Beethoven: Filosofia Della Musica

by Theodor W. Adorno

Beethoven is a classic study of the composer's music, written by one of the most important thinkers of our time. Throughout his life, Adorno wrote extensive notes, essay fragments and aides-memoires on the subject of Beethoven's music. This book brings together all of Beethoven's music in relation to the society in which he lived.Adorno identifies three periods in Beethoven's work, arguing that the thematic unity of the first and second periods begins to break down in the third. Adorno follows this progressive disintegration of organic unity in the classical music of Beethoven and his contemporaries, linking it with the rationality and monopolistic nature of modern society.Beethoven will be welcomed by students and researchers in a wide range of disciplines - philosophy, sociology, music and history - and by anyone interested in the life of the composer.

Genres: Music, Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Biography Memoir, Biography

Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

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

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I have to confess that I am still in my novitate as far as my listening style to Beethoven goes, nevertheless I appreciated this book in which the author says that composers should be judged in the light of their musical works, not as they turned out as finished products, but as they might have turned out if their creators had full reign over their artistic drive and impulses. Likewise, and more akin to my musical knowledge, the history of Bob Dylan's music can be best understood as the story of an artist's successful accession to a position of full artistic control. In my opinion, this was a position he only attained only when he started producing his own recordings, say, perhaps after Time Out of Mind won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1998. On the other hand, John Zorn is an artist who always made full conceptual control of his art his very byword. I can imagine him as an underground musician in his late twenties, living off of Food Stamps while housed among the denizens of New York's lower East Side in the late 1970s, composing the music that came to be known as The Parachute Years, whose counterweight was established by the burgeoning punk music scene of downtown NYC and London. In fact, the music Zorn has been making in the 2020s, this second decade of the twenty-first century, is an example of an even more fulfilling realization of music as graded by its yearning to be free. These well-known Jewish composers, like Felix Mendelssohn, Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg before them, stand as icons for their ability to render, in a religious-bourgeois musical style, the symbols of the Jew's desire for a permanent home in Palestine beyond the pale of settlement. Similarly, in creating Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan was able to realize the tragic situation of the bourgeoisie that Adono says Ibsen was unable to portray in his dramas which underscored the emancipation of women who were imprisoned in a social role that was equivalent to their husband's standing as property-owner and proportionate to his status as a wage-earner.

What Adorno finds in Beethoven's music, namely the concept of the contraction of time as a concept of development, I see in the the music of Bob Dylan and John Zorn, in that the same elements of time-constriction results in the unloosening of a popularized artistic style where free time, namely, freedom from the rhythm of the death-cycle and, ultimately, the freeing up of human energies for the embrasure of the life-affirming pleasure-principle, as the subject succumbs to his or her identity in the capitalist economy's labor-market. As Adorno says, "The symphonic transformation of time is directly connected to the reification of subjective production, and this may be the deepest point of comparison between Kant and Beethoven." Maybe I am overstating the case, but I see Bob Dylan and John Zorn as two prominent exponents of radical Jewish music who cast their long shadows over music's kingdom of sound. For example, John Zorn, in his Naked City project, seeks to outdo and overwrite Wagner's Ring Cycle so that, in effect, much like the anti semitic scrawlings he spewed out with much venom and hatred, Wagner's works are no longer to be found (or are fundamentally altered) in the library of the world. Adorno sees Beethoven as the musical precursor to not only what became the subjective twelve-tone panoply of Schoenberg, but allowed for expansion of music that incorporated Wagner's 'rock and roll' aesthetics that elevated the amplified individual to greater heights, in that the dynamic dramaturgy of Wagner's operas eventually led to the birth of popular music in the 20th century, and the rhythms of jazz, blues and the birth of rock and roll developed from the new socio-political cool perspective, and even the cult of the vocal which eventually came to prominence, Adorno says, hinted at the end of the human element in reality.

The work of these artistic pioneers in radical Jewish music affords an escape hatch from the false consciousness of modernity, which involves a stoppage of time and an erasure of the subject due the demands of the marketplace's drive for labor, a fitting tribute to the age of mechanical reproduction. Unfortunately, Adorno died from a heart attack at age 65, possibly due to his too great commitment to writing philosophy and not taking care of his health, just as Beethoven went deaf and ultimately died, too, because of his too steadfast commitment to inner communication and a rendering of the soul in musical forms in terms of the deepest part of himself. According to Adorno, "A work of art is great when it registers a failed attempt to reconcile objective antinomies," and I can see this principle at work in this book. What is perhaps most impressive to me in Adorno's writing is his almost perfect recollections of his earliest impressions of Beethoven's music, seemingly remembered at first-hand. What accounts for the phenomenon? Perhaps the Kabbalah is correct in suggesting that evil first arose through the element of excess in an all-consuming divine power. Read this book and you may discover Adorno, like the music of Beethoven, comes to life again when you listen to it. Three stars.

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was probably not my best introduction to the philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno, since it is a posthumous work, consisting of notes and fragments for an unwritten book arranged by the editor. As a result, it had somewhat the feel of a collection of aphorisms. In addition, I do not have the intimate knowledge of Beethoven's work which is presumed here, since he was writing the notes to himself and he had obviously memorized the scores -- hence the references to "the D flat chord in the fourteenth bar" and so forth.

Nevertheless, I found it very much worth reading, and spending a good deal of time working through. There are very many good insights here, not only into Beethoven but into much later music as well. The first two chapters established analogies between Beethoven's music and Hegelian philosophy and bourgeois society, respectively. Since, although Beethoven and Hegel were contemporaries, neither mentions the other and they probably were unaware of each other, the first analogy is "mediated" (to use one of Adorno's favorite words) through the second. I thought both analogies were good on a general level, but that he pressed them to hard in detail.

His thoughts on "late style", both in Beethoven and as a general catagory in music and literature were quite interesting as well.

The book left me wanting to read some of his completed works, and also to read some Walter Benjamin (a major influence, according to the editor's notes), probably next year; but for the present, it made me want to read someone less abstract.

[Michal Lipták · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fragment 229: “Art-works of the highest rank are distinguished from others not through their success – for in what they have succeeded? – but through the manner of their failure. For the problems within them, both the immanent, aesthetic problems and the social ones (and, in the dimension of depth, the two kinds coincide), are so posed that the attempt to solve them must fail, whereas the failure of lesser works is accidental, a matter of mere subjective incapacity. A work of art is great when it registers a failed attempt to reconcile objective antinomies. That is the truth and its ‘success’: to have come up against its own limit. In these terms, any work of art which succeeds through not reaching this limit is a failure. This theory states the formal law which determines the transition from the ‘classical’ to the late Beethoven, in such a way that the failure objectively implicated by the former is disclosed by the latter, raised to self-awareness, cleansed of the appearance of success and lifted, for just this reason, to the level of philosophical succeeding.”