Beethoven

The Philosophy of Music

Theodor W. Adorno

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745630458, 9780745614670
• eBook ISBN: 9780745694290
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Fragments and Texts

ONE

PRELUDE

Reconstruct how I heard Beethoven as a child.

[1]

From my childhood I can clearly remember the magic emanating from a score which named the instruments, showing exactly what was played by each. Flute, clarinet, oboe – they promised no less than colourful railway tickets or names of places.¹ If I am entirely honest, it was this magic far more that the wish to know music as such that induced me to learn how to transpose and read scores while still a child, and which really made a musician of me. So strong was this magic that I can still feel it today when I read the Pastoral, in which, probably, it first manifested itself to me. Not, however, when it is played – and that is no doubt an argument against musical performance as such.²

[2]

Of my childhood experience of Beethoven I know that I first (when certainly no more than 13) came across the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata and mistook its theme for an accompaniment which was to be joined only later by the melody. – My favourite piece for a long time was the Adagio from op. 2, no. 1. I heard about the chamber music, especially the quartets, so early, from Rosé,³ that I never actually experienced its newness. I probably did not really understand the quartets until Vienna,⁴ although I had long half-known them by heart. – The violin sonatas, which move me indescribably, go back to my early childhood (‘Kreutzer’, the small Sonata in A minor [op. 23] and two slow movements: the D major section from the Sonata in A major [op. 30,1] and the E major minuet movement from the

Sonata in G major [op. 30,3].} – My first real experience of the late Beethoven was through op. 109 and op. 119; I heard both of them, with a short interval between them, played by d’Albert and Ansorge.⁵ I discovered and cherished the first movement of [op.] 101 on my own. – I played trios (the first [op. 1,1] and the ‘Geister’ Trio) while still a schoolboy.

[3]

On my childhood image of Beethoven:⁶ I thought the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata must be an especially easy piece, associating it with toy pianos with little hammers. I imagined it had been written for one of those. My disappointment when I could not play it. – Another part of the same stratum: as a child I thought the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata portrayed the name Waldstein; in the opening bars I imagined a knight entering a dark wood. Was I not, perhaps, closer to the truth in this than I ever was later when I could play the piece by heart?

[4]

The difficulty of any musical analysis lies in the fact that the more the piece is dissected into its smallest units, the closer one comes to mere sound, and all music consists of mere sounds. The most specific thus becomes the most general, abstract in the wrong sense. But if this detailed analysis is omitted, the connections elude us. Dialectical analysis is an attempt to sublate [aufheben] each danger in the other.

[5]

NB: In the study of Beethoven the appearance of giving primacy to the whole must be avoided at all costs, the subject matter being shown as genuinely dialectical.

[6]

It will not be possible to avoid completely certain scientific procedures relating to the logic of proportions. The approach used by Rudi [Rudolf Kolisch] in his typology of tempi,⁷ only subtler. For example: comparisons between main themes, transitions, second subject groups, closing themes, codas, and so on, of different (naturally comparable) works. What such shapes have in common may be abstract and empty, but it can sometimes throw light on the essence of these shapes, as when pedal points, shifts to the subdominant, and so on, occur in closing sections. Follow up.

[7]

The fundamental error in Bekker’s book [Paul Bekker, Beethoven, 2nd edition, Berlin 1912] is that he regards the content [Gehalt] of Beethoven’s music and its objective musical form as largely independent of each other – and the latter as subordinate to the former, whereas any statement about content remains mere verbiage unless it is wrung from technical findings. That is the methodological rule in my work. Evidence of the contrary in Bekker [ibid., p. 140], where he refers to the Funeral March in op. 26 as: ‘a piece of music of thrilling power, with an imposing grandeur of feeling. And yet – a piece of music. Its special charm, the reason for its popularity, lies in its objective musical values. As a confession it hardly concerns us’. (Note the condescending tone.) Paul Bekker is a barbarian of progress; his concept of historical development constantly obscures his view of the specific quality and encourages him to pontificate. On the Rondo from op. 31,1 (p. 150): ‘the work concludes with a charming Rondo, an inconspicuous late bloom of an obsolete genre.’ Once again, the attitude of nil admirari, on the basis that, if you know where it all leads, you always know better.

[8]

‘Developing variation.’ But the aim is not, as is often the case in the analyses of René [Leibowitz],⁸ to show what is contained in what, but what follows what, and why. Not mathematical but ‘historical’ analyses are needed – René usually thinks he has ‘proved’ a piece of music by demonstrating thematic relationships. But the task begins only after that. Cf. Valéry’s book on Degas.⁹

[9]

How undiscriminating our means of analysing musical meaning still are can be seen from a straightforward question such as: Why does so simple and in some ways masterful a piece as the introduction of Act III of the Meistersinger, when compared to a piece expressing ‘resignation’ by Beethoven – for example, the first movement of op. 101 – have an embarrassed, turgid, Pharisaical quality? And yet this is objectively the case, regardless of the mere taste of the listener, or the psychology of Wagner – in which the categories of genuine and ungenuine remain ambivalent, changeable – and even regardless of its theatrical function. I shall attempt to indicate a number of objective moments in the composition.

The¹⁰ formal idea of the piece is the contrast of three elements: subjective-expressive theme, folksong (in the Shoemaker’s song) and chorale. The Chorale is meant to have affirmative power, especially through its cadences. But the relationship of these elements is an outward one. Folksong and chorale give the effect (in extreme contrast to Bach, for example) of a quotation, because we know: this is a folksong and this a chorale; and this knowledge, this reflexion on naivety, dissolves the latter, making it something manipulated. ‘Look, I’m a plain, true-hearted master’ – ‘I have a German soul’: simplicity as artifice. (Nietzsche doubtless felt all this but always argued it ad hominem, never really in relation to the ‘artist’.) The incongruity manifests itself, however, in purely musical terms. In the true chorale the cadence is taken for granted and never especially emphasized. From the standpoint of Tristan, where it no longer really commands belief, and where straightforward diatonic harmony seems banal, the cadence has to be exaggerated in order to be felt at all. It’s like a parson intoning: Verily I say unto you, my dear brethren, amen, amen, amen. And this gesture is at the same time in contradiction to the chorale’s melody, which it overstates to the point of expressing, not faith, but: Look, I believe. – Similarly with the folksong. As a melody it does not convey the deeply fractured expression (intended as a stroke of genius) of hopeless tenderness, of renunciation’s sweetness, that Wagner ascribes to it. He therefore has to introduce this effect from outside, by harmonization, by modulation to E major, by the chord of the ninth, by overstretching – all of which procedures are foreign to the musical phenomenon itself. But it is not thereby assimilated but rather, for the sake of effect, stands still as something heterogeneous. The whole has something of the Child Jesus in Flanders, ‘where the star stops’ – Monsieur Timmermans is teleologically immanent in Wagner (his assimilation of precisely this element is dubious even in Mahler). The technical reflection on expression in Wagner is a negation of its own content. But it should be added that this is not the whole truth, and that precisely this fractured quality, the truthful image of untruth, has about it something wholly splendid, and even infinitely touching. That is to say that untruth, depending on the point it occupies on the sundial of history, is at the same time truth – a fact that Nietzsche misjudged, registering it merely by categories such as charm and refinement. And finally: all musical characters are really quotations. Alexandrinism is the principle of art that has attained self-awareness…

[10]

A prominent and fundamental motif of the work must be that Beethoven – his language, his substance and tonality in general, that is, the whole system of bourgeois music – is irrecoverably lost to us, and is perceived only as something vanishing from sight. As Eurydice was seen.¹¹ Everything must be understood from that viewpoint.

[11]

The ideological essence of music, its affirmative element, does not lie, as with other arts, in its specific content, or even in whether or not its form operates in terms of harmony. It lies merely in the fact that it is a voice lifted up, that it is music at all. Its language is magical in itself, and the transition to its isolated sphere has a priori a quality of transfiguration. The suspension of empirical reality and the forming of a second reality sui generis seem to say in advance: all is well. Its tone is by origin consoling, and to that origin it is bound. But that does not apply unambiguously to music’s status as truth. It can be said that it stands, as a totality, more directly and completely under the sway of appearance. But this a priori condition encompasses it as if from outside, like a kind of general clause, whereas inwardly, in its immanent movement, through its lack of objective substance and unequivocal relationships, music is more free than other arts. Its remoteness from reality does, it is true, cast on the latter a reflected, conciliatory glow, but keeps music itself purer of subservience to reality, which affects it primarily, not in its essence, but as a context of interrelated effects. Once it has consented to be music at all, it can, to an extent (that is, as far as it is not aimed at consumption), do as it thinks fit. – From this standpoint, Beethoven’s work would be seen as an attempt to revoke the a priori untruth of music’s voice, of its being music at all, through the immanent movement of the concept as an unfolding truth. Hence, perhaps, the insignificance of the starting point:¹² this is nothing but the untruth, the appearance inherent in music as such. – The late style would signify that music becomes aware of the limit of this movement – of the impossibility of cancelling its own premises by virtue of its own logic. The late style is the

[12]*

Perhaps the pure, strict concept of art can be derived only from music, while great literature and great painting – and especially great literature and painting – necessarily contain something material, projecting outside the charmed aesthetic circle, not dissolved in the autonomy of form. – It is precisely the logical, profound aesthetic which is fundamentally inappropriate to significant literature, as it is to novels. Hegel, unlike Kant, had some awareness of this.

[13]

Benjamin’s concept of aura,¹³ which may touch on the music-like quality of all art, could be scarcely better explicated than by some turning points in An die ferne Geliebte (and similarly in the last violin sonata [op. 96]), such as the shift between the first and second songs, which opens a limitless horizon, and the passage with semiquaver-triplets in ‘Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder’ [bars 21–5].¹⁴

[14]

The dispute whether music can portray anything definite, or is only a play of sound-patterns in motion,¹⁵ no doubt misses the point. A far closer parallel is with dream, to the form of which, as Romanticism well knew, music is in many ways so close. In the first movement of Schubert’s Symphony in C major, at the beginning of the development, we feel for a few moments as if we were at a rustic wedding; an action seems to begin unfolding, but then is gone at once, swept away in the rushing music which, once imbued with that image, moves onwards to a quite different measure. Images of the objective world appear in music only in scattered, eccentric flashes, vanishing at once; but they are, in their transience, of music’s essence. The programme is, so to speak, the musical residue left over from the day’s dealings. While the music lasts we are in it much as we are in dream. We are at the rustic wedding, then are carried away in the musical flood, heaven knows where (it may be similar with death – perhaps the affinity between music and death has its locus here). – I believe the images flitting past to be objective, not mere subjective associations. The anecdote told by Decsey about the poem ‘Lieblich war die Maiennacht’ and the post-horn passage in Mahler’s Third Symphony, is relevant here (though doubtless too rationalistic).¹⁶ Within the framework of such a theory, a rescue of programme music might be attempted. Perhaps with reference to the Pastoral.

[15]

Beethoven may represent an attempt to circumvent the ban on images. His music is not an image of anything, and yet is an image of the whole: an imageless image.

[16]

The task of the book will be to resolve the riddle of humanity as a dialectical image.¹⁷

[17]

Copied from a notebook:¹⁸ The element of praxis in Beethoven. Humanity in his work means: you should behave as this music behaves. It shows how to lead a life which is active, outwardly productive without being narrow – a life of solidarity. And the injunction to ‘strike sparks from a man’s soul’¹⁹ – no ‘emotional effusions’. Against Tolstoy’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’. However: this does not exhaust the meaning of Beethoven. – The metaphysics of ‘gallantry’ and amusement: a way to defeat boredom. This was a feudal need. The bourgeoisie took it over and adapted it. By work, time is killed in earnest. Similarly, Beethoven forces aimlessly passing time to stand still. By work it is conquered twice over. Precisely what is a lie in reality is truth in ideology. Extremely important: to be taken further. – Beethoven’s rhythm and tonality. Syncopation is relative to the down-beat as dissonance is to consonance. The problem of tonality cannot be grasped deeply enough. It is both the surface as opposed to the subcutaneous, and the general principle which itself constitutes the subcutaneous.²⁰ – Emancipated rhythm today is in the same position as harmony: it is nullified by the absence of a distinguishing principle. NB: Schoenberg latently sustained musical metre. – Jemnitz’s remark on rhythmical monotony, arising from the occurrence of complementary events on each beat.²¹

[18]

To come closer to understanding the Missa, it is doubtless necessary to study the Mass in C major. – There is Schenker’s analysis of the Fifth.²² – Bekker quotes a movement composed by Beethoven for a projected mythological opera: in it all the dissonances were to remain unresolved.²³

[19]

On considering the original manuscript of Beethoven’s ‘Geister’ Trio: the extraordinarily extensive abbreviations cannot be explained by haste. Beethoven composed relatively little. Nor – unlike Schubert – does he make countless changes in the MS. What is striking, however, is the haziness of the script. It looks like a mere support for the real substance – that is, the sound it represents. The written form clearly betrays an aversion to a process which does not itself form part of the musical imagination (so that in Beethoven the visual appearance of the notation has little influence on the composition, unlike the case with many, especially modern, composers). In this context, one should think first of the primacy of the whole over the individual part in Beethoven. In the written image the ‘idea’ or ‘inspiration’, the clearly defined individual melody, recedes into the flow of the whole. But something deeper is also involved: the image of the objectivity of music, which Beethoven conceived as something existing in itself, not originally made by him, as

He is the stenographer of the objectified composition, which is something detached from the arbitrariness of individuation. In Benjamin’s phrase: ‘the clerk recording his own inner life.’²⁴ What the handwriting reve...

Table of contents

• COVER
• CONTENTS
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• EDITORS PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Fragments and Texts
• APPENDIX I
• APPENDIX II
• APPENDIX III
• ABBREVIATIONS
• EDITORS NOTE
• EDITORIAL AFTERWORD
• COMPARATIVE TABLE OF FRAGMENTS
• THEMATIC SUMMARY OF CONTENTS
• INDEXES