarifies:

Here Adorno asks that we consider multiple models, and not search for an origin in a

monadological approach. From Negative Dialectics we know that what he means by a

monadological approach is akin to dogmatism. In ND Adorno has particularly emphatic

warnings against the dangers of dogmatic, or ideological thought. Thinking in multiple

models asserts that thinking philosophically requires networks of understanding to avoid

thought or concepts that become an absolute unit, a simple being. The key to Adorno’s

warning is the phrase “merely monadological;” he uses the idea of the monad, here and

elsewhere, to warn against oversimplification. This idea also serves as a warning

against falling victim to dogmatic thought.

In PoNM the two main networks of understanding Adorno puts forth, are

Hegelian and negative dialectics. Using two contradictory approaches — negative

10 Adorno, Negative Dialektik, GS band 6, 39. The translation is my own. Die Forderung nach Verbindlichkeit ohne System ist die nach Denkmodellen. Diese sind nicht bloß monadologische Art. Das Modell trifft das Spezifische und mehr als das Spezifische, ohne es in seinen allgemeineren Oberbegriff zu verflüchtigen. Philosophisch denken ist soviel wie in Modellen denken; negative Dialektik ein Ensemble von Modellanalysen.

175

dialectics to critique the positive Hegelian dialects — can present two contradictory musical approaches to critique musical styles and materials he believes at time to be undialectical. Adorno clearly favors Schoenberg’s musical language over Stravinsky’s but he does not offer either composer as a way forward for new music. Thinking in models, through negative dialectics is both a “rejection and a critical transformation of established issues.”11 Adorno proposes new ways to approach ideas and systems of thought, as Alastair Williams states, “demonstrating that supposedly unified philosophical systems reveal antinomical aspects when subjected to a critique capable of conveying the extent to which consciousness is mediated by social conditions.”12

As a mode of understanding that pervades the deeper level of PoNM, negative dialectics operates on multiple levels throughout the book. Not only does it govern the large-scale structure, or organization, and the main concept but many of woven interwoven themes. Adorno argues, in the introduction of PoNM, for a dialectical method turned on its head, he writes: “The dialectical method, and precisely the one turned from its head onto its feet, cannot consist of treating particular phenomena as illustrations or examples of something preexisting and exempt from movement of the concept.”13 By examining the different, changed, dialectical method we will have a richer understanding of how Adorno understood the tensions and extremes in new music and modernity.

Understanding negative dialectics as operating on a deeper level in the text also allows us to let go of the expectation of the kind of synthesis that a Hegelian reading requires.

11 Williams, New Music and the Claims of Modernity, 11.

12 Williams, New Music and the Claims of Modernity, 8.

13 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 23.

176

The Hegelian Thought Model

The Hegelian presence in Philosophy of New Music appears to be structural.14 At

the most basic level, the structure of the book presents the infamous Hegelian binary, a

thesis and antithesis, as represented in the chapters: “Schoenberg and Progress” and

“Stravinsky and the Restoration.” Each of the three major sections, the introduction and

the chapters just mentioned, begin with an excerpt from one of Hegel’s works. These

epigraphs serve different purposes, related to the focus of the chapter, but they all

address notions of truth and truth content (Wahrheitsgehalt), and Adorno uses them, in

turn, to critique the aesthetics. Adorno also uses quotations of Hegel prominently

throughout the text, often to critique Hegel’s ideas of dialectics, aesthetics, truth, or work

concept. The Hegelian appearance is to draw attention to the underlying reality of the

book’s method, that it is not Hegelian.

Throughout the “Introduction” Adorno unfolds the purpose of his philosophical

treatment of new music. First he examines the Schoenberg and Stravinsky as the

extremes of new music. Second he seeks then to understand how the music does or

does not push the historical precedents to create authentic, progressive music. This all

plays into a larger question, that Adorno addresses in the first two quotations he uses:

What is the best method for understanding the truth of an artwork?

Adorno begins with a short line from Hegel’s Aesthetics: “For in art we have to do

not with any agreeable or useful child’s play, but… with an unfolding of the truth.”15 On

the page, Adorno’s epigraph directs the reader to the idea that the truth of art works

14 I use this terminology - the Hegelian presence appears to be structural – to invoke the Hegelian concepts of essence and appearance.

15 G.W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, translated by T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 2: 1236. In Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 7.

177

does not come from passing and superficial “play,” but rather from understanding all of

the elements of an “unfolding of the truth.” He truncates Hegel’s full phrase to

emphasize his own concepts. The full passage reads:

For in art we have to do, not with any agreeable or useful child’s play, but with the liberation of the spirit from the content and forms of finitude, with the presence and reconciliation of the Absolute in what is apparent and visible, with an unfolding of the truth which is not exhausted in natural history but revealed in world-history.16

What Adorno omits from this quotation is the notion of the elements of the dialectic

(form and content) being reconciled to an Absolute. He excises parts of Hegel’s text that

could be interpreted to allow “the dialectic degenerates into a state religion.”17 The

epigraph comes directly before a quotation from Walter Benjamin, that serves as the

first line of the “Introduction.” That sentence reads as follows:

Philosophical history as the research of origin is the form that, in the most remote extremes, in the apparent excesses of development, reveals the configuration of the idea as the configuration of the totality, characterized by the possibility of a meaningful juxtaposition of these extremes.18

Adorno, using, and then interpreting, Benjamin’s ideas as applied to new music, concludes that a philosophical analysis of new music can reveal how we got to that concept by understanding the juxtaposition of the extremes: Schoenberg and

Stravinsky. He goes on to say that, “only in the extremes does the essence of this music take shape distinctively; only they permit knowledge of its truth content.”19 It is with

16 G.W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, translated by T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 2: 1236. Please note that the translator of PoNM chose to amend the grammar of the translation of the Hegel quotation, removing the comma after “not” in PoNM.

17 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 23.

18 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John Osborn (London: NLB, 1977), 47. In Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 29.

19 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 7.

178

these two phrases, and continuing onward that Adorno establishes one of the key ideas

to his analysis and musical aesthetics, that truth content can be established by

categories such as atonality, twelve-tone technique, or neoclassicism but by “the

concrete crystallization of such categories in the structure of the music itself.”20

Establishing truth content as different from but informed by Hegel and Benjamin

allows Adorno to reveal his concept as an analytical method to understand new music,

but also serve his critique of the Hegelian dialectical model. While the concept of “truth

content” is a key, organizing concept, in Adorno’s late works, such as Negative

Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, it is essential to PoNM and understanding how Adorno

is moving away from a Hegelian dialectic to negative dialectics. As Lambert Zuidervaart,

writes:

According to Adorno, each artwork has its own import (Gehalt) by virtue of an internal dialectic between content (Inhalt) and form (Form). This import invites critical judgments about its truth or falsity. To do justice to the artwork and its import, such critical judgments need to grasp both the artwork's complex internal dynamics and the dynamics of the sociohistorical totality to which the artwork belongs. The artwork has an internal truth content to the extent that the artwork's import can be found internally and externally either true or false.21

Truth content, as a conceptual cornerstone of PoNM, is a bridge between music

analysis and philosophical analysis allowing Adorno to shape a new way to construct a

dialectical argument without an Absolute. “Truth content, Zuidervaart goes on to explain,

“is the way in which an artwork simultaneously challenges the way things are and

20 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 8.

21 Zuidervaart, Lambert, "Theodor W. Adorno", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = . Accessed 10 January 2016.

179

suggests how things could be better.”22 While there is reconciliation of opposites in the

Hegelian dialectic, and aesthetics, Adorno is positing a method of analysis that does not

need the positive synthesis which leads to an Absolute, which is teleological.

The second structural use of Hegel begins “Schoenberg and Progress.” Adorno

uses a line from Phenomenology of Mind (Geist), to highlight a central Hegelian concept, pure insight, as well as the role of negation. He uses it as the starting point for his negative dialectics. He includes the following:

Pure insight, however, is in the first instance without any content; it is rather the sheer disappearance of content; but by its negative attitude toward what it excludes it will make itself real and give itself a content.23

Adorno invokes the famous opposition between Faith and Reason from

Phenomenology. Hegel, in this section of Phenomenology, questions the role of belief in

relation to the truth, questioning how content can be organized to create what he calls

false insight. He writes:

Pure insight knows belief to be opposed to insight, opposed to reason and truth. Just as, for it, belief is in general a tissue of superstitious prejudices and errors; so it further sees the consciousness embracing this content organized into a realm of error, in which false insight is the general sphere of consciousness, immediate, naïvely unperturbed, and inherently unreflective.24

The passage Adorno includes links the Hegelian critique of form and content and the

formation of truth to perceptions and expectations of new music.

But the inclusion of this quotation and the argument that follows is impossible to

decipher without reference to the preceding section of the “Introduction.” The final

22 Zuidervaart, “Theodor W. Adorno.”

23 Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, translated by J. B. Baillie (New York: Dover, 2003), 561. In Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 29.

24 Hegel, Phenomenology, 561.

180

section of the “Introduction” under the header, “On Method,” is more than a discourse

on methodology. Adorno questions the validity of the dialectical method of assessing art

that is rested in bourgeoisie expectations of art. He warns against the tendency to

reduce avant-garde music to its social origin and social function because that approach

subsumes autonomous artworks to predetermined categories. Furthermore he

questions the applicability of the Hegelian dialectical method, suggesting it be turned

from its head to its feet, so that it does not degenerate into a state religion.25 Finally, as

he introduces the importance of an “immanent method” which, “reveals the reciprocal

implications between technical procedures and works. Thus it seeks to determine the

idea of both groups of musical phenomena respectively and to pursue them to the point

the rigor of the objects themselves reverses into their critique.”26 While the immanent

method fits securely with the new concept of analysis he is trying to establish, one that

does not resolve to an absolute, it is also a critique of Hegelian immanent critique. He

writes that an immanent method cannot depend, “as could Hegel, on that ‘pure looking

on’ [reine Zusehen] that promises the truth exclusively because the conception of the

identity of the subject and object underlies the whole so that the observing

consciousness is all the surer of itself the more completely it extinguishes itself in the

object.”27 Adorno critiques the thinking that allows subjects and objects to be critiqued in

the name of synthesis, or Universality.

This very last section, ending with a critique of “pure looking on” directly links to the beginning of the Schoenberg chapter. The epigram, is worth including again, “Pure

25 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 23.

26 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 24.

27 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 24-25.

181

insight, however, is in the first instance without any content; it is rather the sheer

disappearance of content; but by its negative attitude toward what it excludes it will

make itself real and give itself a content.28 This link to pure insight, as an extension of the preceding critique, connects to the main point of the first section of “Schoenberg and

Progress.” Adorno posits that the thirty years of musical transformation between 1907-

1947 have not been adequately understood, partially due to inadequate methods of analysis. This inclusion of Hegel, again, is to question the method, to question the assumed modes of understanding art works. A closed dialectic does not offer an adequate model for assessing the musical material nor the historical context.

Finally, “Stravinsky and the Restoration” goes back to Aesthetics as a warning against reverting back to past world-views, exactly what he accuses Stravinsky of promoting.

It is therefore no help to him to adopt again, as that substance, so to say, past world-views, i.e., to propose to root himself firmly in one of these ways of looking at things, e.g., to turn Roman Catholic as in recent times many have done for art’s sake in order to give stability to their mind and to give the character of something absolute to the specifically limited character of their artistic product itself.29

Adorno uses this epigraph to highlight his main point about Stravinsky’s neoclassicism.

Calling neoclassicism Stravinsky’s attempt at “restoration.”30 Restoration, or in Hegel’s

worlds, adopting past-world views is regressive. Adorno writes, ”Music knows

development only to the extent that it knows the solidified, the definite, Stravinsky’s

regression, which would like to reach back prior to this stage, therefore replaces

28 Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 561. In Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 29.

29 Hegel, Aesthetics, vol.1, 606. In Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 105.

30 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 106.

182

progress with repetition.”31 Adorno uses this Hegelian signpost to question Stravinsky’s

authenticity, but also to bring to the forefront the idea of a return to an Absolute, or

ideology. Adorno’s critique of Stravinsky is analogous to his critiques of Hegel: it does not offer a way forward.

These quotations then lead us to see the transition between a Hegelian approach and negative dialectics. They ask the reader to call into question the way the materials and concepts are analyzed and perceived, and also to question the mode of criticism itself. The appearance of a Hegelian dialectic in this text points out the problems with that mode of analysis, while establishing a different reality. Throughout the book it is possible to see what Lucia Sziborsky argues: “negative dialectics, whose fundamental basis is the experience of the subject, stands in opposition to the speculative Hegelian dialectic.”32

While a Hegelian presence is undeniable in Adorno’s conceptions and intellectual

framework, throughout the text Adorno subjects the Hegelian concepts to the very same

Hegelian criticism. Returning again to the introduction of PoNM, where Adorno critiques the basic tenant of the Hegelian dialectic, we see Adorno calling into question the most important tent of the method. Adorno writes:

31 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 122.

32 Lucia Sziborsky, Adorno’s Musik-Philosophie: Genese, Konstitution, Pädagogische Perspektiven (Munich: W. Fink, 1979), 163. “Negative Kialektik, deren tragender Grund die Erfahrung des Subjekts ist, tritt in Opposition zur spekulativen Dialektik Hegels.”

183

self-unfolding of the concrete object and to resolve the social puzzle of its image by the power of its own individuation.33

This phrase serves dual purposes: in the course of the section, it condemns modes of

understanding which seek to situate pieces of music into larger categories of what it

should or should not do based on socio-cultural history and expectations. In a larger

view he criticizes the dialectical method, based on Hegelian conceptions, which in the

process of turning a simple concept/proposition into its opposite, devolve into a school

of thought or ideology. An alternative, as Adorno describes in the “Preface” of ND is to,

with logical consistency, substitute the unity principle, or ideology, with the “idea of what

would be outside the sway of such unity.”34

Negative Dialectics in Philosophy of New Music

Philosophy of New Music is commonly overlooked when scholars seek to

understand Adorno’s negative dialectics in the contexts of his earlier works. This is

partially due to the overt Hegelian surface. Scholars also focus on Adorno’s theories on

musical material, among other ideas. But if we take Adorno’s statement above, about

thought models, and particularly the phrase “negative dialectics is an ensemble of

analyses of models [Modellanalysen],” in conjunction with what I have already

discussed about ND (coming out of knowledge of Berg/Berg’s music among other

works) it is possible to analyze PoNM to understand it in this vein.

Adorno provides his audience with a variety of concepts and features that could

be analyzed in depth thus appearing as the main concept.35 The nature of this text can,

33 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 23.

34 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, xx.

35 Note here about all of these possibilities. Need something about how the “concept” model Adorno adapts in PoNM as well as ND (and other works) as it relates to Benjamin.

184

on the other hand, invite a reading or interpretation that is exactly the opposite of what

Adorno intends, an ideological or monadological approach. Its construction presents a

false consciousness, which is analogous to the critique of listeners he brings out in the

introductory section, “False Musical Consciousness.” In that section, when writing about

how new music can alienate a population cut off from its productions, he warns:

Inversely, the content of what is all too familiar is so far removed from what hangs over people’s heads today that their own experience scarcely communicates any longer with that to which traditional music bears witness. When they think they comprehend the music, they only perceive an inert, empty husk of what they treasure as a possession and what was already lost in the moment in which it became a possession; an indifferent showpiece, neutralized and robbed of its own critical substance.36

This excerpt warns about approaching an object – new music in this case – with an

outdated frame of mind. Ideal listeners, or readers, would recognize the subtleties of a

work based on their prior knowledge, but would not judge the work based on it. It is not

far-fetched to assume Adorno felt the same way about the reception of PoNM. This is

perhaps because Adorno wanted his ideal-reader to be “trained”, to be able to

understand what appears to be binding statements as parts of thought models under

analysis. This is not to say that scholars have been lulled into a false philosophical

consciousness by Adorno’s text, but that other interpretations are always possible if

rooted in the experience of the object at hand. Adorno’s writing and thought is

constructed with paratactical aporias and misunderstandings, which Adorno himself

addressed, are common to this work.37

36Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 11-12.

37 “Misunderstandings”: Adorno’s Response to the Commentary on Philosophy of New Music (1950), in Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 165-70.

185

On one level Adorno presents two irreconcilable modes of analysis, a Hegelian

dialectic and negative dialectics. These two competing thought models ostensibly offer

a way to understand the object of analysis, new music. The abstract, philosophical

modes of analysis are manifested on another level, Adorno’s extremes of new music:

Schoenberg’s technique composition with twelve tones and Stravinsky’s neoclassicism.

The crux of Adorno’s analysis in PoNM is based on experiences with, and theories of

the music he analyses. Experience here, in light of ND, means the act of knowing a

work or works, which for Adorno is rooted in analysis, not preconceived judgments

based hearing a piece, but also the knowing the work in its socio-historical

transformations. He calls for experiences, throughout the text, to be the basis of

judgments. Thus it is important to form critiques based on experiences with the details

of the musical materials and the works. “If one were to review new music not

chronologically but in terms of its quality and in its full amplitude,” Adorno writes,

“including all its transitions and all its compromises, inevitably these extremes would be

reencountered insofar as one would be content with neither simple descriptions nor the

judgments of specialists.”38 While in sections of the book Adorno does address the

development of new music diachronically, he does so in the midst of synchronic

analysis.39

Negative dialectics provides a new way of thinking, a changed philosophy as

Adorno calls it, or multiple modes of thinking, thinking in thought models, that can get at

truths of a subject or object without divulging into the dogmatism that non-idealistic

38 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 7.

39 See “Schoenberg as Progress” particularly the sections where he discusses the “loneliness of style” or discusses the development from Expressionism to twelve-tone technique.

186

dialectics (Hegelian and “current” philosophy) had enabled. It can provide meaningful

analysis without dissolving into absolutes, or for that matter the perils of relativism. Or

as Adorno writes:

A changed philosophy [negative dialectics] itself would be a infinite in the sense of scorning solidification in a body of enumerable theorems. Its substance would lie in the diversity of objects that impinge upon it and of the objects it seeks, a diversity not wrought by any schema; to those objects, philosophy would truly give itself rather than use them as a mirror in which to reread itself, mistaking its own image for concretion.40

This approach, in the form of a changed philosophy, allows a diversity of interpretations

to any given object. But more than that, it works to understand the residues of concepts

as they go into their objects.41 Thus multiple elements, multiple concepts, and multiple

objects can be analyzed using thought models to understand experience.

Negative Dialectics operates on many levels in Philosophy of New Music:

structurally, as a mode to critique the Hegelian dialectic, as a method for analyzing

Schoenberg and Stravinsky’s music, and also to weave together Adorno’s discussion of music history and musical material. The main concept under examination in PoNM is progress in new music, but after the analysis presented previous chapters I want to take a deeper look how and why Adorno undertakes this examination. As just discussed

Adorno’s methodology includes a Hegelian approach, of which Adorno was very critical.

If he is calling for a dialectic method turned on its head – one that transforms the idea of a universal concept “into the self-unfolding of the concrete object and to resolve the social puzzle of its image by the powers of its own individuation – then we need to look

at the role negative dialects plays in PoNM.

40 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 13.

41 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 4-7.

187

While Adorno was writing this book in the 1940s in the United States, to simultaneously question the possibility of progressive new music all the while looking back to the flash-posts of what was once new to perform a critical analysis of the concept of progress in new music. And while Schoenberg and Stravinsky had large oeuvres, in the 1940s they were, more so than they had been in the 20s and 30s, heralded as standard bearers. Their compositional techniques and innovations had become ideological, particularly in university composition departments in the United

States. Adorno presents these composers as the extremes to offer a fuller understanding of the transformations of music. He writes:

The transformation that music has undergone during the past thirty years has scarcely been recognized to their full extent. It is not a matter of the much-invoked crisis, a chaotic fermentation whose end could be anticipated and that would bring order after the disorder. The thought of a future renewal, whether in the form of great and consummate artworks or of the blessed accord of music and society, simply denies what has happened and can be suppressed but not undone.42

At the beginning of the “Schoenberg and Progress” chapter he is asking the reader, and critics of music, to see what has happened to get the audience to the current day critiques. Adorno’s call to better understand the music and what it does in the thirty-year period from 1907-1947 is not a new idea; understanding the form and content of a work for itself is a consistent theme in Adorno’s writings on music. Adorno’s call to understand the details, the musical material, of Schoenberg and Stravinsky echoes a sentiment from Negative Dialectics, where Adorno warns of reducing thought to categories, or universals. He writes:

Philosophy serves to bear out an experience which Schoenberg noted in traditional musicology: one really learns from it only how a movement

42 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 29.

188

begins and ends, nothing about the movement itself and its course. Analogously, instead of reducing philosophy to categories, one would in a sense have to compose it first. Its course must be a ceaseless self- renewal, by its own strength as well as in friction with whatever standard it may have. The crux is what happens in it, not a thesis or a position – the texture, not the deductive or inductive course of one-track minds.43

Not coincidentally Adorno uses a version of this recollection in Philosophy of New

Music. He writes “Schoenberg pointed out that traditional theory of composition

basically treats only beginnings and conclusions and never the logic of the

continuation.”44 In Negative Dialectics as well as in Philosophy of New Music Adorno is

calling for a different analytical method to understand the concepts he is analyzing, to

understand the whole of the music or idea and not just its features.

As an abstract, complex idea, it may not initially be clear that negative dialectics

has its roots in music or link to PoNM explicitly. But as I have written in the previous

chapters Adorno did find the method in which Berg composed analogous to certain

aspects of negative dialectics, particularly the opposition of extremes that does not need

to result in a resolution to some sort of Absolute, or system. Linking negative dialectics

to truth content in music, Lucia Sziborsky reveals:

The content of [negative dialectics] outlines the horizon where music (art) is a particular place of the truth. The dialectical constitution of its [negative dialectics] contents is consistent with the dialectical constitution of the musical materials, which communicate the true content of the music.45

The extremes, as Adorno writes, are the places for truth content to be revealed. There

are several tenants of negative dialectics that I would like to discuss as they are related

43 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 33.

44 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 58-9.

45 Sziborsky, Adorno’s Musik-Philosophie, 163. Translation my own. Der Gehalt ihrer Aussage umreißt den Horizont, in dem Musik (Kunst) der besondere Ort der Wahrheit ist. Die dialektische Konstitution ihres Gehalts entspricht der dialektischen Konstitution des musikalischen Materials, das seinerseits den Wahrheitsgehalt der Musik vermittelt.

189

to PoNM. First, I will address ideas related to the methodology of the book, or the large-

scale construction of a philosophical analysis. Key to linking negative dialectics, as I

discussed in the previous chapter, to PoNM is to analyze Adorno’s critique of the

twelve-tone technique in light of negative dialectics.

“In the negative dialectic,” Brian O’Conner writes, “we are offered ways by which,

for instance, we might question ‘the given’ or recognize distortions of experience.”46

Questioning “the given” is crucial to PoNM. Adorno not only puts forward new music and

progress as givens to be critiqued but also the idea of the work. In PoNM, as much as in

Negative Dialectics Adorno is concerned with, understanding objects of analysis (the

music of Schoenberg for example) not just as emblematic of an idea, or notions of style,

but through immanent analysis of works.47

In the book the main categories Adorno builds up to are Schoenberg’s

composition with twelve tones and Stravinsky’s neoclassicism. Max Paddison analyzes

the extremes in PoNM as part of Adorno’s usual dialectical method, “the extremes are

even more sharply drawn than usual, are dealt with separately and at length in the two

main sections of the book, and, although each essay can be understood as proceeding

dialectically within itself, there is little genuine ‘dialectical interaction’ with the Stravinsky

essay to be found within the Schoenberg essay.”48 Paddison does not recognize

negative dialectics as the changing force for dialectics in this book, thus he critiques the

lack of dialectical interaction. His analysis focuses on PoNM as a logical extension of

46 Brian O’Conner, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004), ix

47 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 8.

48 Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 266.

190

Dialectic of Enlightenment, which is correct but does not see the possibility that Adorno

was examining what O’Conner called “givens”.

In PoNM “givens” are synonymous with generalizations of style or genre. Of this

Adorno writes:

The truth or untruth about Schoenberg and Stravinsky is to be encountered not in mere explication of categories such as atonality, twelve-tone technique, or neoclassicism, but only in the concrete crystallization of such categories in the structure of the music itself. What preconceived categories of style pay as the price of their accessibility is that they do not themselves show the complexion of the work but instead remain arbitrarily this side of the aesthetic configuration.49

To accomplish this, to really understand the transformations the music of these two composers goes through, Adorno works backwards historically to analyze how the music and society got to the place where Schoenberg and Stravinsky were ideological signposts for new music.

Particularly in the chapter on Schoenberg Adorno focuses on how musical ideas change throughout the progression of history, but also focuses on the historical tendency of musical material. The method of approaching the object of analysis to show how we got to the place or time where it was important is embedded in Negative

Dialectics. As Peter Thompson writes: “In ND there is no necessity for things to turn out a certain way, and the future-oriented teleology that Adorno claimed Hegel followed is replaced with retrospective teleology in which we can only se that what has happened to get us to where we are had to happen to get us there, but that there was no necessity for it to happen in that way.”50 Through the progression of sections in the Schoenberg

49 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 8.

50 Peter Thompson, “The Frankfurt School, part 2: Negative Dialectics,” The Guardian, April 1, 2013, accessed January 25, 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/01/negative-dialectics- frankfurt-school-adorno.

191

chapter Adorno weaves pieces of the music-historical narrative to understand

Schoenberg’s works but also why he was different, essentially proving why Schoenberg is one of the extremes.

One overarching example is how Adorno constructs the entire chapter, a philosophical analysis of the styles and musical materials that lead up to the twelve-tone technique. In his discussion about the “total organization of the elements” and “total development” Adorno is moving from an analysis of Expressionism to the idea of the twelve-tone technique. He uses the idea of development, or variation, as a link to understanding how Schoenberg got his technique. “At the start of the eighteenth century,” Adorno writes, “Development was a small part of the sonata. Once themes were stated and adequately established in the music, they were modified by subjective illumination and dynamism.”51 Establishing the prehistory, very briefly, Adorno moves on to Beethoven, who he uses throughout as a link to Schoenberg. Beethoven, like

Schoenberg and Stravinsky, is an example of an extreme in music history. Beethoven,

Adorno argues, changes the function of development – and this is important for

Schoenberg. He writes, “in Beethoven, development becomes the center of the form all together.”52 All of this is for Adorno to make the point that Beethoven transforms a commonly used technique elevates it to a new importance and he does so by giving an even older compositional means, variation, new life.

Although development is reminiscent of variation, Adorno argues, Beethoven transforms both compositional means. He writes:

51 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 46.

52 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 46.

192

In music before Beethoven, with hardly an exception, variation was counted among the most superficial of technical procedures, a mere masking of identically preserved thematic material. Now, however, conjoined with development, variation serves the production of universal, concrete, nonschematic relationships. Variation has been rendered dynamic.53

While Adorno embeds other critiques within his discussion of Beethoven and development, he sets up this musical signpost to then link development and variation to

Brahms, who links to Schoenberg. Ultimately he is creating an argument about how musical organization, through twelve-tone music, can become meaningful again after the innovations of Beethoven and Brahms had lost their meaning. As he writes: “The question that twelve-tone composition poses to the composer is not how musical meaning can be organized but rather how organization can become meaningful. What

Schoenberg has produced over the past twenty-five years are progressive attempts at an answer to this question.”54

If in “Schoenberg and Progress” Adorno uses his historical analysis to argue that

Schoenberg enlivens the most progressive techniques and ideas of the past, then in

“Stravinsky and the Restoration” he uses historical analysis to argue that Stravinsky does not further the techniques of the past. The methodology is similar in both chapters because Adorno needs to examine how both composers got to their given aesthetic stances. While Adorno’s judgment of Stravinsky’s music is well known, examining the methodology to understand Stravinsky as the pole in negative dialectics has not been undertaken in the literature. From the outset Adorno argues that Stravinsky’s attempt at restoration was present from his earliest works. “Stravinsky’s attempt at restoration,

53 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 46.

54 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 46

193

Adorno argues, “was undertaken in the urbane consciousness of the dubiousness and

charlatanism that shapes every aspect of the project, however much this may be

forgotten in the face of the highly polished scores that he now offers up.”55

Critique of the Twelve-Tone Technique

The notion of thinking in models extends to Adorno’s critique of any technique or approach which adapted into a system but his examination of the twelve-tone technique is the sharpest. Essential to negative dialectics is Adorno’s or critique of systems and ideology. In ND he writes:

To comprehend a thing itself, not just to fit and register it in its system of reference, is nothing but to perceive the individual moment in its immanent connection with others. Such anti-subjectivism lies under the crackling shell of absolute idealism; it stirs in the tendency to unseal current issues by resorting to the way they came to be. What the conception of system recalls, in reverse, is the coherence of the nonidentical, the very thing infringed by deductive systematics. Criticism of systems and asystematic thought are superficial as long as they cannot release the cohesive force which the idealistic systems had signed over to the transcendental subject.56

Throughout PoNM Adorno painstakingly argues that to understand a work or idea one

must understand it for itself and then determine if the musical material justifies the

explication of categories such as atonality, twelve-tone technique, or neoclassicism.57

As he progresses through “Schoenberg and Progress” Adorno provides the reader with

the musical-historical developments leading to the twelve-tone technique.

55 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 106.

56 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 25.

57 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 8.

194

For Adorno, Schoenberg was a profound historical figure, and the progression of

Schoenberg’s pieces prior to the twelve-tone pieces built and expanded upon

progressive ideas from the past, as previously discussed. As Arved Ashby writes,

[Adorno] understood Schoenberg as an articulation of history, a historical necessity whose legitimization was to be carried out in part by Berg’s music. Adorno saw Schoenberg as the prime force of the dialectic of progress in his century, and as the first to bring questions of methodology into that dialectic.58

Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique, in Adorno’s view, was linked to a dialectic of

progress, historical progress. Ashby goes on to claim, Adorno keeps Berg as an a

historic figure, defying and reversing temporal processes, implying “that Berg’s dialectic

was a self-contained process.”59

Adorno accuses Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music of stopping the dynamic

progress that his earlier music had created. Because each work or movement must be

derived from a basic shape or row it takes away the freedom of the note. “The reversal

of the musical dynamic into a static-dynamic of the musical structure (and not the mere

alternation of the level of intensity which over course continues to involve crescendo

and decrescendo),” Adorno writes, “clarifies the peculiarly rigid systematic character

that Schoenberg’s composition acquired in its late phase.”60 That the twelve-tone

technique had laws governing the progression of notes, for Adorno, affected all levels of

constructing the work from rhythm and harmony, to forms and counterpoint. He focuses

on the twelve-tone technique as a system because it stops the dynamic process that

58 Arved Ashby, “The Development of Berg’s Twelve Tone Aesthetic as seen in the “Lyric Suite” and Its Sources,” PhD Yale (1995): 26.

59 Ashby, “The Development of Berg’s Twelve Tone Aesthetic,” 26.

60 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 50.

195

Schoenberg himself had set in motion by reinvigorating the variation idea in his

expressionist phase. Adorno argues:

The static twelve-tone technique puts into practice the intolerance of the musical dynamic vis-à-vis the impotent return of the same. It makes the intolerance sacrosanct. The tone that recurs too soon, as well as the tone that is ‘free’—fortuitous vis-à-vis the whole—becomes taboo. A system of the domination of nature in music results.61

Not only does the systemization required by the twelve-tone rules stop the dynamic nature of music, it also limits what practitioners or keen observes see as correct. It, in a sense, stops the dialect by offering one system to move forward. Schoenberg as

Adorno argues, has made composition more difficult, not easier.62

In perhaps his most biting critique Adorno links the system of twelve-tone

composition back to superstition, which alludes to Hegel. He writes:

The arithmetical play of twelve-tone technique and the constraint that it exercises is reminiscent of astrology, and it is no mere fad that many of its adepts fall prey to it. As a system closed in itself and at the time self- opaque, twelve-tone rationality—in which the constellation of means is immediately hypostatized as the goal and law—verges on superstition.63

Closed systems refer to a Hegelian dialectic, which resolves its extremes to an

absolute. While, for Adorno, the twelve-tone technique offered a way out of tonality,

atonality, and expressionism, as a system it reverts back to “laws” that already have a

goal in mind. “Twelve-tone exactitude,” he writes, “which banishes all meaning as if it

were an illusion claiming to exist in itself in the musical object, treats music according to

the schema of fate.”64 Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique while essential to new music

61 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 52

62 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 50.

63 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 53.

64 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 54.

196

it did not offer the dialectic play of materials that Schoenberg’s earlier music did. Adorno

pointedly states:

In the five years prior to World War I, Schoenberg traversed the full compass of the musical material from through-constructed tonality to the beginnings of the row technique by way of free atonality. These five years are hardly matched by his twenty years practicing twelve-tone technique. They were more involved with control over the material than with the works whose totality the new technique was to have reconstructed, although there was no lack of great works. Just as twelve-tone technique seems to instruct composers, there is a didactic element peculiar to twelve-tone works.

What is lauded as progress, the advent of the twelve-tone technique, Adorno sees as

actually stifling the progress of musical material and constructed. It simultaneously

threw off an old system (tonality) while creating a new one.

While Adorno is critical of the twelve-tone technique becoming a system of

composition, or an ideological practice, he does find that it participates in the historical

dialectic. He writes:

Music, in thrall to the historical dialectic, participates in this dialectic. Twelve-tone technique is truly its fate. It subjugates music by setting it free. The subject rules over the music by means of a rational system in order to this rational system itself. Just as in twelve-tone technique—in the composition proper—the productivity of the variation is forced back into the material so it turns out for the freedom of the composer in general.65

Here Adorno seems to reverse his argument, but prior to this excerpt, he was implying

the dangers of the twelve-tone technique becoming an ideology, becoming dogmatic. It

is in this section where Adorno takes us out of an argument based in the heyday of new

twelve-tone pieces by Schoenberg, and places us in his time (placing us back into

reason for constructing this book – understanding perceptions of new music in the 40s).

He writes of turning the technique into a system as follows:

65 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 54.

197

What once the attentive ear discovered is distorted into a trumped-up system in which the criteria of compositional right and wrong are to be abstractly verified. This explains the readiness of so many young musicians—specifically in the United States, where the sustaining experiences of twelve-tone technique are wanting—to write in the “twelve- tone system” and their elation at the invention of a surrogate for tonality, as if freedom were aesthetically intolerable and needed to be furtively replaced by a new compliancy.66

Schoenberg may not have intended the precompositional twelve-tone technique to become a method or school of composing, it did, and Adorno presented a critique of the technique as an ideology. Stravinsky’s neoclassicism is of course the antithesis to

Schoenberg’s technique, not an alternative, or way out of the system.

Adorno does offer an alternative to the closed-system, or twelve-tone as an ideological method, and it is to allow freedom back into the work. He writes:

If [composition] is to hope to make it through the winter, music must emancipate itself as well from the twelve-tone technique. This emancipation, however, is not to be accomplished by a return to the irrationality that preceded it and that is now thwarted at every turn by the postulates of exact composition that twelve-tone technique itself cultivated; rather, it is to be accomplished through the absorption of twelve-tone technique by free composition and of its rules by the critical early. Only from twelve-tone technique can music learn to remain master of itself, but only if it does not become its slave.67

This is reminiscent of the negative dodecaphony he explained to Berg in the letter from

1925. Berg, unsurprisingly, serves as an example of freeing twelve-tone technique from its systemization – he does not allow music to become slave to the technique. He uses

Berg to contrast Schoenberg and Webern’s exactitude. “Berg,” Adorno writes, “wanted to break the spell of twelve-tone technique by invoking it.”68 While Adorno does criticize

66 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 55.

67 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 89.

68 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 85.

198

Berg for not being about to renounce anything, particularly music of the past, he sees

Berg’s music as that blending of the twelve-tone technique and free composition.

The work [Lulu] avails itself of twelve-tone technique. But what is even more true of it than of any of Berg’s works since the Lyric Suite is that the entire effort aims at making the twelve-tone technique unnoticeable. It is precisely the happiest sections of Lulu that are plainly thought out in terms of dominant functions and chromatic steps. The essential severity of twelve-tone construction is unrecognizably mollified. Serial technique is itself scarcely recognizable except at those moments when Berg’s insatiability finds that it does not dispose over the infinite store of notes it would need. The rigidity of the system now makes itself felt only in such restrictions and has otherwise been entirely surmounted.69

Berg, as Adorno will go on to write, does not employ the technique as a means to a serial end. But as a tool for his compositions, one among many, Berg refuses to acknowledge that twelve-tone technique excludes all other tools. By offering a way forward, out of the closed system of rigid twelve-tone practice, Adorno offers an open- idea, akin to his open dialectics. He does not argue that composition that allows twelve- tone techniques is the answer, rather it is a possibility to to keep the dialectic from shutting down.

While I can only highlight a few examples of traits of negative dialectics, which might simplify Adorno’s layered and complex analysis in the book, it is important to see that even in one example, Adorno’s discussion of development and variation, history is not just the simple unfolding of preordained ideas. For Adorno, in music, “remnants of the past surpass the achieved level of technique.”70 Understanding the musical,

historical, social, and philosophical background of Schoenberg and Stravinsky’s music

69 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 84

70 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 46.

199

cannot offer a way forward because the two extremes are not reconcilable in Adorno’s

mode of analysis.

By the end of his career Adorno was an “anti-system” thinker. He sets out as

much in his magnum opus, Negative Dialectics, but this trait is evident in many other

writings and can be seen, as earlier argued, developing in his earliest essays, which are

on music. In his review article, “Adorno,” James Finlayson analyzes Adorno’s anti-

systematic approach to philosophical pursuits, he writes:

This was not just a matter of philosophical inclination. He came up with various justifications for why philosophy qua critical theory should resist its assimilation to theory and eschew formal modes of argumentation. Some of these justifications are more compelling than others, but all of them flow from his deep convictions: that the way modern subjects think and act is unavoidably influenced and determined by the patterns of constitution and self-constitution of the social world (in ways that are complex and obscure); that the social world is constituted by the ways in which modern subjects think and act; and, of course, that 20th Century Western capitalist society is deeply awry and ought to be otherwise.71

Finlayson’s point in this section, that the subject of inquiry is influenced by both its nature, materials, and the outside world, which has a reciprocal relationship to then the social world, can be directly related to Adorno’s writings on music, and particularly those on Berg.

I ultimately argue that, what Adorno sets out to do in Philosophy of New Music is to establish a new mode of analysis for comprehending a thing or idea that is seemingly well known. It is no coincidence that this is what he does throughout his writings on

Berg. At once he asks the reader to reconsider how and why Schoenberg and

Stravinsky have reached an ideological status. But he also is asking the reader to

71 James Gordon Finlayson, “Adorno,” review of Adorno, by Brian O’Connor, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, February 8, 2013, http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/41463-adorno/.

200

question the method of knowing, a Hegelian dialectic, that supports and idea becoming

ideological. He is questioning what is known and how they want to know it. In Negative

Dialectics he writes:

Linking this notion to PoNM that as Adorno argues for understanding a work in and of

itself all the while expanding the systems of reference. To understand Schoenberg and

Stravinsky as extremes, he examines works all the while providing social and historical

analysis and criticism of the genres and styles commonly attributed to the composers.

Adorno establishes the imperative need for a new mode of criticism to

adequately understand the role of new music in a changing society. What he

establishes is the need for negative dialectics, and puts it into practice in the later

chapters. The purpose of extremes in PoNM is, as Adorno writes, to understand new

music’s full amplitude. The idea is crucial to establishing negative dialectics because it

is a way out of a systematic mode of analysis or reception, or as Adorno calls it, a way

out of judging a work based on “preconceived categories of style.”73 Adorno offers no

synthesis, no way forward in this book, full of criticism of both Stravinsky and

Schoenberg, because the reconciliation of these two extremes is left to the reader.

72 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 25.

73 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 8.

201

CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSIONS

To comprehend a thing itself, not just to fit and register it in its system of reference, is nothing but to perceive the individual moment in its immanent connection with others. —Theodor W. Adorno Negative Dialectics 1

Adorno’s conceptual and musical understanding of Berg’s compositional language are profound, not only for the links to larger philosophical concepts, but he continually interrogates the dialectic interplay in Berg’s music to understand it in and of history. Adorno’s study with Berg, understanding of Berg’s approaches to compositional techniques, and understanding of how Berg’s conception of new music relates to history and philosophy led me to reconsider two of the most fundamental concepts to Adorno’s writings on music: new music and composition with twelve tones. It is most common in the secondary literature to tie Adorno’s conceptions of new music and composition with twelve tones to Arnold Schoenberg because he was a pillar of PoNM. While

Schoenberg is one factor informing these concepts, Adorno’s study with Berg influenced the depth and breadth of Adorno’s concepts. By analyzing the relationship of Berg’s music to Adorno’s thought I am disassociating Adorno from Schoenberg, in some senses. Schoenberg is absolutely pivotal to Adorno’s musical aesthetics, but as a significant historical figure while Berg influenced the makeup of his thought models.

Adorno’s understanding of twelve-tone music as based on practical engagement with Berg’s music evidenced in his own compositions and writings complicates our understanding of Adorno’s position on the subject. The early introduction of negative

1 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 25.

202

dialectics as a tool to understand Berg’s works and Adorno’s own compositional techniques prompts the question: Did Adorno find that elements of Berg’s works helped him to codify his thought on negative dialectics? Yes. Negative and positive dodecaphony, a prototype of negative dialectics, gave Adorno a philosophical framework to express what he understood about Berg’s music in a music analytical sense. Berg’s evocations of the past were not ad hoc insertions but deliberate workings- out of the twelve-tone techniques as an overarching system that incorporates tonality and atonality, rather than replacing them.

Throughout this dissertation I approached Adorno’s ideas differently than is common in the secondary literature. It is common to address Adorno’s concepts, thoughts, and aesthetics with the perspective that Adorno’s ideas are “fully formed” from an early age; I, however, see this differently. Ideas like negative dialectics or Adorno’s concept of twelve-tone music developed in stages throughout his life. It is possible to address this development in Adorno’s thought through a critical, historiographical narrative, considering all of the resources, not just giving preference to the collected works. Examining archival resources gives the scholarly community to better understand the development of Adorno’s thought. Finding early instances of Adorno’s

Berg monograph is significant because we can now see the significance of Berg in

Adorno’s lifelong work, and the import it plays on conceptions of music, aesthetics, and modernism.

After finding and analyzing the prototype of negative dialectics in Adorno’s letter to Berg, seeing that idea develop throughout his writings on Berg among others, I believed it necessary to call into question the methodology of Philosophy of New Music.

203

Was PoNM really governed by a Hegelian dialectic as has been commonly accepted?

After all, Berg is a specter throughout the book, often used as an example of what new music can do, if not mired by allegiance to a compositional system. Thus, Chapter Five reassess one of the most significant works in musicology. If it is organized by negative dialectics what does this imply for our reading of the book and moving forward, away from the book? I ultimately argue that in Philosophy of New Music, through negative dialectics, Adorno establishes a new mode of analysis for comprehending that is seemingly well known. It is no coincidence that he approaches Berg in a similar manner.

In PoNM he at once asks the reader to reconsider how and why Schoenberg and

Stravinsky have reached an ideological status. But he also is asking the reader to question the method of knowing, a Hegelian dialectic, that supports and idea becoming ideological. He is questioning what is known and how they want to know it.

Adorno established a new mode of criticism to adequately understand the role of new music in a changing society. Negative dialectics is one such methodology, and he puts it into practice in the argument structure of PoNM. The purpose of extremes in

PoNM is, as Adorno writes, to understand new music’s full amplitude. The idea is crucial to establishing negative dialectics because, he writes: “to comprehend a thing itself, not just to fit and register it in its system of reference, is nothing but to perceive the individual moment in its immanent connection with others. 2 Negative dialectics as applied to musical analysis and critique is a way out of a systematic mode of analysis or reception, or as Adorno calls it, a way out of judging a work based on “preconceived

2 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 25.

204

categories of style.”3 Adorno offers no synthesis, no way forward in PoNM, full of

criticism of both Stravinsky and Schoenberg, because the reconciliation of these two

extremes is left to the reader.

The notion that the reader is left to make sense of the extremes has led to

misinterpretations, or as Adorno called them “misunderstandings,” of PoNM.

Misunderstandings”, Adorno’s 1950 response to commentary on PoNM by Watler Harth

among others.4 As is well known the composers of the Darmstadt notoriously also had

misunderstandings; they read what they needed from the book – what they interpreted

the book to say was that “Schoenberg’s ‘method’ was the way forward.”5 It is precisely

because the synthesis between the two parts “Schoenberg and Progress” and

“Stravinsky and Restoration.” When Schoenberg was revealed, in this reading, to be

victorious over Stravinsky, the system he stands in for cannot fail. Serialism in the

1950s, as different from the idea of composition with twelve tones as a technique, “had

spread like a religious doctrine and had put many young composers in a state of

euphoria. They were fascinated by the idea that all parameters of a musical work of art

could be fixed by a series in advance.”6 With these misinterpretations of PoNM by the

Darmstadt composers as well as the growth and development of serialism as an

aesthetic and compositional standard a new binary occurred.

3 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 8.

4 Theodor Adorno, “Misunderstandings,” in Philosophy of New Music, 165-168.

5 Daniel Chua, “Drifting: The Dialectics of Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music,” in Apparitions: New Perspectives on Adorno and Twentieth Century Music, Berthold Hoeckner ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 2.

6 Constantin Floros, Györgi Ligeti: Beyond Avant-garde and Postmodernism, Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch trans. (Frankfurt: PL Academic Research, 2014), 77.

205

One way to extend the dialectical analysis put forth in PoNM is to examine the

polarization of musical ideals in the post-World War II era, particularly those of the

Darmstadt aesthetic circles surrounding Pierre Boulez and Györgi Ligeti. Based on my

analysis of Adorno’s application of negative dialectics to music criticism I further argue

that the composers around Boulez and Messiaen, promoting integral serialism, are

representative of Adorno’s use of the Hegelian dialectic while Ligeti is representative of

negative dialectics in music. The composers propelling integral serialism were, in

Adorno’s terms, promoting an ideological aesthetic that promoted rigor and orthodoxy to

the system of composing. While Ligeti most notably opposed compositional orthodoxy.

As Constantin Floros writes,

It is characteristic of Ligeti that he did not commit himself to any fixed method. While, in composing, he set out from the rules that he himself devised for the purpose, he frequently deviated from them. He was a decided opponent of all orthodoxy, all rigorism. He occasionally made sue of characteristic twelve-tone rows, but he never composed a single strict twelve-tone music.7

The polarization of sides in the Darmstadt era is analogous to the arguments Adorno

makes with Negative Dialectics and Philosophy of New Music. Boulez’s strident need for development of systemization would, if following Adorno’s arguments be akin to ideology which does not allow a real path forward to compositional innovation and development. While Ligeti’s need for compositional openness, and experimentation with styles and ideas is analogous to Berg’s compositional openness, which Adorno relates to negative dialectics. Both Ligeti and Berg allowed a negative synthesis of vast techniques and approaches without being beholden to compositional orthodoxy.

7 Floros, Györgi Ligeti, 37.

206

This dissertation first sheds light on the historical relationship between Adorno

and Berg, then shows the importance of this relationship by exposing the how Berg’s

compositional language informed Adorno’s philosophical thought and his most important

musical concepts. That knowledge then led me to show how negative dialectics played

an important role in the conception of not only Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link

but also Philosophy of New Music. While this research will be expanded as I have just

shown we can take Adorno’s dialectical model in Philosophy of New Music and use it to

analyze the impact in made on Darmstadt composers’. But there is also one more way

to use the knowledge this dissertation has brought to light.

Future research based on this topic will delve into how Adorno, through Negative

Dialectics the book and the concept, inadvertently sets up the concept or idea of

Postmodernity in musical composition. While definitions of postmodernism in music

vary, Andrew Dell’Antoino writes: “In stylistic terms, some have characterized

postmodernism as prioritizing discontinuity and rupture over ideals of logic and

completeness.”8 Negative dialectics can never reach synthesis, and “it ceaselessly

undermines all the available positivities until it has only its own destructive energy to

promote.”9 While Adorno favored logic, and completeness of pieces the idea of negative

dialectics which can leave us with the impossibility of concluding anything at all can

allow for a compositional aesthetic which shirks the priorities of past compositional rules

and ideologies. Postmodernism, however difficult to define stylistically, promotes anti-

ideological combination of musical techniques, styles, and materials.

8 Andrew Dell’Antonio, "Postmodernism," in Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press), accessed July 6, 2016, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/A2259137.

9 Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2010), 56.

207

From learning compositional techniques to making analogies between

composition and philosophy Theodor Adorno’s thought was beholden to what he

learned from Alban Berg. Adorno translated compositional techniques to philosophical

models that affected his writings and conceptions. There is more to be learned and

analyzed from this project. “Instead of asking whether [Berg] really integrated everything

he planned to integrate,” Adorno states, “it would be more productive to ask what

features were hidden in the work by his mythical cunning.”10 Turning this phrase around,

asking what features were hidden in Adorno’s work will yield a more nuanced

understanding of the often impenetrable thinker.

10 Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 18.

208

LIST OF REFERENCES

Autograph Sources1 Österreichische National Bibliotek, Vienna F 21 Berg 2493 — Theodor W. Adorno, Red Notebook, “Zur Monographie Alban Berg”

F 21 Berg 2494 — Theodor W. Adorno, Typed Draft of “Drei Orchesterstucke” Essay; 12 leaves

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno Archive (TWAA), Berlin/Frankfurt TWAA Ts 17192-17237 — 1968, edited Kontrolexemplar of Berg. Der meister des kleinsten Übergangs

TWAA Ts 17246-17293 — 1968 (January), edited draft of monograph titled Berg eine Retrospektive

TWAA Ts 17640-17749 — 1968 (July), edited draft of monograph titled Berg eine Retrospektive

TWAA Ts 30009-21 — 1954-55, edited draft of “Ton” chapter from Berg eine Retrospektive

Musical Scores Adorno, Theodor W. Kompositionen bands 1 and 2. Edited by Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn. Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1980.

———. Kompositionen band 3. Edited by Maria Luisa Lopez-Vito and Ulrich Krämer. Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 2007.

Berg, Alban. Kammerkonzert für Klavier und Geige mit Dreizehn Bläsern. Vienna: Universal Edition, 1925.

———. Lyric Suite für Streichquartett. Vienna: Universal Edition, 2005.

———. “Schließe mir die Augen beide.” Vienna: Universal Edition, 1955.

Works by Adorno Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. [1970; GS, vol 7.]

1 Adapted from Rosemary Hilmar, Katalog der Musikhandschriften, Schriften und Studien Alban Bergs im Fond Alban Berg und der weiteren Handschriften Quellen im Besitz der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek (Alban Berg Studien I) (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1981).

209

———. “Alban Berg.” In Sound Figures, translated by Rodney Livingstone, pp. 69-79. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. [1959; GS, vol. 16, 85-96.]

———. Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link. Translated by Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. [1968; GS, vol. 13, 321-494.]

———. “Alban Berg: Zur Uraufführung des Wozzeck.” [1925; GS, vol. 18, 456-64.]

———. “Arnold Schoenberg, 1874-1951.” In Prisms, pp. 133-46. [1953; GS, vol. 10.1, 152-80.]

———. Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

———. “Berg and Webern—Schoenberg’s Heirs.” Modern Music 8, no. 2 (January/February 1931): 29-38. [1930; GS, vol. 18, 446-55.]

———. “Berg’s Discoveries in Compositional Technique.” QF, pp. 179-200. [1961; GS, vol. 16, 413-32.]

———. “Bourgeois Opera.” SF, pp. 15-28. [1955; GS, vol. 16, 24-39.]

———. The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940 [of Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin]. Edited by Henri Lonitz. Translated by Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

———. Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. [1963, 1969; GS, vol. 10.2, 455-799.]

———. “The Dialectical Composer.” In Essays on Music, 496-500. Translated by Susan Gillespie. [1934; GS, vol. 17, 253-91.]

———. Essays on Music. Selected, with introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard Leppert. Translated by Susan H. Gillespie. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

———. “Expressionism and Artistic Truthfulness: Toward a Critique of Recent Literature,” In Notes to Literature vol. 2., 257-59. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.

———. In Search of Wagner. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso, 1984. [1952; GS, vol. 13, 7-148.]

210

———. Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008.

———. Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. [1960; GS, vol. 13, 149-319.]

———. Metaphysics: Concept and Problem. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.

———. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. London: Verso, 1978. [1951; GS, vol. 4.]

———. “Motifs.” In Quasi una Fantasia. 9-36. [1927-37, 1951; GS, vol. 16, 259-83.]

———. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 2007.

———. Night Music: Essays on Music 1928–1962. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Wieland Hoban. London: Seagull Books, 2009.

———. Notes to Literature volume 2. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.

———. “On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music.” In Essays on Music, 135-61. Translated by Susan Gillespie. [1952; GS, vol. 18, 149-76.]

———. “On the Problem of Musical Analysis.” Translated by Max Paddison. Music Analysis 1, no. 2 (June 1982): 169-187.

———. “The Opera Wozzeck.” In Essays on Music, pp. 619-26. Translated by Susan Gillespie. [1929; GS, vol. 18, 472-79.]

———. Philosophy of New Music. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. [1949; GS, vol. 12.]

———. Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso, 1998. [1963; GS vol. 16, 249-540.]

———. Sound Figures. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. [1959; GS, vol. 16, 7-248.]

———. “Stravinsky: A Dialectical Portrait.” In Quasi una Fantasia, pp. 145-75. [1962; GS, vol. 16, 382-409.]

———. In Search of Wagner. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso, 2005. [1937/8, 1952; GS, vol. 13, 7-148.]

211

———. “Why is New Art So Hard to Understand.” In Essays on Music, 127-34. Translated by Susan Gillespie. [1931; GS, vol. 10.2, 459-73.]

Adorno, Theodor W. and Alban Berg. Correspondence 1925–1935. Edited by Henri Lonitz. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005.

Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

All Other Sources Agawu, Kofi. “What Adorno Makes Possible for Music Analysis.” 19th-Century Music 29 (2005): 49-55.

Ashby, Arved. “The Development of Berg’s Twelve-Tone Aesthetic as Seen in the Lyric Suite and Its Sources.” PhD diss., Yale University, 1995.

———. "Of ‘Modell-Typen’ and ‘Reihenformen’: Berg, Schoenberg, F. H. Klein, and the Concept of Row Derivation." Journal of the American Musicological Society 48, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 67-105.

———. Review of Theodor Adorno and Alban Berg: Correspondence 1925-1935. Twentieth-Century Music 5, no. 1 (2008): 135-39.

Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. London: Verso, 1998.

Berg, Alban. Pro Mundo – Pro Domo: The Writings of Alban Berg. Edited by Bryan R. Simms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Berg, Alban and Arnold Schoenberg. The Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence. Edited by Juliane Brand, Christopher Hailey, and Donald Harris. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987.

Berman, Russell A. Modern Culture and Critical Theory: Art, Politics, and the Legacy of the Frankfurt School. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

Bernstein, J.M. “Negative Dialectics as Fate: Adorno and Hegel.” In The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, edited by Tom Huhn, 19-50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Blumenfeld, Harold. “Ad Vocem Adorno.” The Musical Quarterly 75, 4 (Winter 1991): 263-84.

212

Boulez, Pierre. Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship. Translated by Stephen Walsh. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1991.

Brunkhorst, Hauke. “Theodor W. Adorno: Aesthetic Constructivism and a Negative Ethic of the Non-Forfeited Life.” Translated by James Swindal. In The Handbook of Critical Theory, edited David M. Rasmussen, 305-326. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996.

Buck-Morss, Susan. The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute. New York: Free Press, 1977.

Carner, Mosco. Alban Berg: The Man, The Work. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983.

Chua, Daniel. “Drifting: The Dialectics of Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music.” In Apparitions: New Perspectives on Adorno and Twentieth-Century Music, edited by Berthold Hoeckner, 1-17. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Claussen, Detlev. Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Cook, Deborah. “Adorno, Ideology, and Ideology Critique.” Philosophy Social Criticism 27 (2001): 1-20.

Cook, Deborah, ed. Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts. Stocksfield, UK: Acumen, 2008.

Covach, John. “Twelve-tone Theory.” In The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, edited by Thomas Christensen, 603-27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Dahlhaus, Carl. “Das Problem der ‘höheren Kritik’” Adornos Polemic gegen Stravinsky.” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 148/5 (1987): 9-15.

Dahlhaus, Carl. Schoenberg and the New Music: Essays by Carl Dahlhaus. Translated by Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Dennis, Christopher J. Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998. dos Santos, Silvio J. Narratives of Identity in Alban Berg’s “Lulu.” Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2014.

Feher, Ferenc. “Negative Philosophy of Music—Positive Results.” Translated by Zoltan Feher. New German Critique 4 (Winter 1975): 99-111.

213

Finlayson, James Gordon. “Adorno.” Review of Adorno, by Brian O’Connor. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, February 8, 2013. http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/41463- adorno/.

Floros, Constantin. Györgi Ligeti: Beyond Avant-garde and Postmodernism. Translated by Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch. Frankfurt am Main: PL Academic Research, 2014.

Forte, Allen. “Alban Berg’s Piano Sonata Opus 1: A Landmark in Early Twentieth- Century Avant-Garde Music.” Music Analysis 26/i-ii (2007): 15-24.

Geuss, Raymond. “Berg and Adorno.” In The Cambridge Companion to Berg, edited by Anthony Pople, 38-50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Goehr, Lydia. "Adorno, Schoenberg, and the Totentanz der Prinzipien –in Thirteen Steps." Journal of the American Musicological Society 56, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 595- 636.

Hailey, Christopher. “Defining Home: Berg’s Life on the Periphery.” In The Cambridge Companion to Berg, edited by Anthony Pople, 5-23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Hall, Patricia. “Compositional Process in Wozzeck and Lulu: A Glimpse of Berg’s Atonal Method.” In The Cambridge Companion to Berg, edited by Anthony Pople, 180- 188. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

———. A View of Berg’s Lulu through the Autograph Sources. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Headlam, David. The Music of Alban Berg. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Hegel, G.W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.

———. Phenomenology of Mind. Translated by J. B. Baillie. New York: Dover, 2003.

Hermand, Jost and Gerhard Richter eds. Sound Figures of Modernity: German Music and Philosophy. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.

Huhn, Tom. The Cambridge Companion to Adorno. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Hufner, Martin. Adorno und die Zwölftontechnik. Regensburg, Germany: ConBrio Verlagsgesellschaft, 1996.

Jameson, Fredric. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso, 2010.

214

Jantzi, John J. “A Post-Tonal Analysis and Critical Commentary on Theodor Adorno’s Vier Lieder nach Gedichten von Stefan George für Singstimme und Klavier, Op. 7.” PhD diss., University of Oregon, 2002.

Jarman, Douglas. The Music of Alban Berg. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.

Jarvis, Simon. Adorno: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998.

Jay, Martin. Adorno. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Karnes, Kevin. A Kingdom Not of This World: Wagner, the Arts, and Utopian Visions in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Koch, Gerhard R. Theodor W. Adorno: Philosoph, Musiker, pessimistischer Aufklärer. Frankfurt: Societäts Verlag, 2013.

Lansky, Paul, et. Al. “Twelve-note compositions.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed January 27, 2016, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/44582.

Leibowitz, René. “Der Komponist Theodor W. Adorno.” In Zeugnisse: Theodor W. Adorno zum 60. Geburtstag, edited by Max Horkheimer. Frankfurt/Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1963.

———. Schoenberg and His School: The Contemporary Stage of the Language of Music. Translated by Dika Newlin. New York: Philosophical Library, 1949.

Levin, Walter. “Adorno’s Zwei Stücke für Streichquartett op. 2.” Musik Konzepte: Theodor W. Adorno Der Komponist 63/64, 1989.

Mooney, Kevin. “A Night at the Opera: Benjamin, Adorno, and the Premiere of Wozzeck.” Paper presented at Music, Marxism, and the Frankfurt School, Dublin, IE, July 2-4, 2014.

Müller-Doohm, Stefan. Adorno: A Biography. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005.

Paddison, Max. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

———. Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture: Essays on Critical Theory and Music. London: Kahn & Averill, 2009.

215

Perle, George. Style and Idea in the ‘Lyric Suite’ of Alban Berg, 2nd edition. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2001.

Redlich, Hans. Alban Berg: The Man and His Music. New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1957.

Reich, Willi. Alban Berg: Mit Bergs eigenen Schriften und Beiträgen von Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno und Ernst Křenek. Vienna: H. Reichner Verlag, 1937.

Rose, Gillian. The Melancholy Science. London: Macmillan, 1978. Schoenberg, Arnold. Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg. Edited by Leonard Stein. Translated by Leo Black. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.

Spitzer, Michael. Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

Steinert, Heinz. Adorno in Wien: Über die (Un-)Möglichkeit von Kunst, Kultur, und Befreiung. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2003.

Stone, Alison. “Adorno and Logic.” In Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts, edited by Deborah Cook, 47-62. Stocksfield, UK: Acumen Press, 2008.

Subotnik, Rose Rosengard. Developing Variations: Style and Idea in Western Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

Sziborsky, Lucia. “Adorno.” In Music in German Philosophy: An Introduction, edited by Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and Oliver Fürbeth, translated by Susan Gillespie, 233- 52. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

———. Adornos Musik-Philosophie: Genese, Konstitution, Pädagogische Perspektiven. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1979.

Theodor W. Adorno Archiv ed. Adorno: Eine Bildmonographie. Edited by Gabriele Ewenz, Christoph Gödde, Henri Lonitz, and Michael Schwarz. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003.

Thompson, Peter. “The Frankfurt School, part 2: Negative Dialectics.” The Guardian, April 1, 2013. Accessed January 25, 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/01/negative-dialectics- frankfurt-school-adorno

Witkin, Robert W. Adorno on Music. London: Routledge, 1998.

216

Zuidervaart, Lambert. "Theodor W. Adorno." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Last modified Winter 2015. Accessed 10 January 2016. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/entries/adorno/

217

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Morgan Rich received her Ph.D. from the University of Florida in August 2016, as

well as a master’s degree in historical musicology from Bowling Green State University,

and a bachelor’s degree in music history and literature from Indiana State University.

She has presented her research on Adorno and Berg at national and international

conferences to include the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, the

German Studies Association, the Austrian Studies Association, and the International

Conference of Europeanists. Her reviews of CDs and DVDs appear in MLA Notes and the Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music.

218