Berg, der Meister des kleinsten Ubergangs

by Theodor W. Adorno

German

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Biography

177 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. Although less well known among anglophone philosophers than his contemporary Hans-Georg Gadamer, Adorno had even greater influence on scholars and intellectuals in postwar Germany. In the 1960s he was the most prominent challenger to both Sir Karl Popper's philosophy of science and Martin Heidegger's philosophy of existence. Jürgen Habermas, Germany's foremost social philosopher after 1970, was Adorno's student and assistant. The scope of Adorno's influence stems from the interdisciplinary character of his research and of the Frankfurt School to which he belonged. It also stems from the thoroughness with which he examined Western philosophical traditions, especially from Kant onward, and the radicalness to his critique of contemporary Western society. He was a seminal social philosopher and a leading member of the first generation of Critical Theory.

Unreliable translations hampered the initial reception of Adorno's published work in English speaking countries. Since the 1990s, however, better translations have appeared, along with newly translated lectures and other posthumous works that are still being published. These materials not only facilitate an emerging assessment of his work in epistemology and ethics but also strengthen an already advanced reception of his work in aesthetics and cultural theory.

Reviews

[Colie! · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was by far the most accessible thing I ever read by Adorno. So if you're all about him, it's an absolute must. And if you've read him and are all infuriated by how impossible he is to understand, then it's even MORE of a must. It's beautifully written, incredibly interesting, and totally digestible (in a nonculinary way.) You'll also get really lovey about Berg. Adorno writes from such a clear place of profound respect that you find yourself loving Berg with him, even when you don't know the first thing about music theory. That's why, even though I'm not a german philosophy meister, nor a music major, this is still in my top favorites of all books, fiction and non. For I am a major dork, but I love it.

[Michal Lipták · Rating 4 out of 5]

Teddy is becoming a bit soft with the older age, doesn't he? He always loved Berg, his teacher, but in Philosophy of New Music the Viennese triumvirate is more straightforwardly distinguished: Webern is the objective. most consequent one, firm believer in the row; Berg is the subjective, the expressive one, free with his use of the row, with remnants of Romanticisim; and Schönberg dialectically embodies the clash of objective and subjective, the angst of expression against the crumbling wall, the catastrophic failure of music and therefore the truth.

Here, Adorno's preference seems to shift towards Berg. That is because, in the post-War avant-garde, Webern gave birth to integral serialism whose claim to total objective organization and rationality scared Adorno, and it is clearly (though predictably) criticised in his essay on aging of new music. That seems to make Webern suspicious, but by association also Schönberg, the father of the idea, while Berg's "untidiness" comes through as possible sign of musique informelle which Adorno offered - ambiguously and shapelessly - against the aged new music. In musicological analyses of particular Berg's works, Adorno does point to meticulous organization in Berg that is on par with Schönberg and Webern (a point which even young Boulez, despite overarching intention to cast Berg as a reactionary of the bunch, must have conceded in his essays) - but it's clear that it's in those muddy points of deviation where something that Adorno even straightforwardly calls "beauty" lies. It is also at points that Adorno's musicological analysis crumbles down that his writing is most revealing.

But as others have pointed out, the essays are also touchingly personal, with Adorno's friendly admiration shining through. In this regard, they are, in a way, sentimental. Adorno ends the Reminiscence essay with this sentence:

[Berg] successfully avoided becoming an adult without remaining infantile.

There is something which resonates in this sentence with the text itself. Adorno is not returning to childhood, but there's something in the essays of the sense of returning to childhood. Adorno surely did become an adult at some point in life, but his mature text seem somehow to be about undoing being adult, breaking free of any prescriptions, even one's dictated by one's own theory. (One can also call it "inconsistency", but that would be mean, wouldn't it? After all, our lives and œuvre's are about making inconsistency work.)

PS: The remarks on jazz in 1968 essay on Der Wein are really unacceptable at this point:

Jazz, a phantasmagoria of modernity, is illusory [scheinhtift]: counterfeit freedom. Musically this illusion is a rhythmic one: the law of the pseudo-meter [Scheintakte]. All jazz obeys this law in a literal sense. The technical idea behind jazz could be thus defined: to handle a sustained basic meter in such a way that it appears to be constituted from differing meters without yielding anything of its rigid authority.

This was not true even in 1930s. But writing this in 1968, with free jazz of Coltrane or Coleman, with Cecil Taylor already around, with emerging European free jazz, etc. is simply ignorance. To say that jazz's purpose is to smuggle in the dictatorship of the beat is ignorant both as musical analysis (rhythmically the avant-garde jazz pieces are irreducible to beat) and as sociological analysis, overlooking the anguish and hope which in jazz is more than capable reaching the depths of atonal classical music.

PPS: In the lats essay on Lulu, Adorno makes powerful case for the completion of the third Act, convincingly arguing against faux-pious calls for leaving the work a torso, as Fate desired it. Alas, Adorno himself didn't live to see it - we know that Cerha's masterful completion in 1979 removed all the doubts about whether it was necessary undertaking; and we now have Lulu in completed form. And yet, while it's sad Adorno didn't live to see it, there's something optimistic in how Lulu becomes part of common project, how Adorno's essays become part of greater project - and maybe we all are contributing to greater common project.

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the best Adorno book I've read. In the end, it's the texts on music rather than the philosophy or criticism I find most compelling of his works, and this one in particular was the most lucid, giving insight into some complex pieces.

[Héctor · Rating 5 out of 5]

ALBAN BERG

Su particular fijación con el pasado, con el mundo de los padres, tal vez incluso su sumisión a Schönberg, que llegaba hasta el temor -nos contó en cierta ocasión que incluso siendo ya adultos, él y Webern seguían dialogando siempre con Schönberg en tono interrogante- trae al pensamiento con fatal automatismo el concepto de neurosis. Es cierto que Berg se sentía neurótico y también que sabía lo suficiente sobre psicoanálisis como para cuestionarse su asma y otros síntomas evidentes como su temor a las tormentas. Él mismo me interpretó un día uno de sus sueños. Además, siendo joven había conocido a Freud en un hotel de los Dolomitas, creo que en San Martino; se había puesto enfermo con una de sus habituales gripes y lo había pasado en grande viendo cómo Freud, el único médico que había en el hotel a la sazón, no sabía cómo desenvolverse frente a aquella trivial enfermedad. Le gustaba bromear con el componente psíquico de sus males. Ligeras indisposiciones le proporcionaban la excusa para introducirse en el papel, tan a menudo dichoso, del niño enfermo rodeado de cuidados. Por lo general se deleitaba de modo vagamente morboso con los rasgos eufóricos de la enfermedad. Algunos aspectos neuróticos eran evidentes: sufría de una especie de complejo de ferrocarril. Tenía por principio llegar con mucho adelanto a los trenes, a veces con horas. En cierta ocasión, según nos contó, se presentó en la estación con tres horas de adelanto y sin embargo se las arregló para acabar perdiendo el tren. Pero tal y como suele ocurrir en no pocas ocasiones en las personas de gran fuerza espiritual, su neurosis no afectaba seriamente a su fuerza productiva, tal y como cabría esperar. En todo caso, el rasgo más llamativo sería la lentitud de su productividad. Pero esto más bien se debía a su rigor autocrítico y tremendamente racional, por mucho que tuviera también cierta parte de temor neurótico. A veces Berg recordaba al hombre que grita "¡al lobo, al lobo!".

THEODOR ADORNO, Alban Berg. Ed. Alianza, 1990.