NOTES II

Concerning the theory of musical reproduction:²³⁹

1. one must be able to sense the harmonic meaning in the principal melodic voice.
2. in a great many cases agogical modifications can be expressed purely through dynamics
3. very often the formal proportions depend on accents
4. theory of ritardando, (evenness)
5. all upbeats, short notes e.g. semiquavers after must be played to their full value. Basic principle: the surface articulation through first steps, cadences and strong beats is audible anyhow. It must, as a part of the abstract schema, recede in favour of the articulation of the concrete thematic work occurring independently of this schema. This illumination and emancipation of the external means of clarification (as dealt with most extremely by Toscanini) is the genuine main rule of interpretation. Revealing the construction does not mean: revealing the schema, but rather revealing what opposes it or indeed what emerges from the collision of schema and intention. – This demand is at once a completely excessive demand. I.e. as soon as even a single moment is not fully felt, everything becomes utterly senseless, as the external articulation's crutch disappears. On the occasion of Rudi's [Kolisch] concert in New York on 13 November 1938 (op. 59, 1 and 127 [by Beethoven]).

Exercise book without cover, pp. 79f.

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Continuation of the notes on the theory of musical reproduction

The true danger of the virtuoso: his perfect control. Through being above the works, having them at his disposal, he no longer journeys all the way into them or takes their immanent demands quite so seriously any more. Sloppiness as a correlate of mastery. For example the blurring of phrases by great virtuosos, also vocal ones. – Preferable to work with young, unfinished musicians who are not yet fully in control.

Support my hypothesis on the immanence of the correct tempo as tempo giusto with a passage from the Spring Sonata by Beethoven, at the top of page 2, where it ‘clicks into place’.²⁴⁰ – The hypothesis can be justified, for example, by showing how, if the tempo is too slow, shapes that are meaningless in themselves take on an inappropriate significance, and seem rather like the telling of a well-known joke. Objective meaning of musical stupidity. Show this for example in the slow movement of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. As soon as the violin satisfies its tone, the 6/8 becomes silly.

The pre-artistic aspect of the virtuoso: when the means becomes the end. ‘Tone’ is much the same. As soon as it begins to relish itself, the musical context suffers. – Being-for-others instead of being-in-itself. – The culinary qualities are regressive.

Exercise book without cover

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Ad reproduction theory

Busoni is wrong to poke fun at those who would defend conventional compositions for being ‘so musical’.²⁴¹ There is, as it were independently of the musical quality, such a thing as speaking the language of music or not. Bad composers such as Tchaikovsky, Puccini or Rachmaninov speak it – Elgar or Sibelius do not.²⁴² This would have to be determined precisely.

The Scribble-in-Book II, p. 64; 1945

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Concerning the reproduction theory

The relationship between mime and music, which is central, becomes manifest in the sphere of reproduction. Music-making and acting are closely related, just as actors and musicians are often found in the same family. All bad manners in music are directly identical to those of slapstick theatre. The cellist who pushes his way to the foreground in a quartet ‘charges’. The violinist who changes positions audibly and uses intense vibrato is wailing: ‘You are crying, Amalia’.²⁴³ The conductor of effect à la Toscanini is the mass director à la Reinhardt. In all such aspects, the music is reduced to gestures.

The Scribble-in-Book II, pp. 76f.; c.1945

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Gretel²⁴⁴ asked me how it can be that actors, who are mostly of questionable intelligence and always uneducated, can represent people and deliver lines that convey the most difficult of ideas, as with Hamlet and Prospero, Faust, Mephistopheles. I ventured the reply: every poetic work contains not only the meaningful-significative element, but also the melodic-mimic aspect, tone, speech melody, and manner; and it is a substantial criterion for success how deeply the former is immersed in the latter, i.e. whether the mimetic, ‘magical’ aspect is able to invoke, to force the meaningful one, to such a degree that a tone of voice or gesture itself becomes the allegorical representation of an idea. The actor's ability is mimic in the true sense: he actually imitates the melodic-gestural aspect of language. And the more perfectly he achieves this, the more perfectly the idea enters the representation, not least because – and especially when – he does not understand it. The opposite approach would be the explanatory one: but to explain the intention means to kill it rather than invoking it. One could almost say that it is the prerequisite for an actor not to ‘understand’, but rather to imitate blindly. Perhaps include in the theory of musical reproduction.

The Scribble-in-Book II, p. 80; c.1945–1947

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Ad reproduction theory.

‘X-ray image’. It can form a part of the sense to conceal the skeleton. But this in turn presupposes the existence of the x-ray photograph.

Brown octavo book II, p. 124; April 1946

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concerning the reproduction theory

The ‘language’ of music, the ingrained structure of memory and foresight, the definite expectation of what is to come – in short, its objectification in both the positive and the negative sense – all this stems largely from the system of musical notation, a comparatively rigid system whose development to a state of differentiation is a laborious affair. Cf. regarding this the ‘Motifs’ in Anbruch on the influence of musical notation upon composition.²⁴⁵ Probably our entire awareness of a musical context is mediated through the written music.

The Scribble-in-Book II, p. 83; after 6 February 1948

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Concerning the reproduction theory: create melodic relationships across wide intervals. Above all, this requires unconditional clarity and precision of the critical notes. – In Mahler, no crotchet should really be conducted in the same way as any other. The utmost flexibility – while keeping the basic tempi within a movement clearly apart.

Black octavo book ‘B’, p. 116; c. April 1957

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Concerning the reproduction theory. My hypothesis that the performance is the x-ray photograph of the work requires correction in so far as it provides not the skeleton, but rather the entire wealth of subcutanea. In relation to this, the manifest façade is precisely an abstract element, as impoverished as the 17th century.

Black octavo book ‘Q’, p. 65; October 1963

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Reproduction theory. The basic problem today: whether one should let the music's structure communicate itself, allowing only the appearance to appear – or transfer the structure into the appearance. My hypothesis is the latter. It is the task of my book to justify this.

Black octavo book ‘V’, p. 9, August 1965

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Reproduction theory

It must not be overlooked that it is first of all necessary to grasp – despite the multitude of facets – the constitutive unifying principle. E.g. in Lohengrin that of extremely differentiated sound-mixtures. This was completely wrong in the performance under Hollreiser:²⁴⁶ one was constantly hearing forte entries that should in fact be inaudible.

The conductor's ability to draw in the reins as soon as they begin to slacken.

Reproduction theory. Any critique of perfectionism at once presupposes it. Be above, not beneath it. Otherwise it's amateurism.

Black octavo book ‘X’, pp. 37f., May 1966

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Concerning the reproduction theory. The strongest argument against me came from my cousin Franz,²⁴⁷ and Edith Picht²⁴⁸ presented it to me as that of Herr von Karajan. Namely that one should present only the sensual appearance, as the structure communicates itself. ‘If I love a woman, I want her body, not her x-ray image.’ But this, as plausible arguments usually are, is pure sophistry. Apologia for the pre-artistic culinary element. For the hidden structural aspect is that which lends sense. If it is not realized in the appearance, then this latter becomes mere sound material and thus senseless. To be shown through the more subtle questions of punctuation. They are a function of the latent structure, of the subcutaneous. Without them, however, the overall sound, as polished as it might be, becomes gibberish. ‘The essence must appear.’²⁴⁹

Black octavo book ‘W’, pp. 115f.; August 1966

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Note

Expression is already the rationalization of the gestural, i.e. its objectification through signification, through ‘symbolic function’, the immediate through mediacy. And it is precisely this element that is more readily present in alphabetic writing than in the musical score. The question is whether, in keeping with this state of affairs, the theory of the musical score and total construction formulated previously – namely that the latter actually fixes the mimetic – needs to be modified. On the other hand, however, I am not yet convinced that the expressive component, which is certainly a mediate one, is indeed implicit in the significative element of writing. This must be thought through precisely.

Ts 49561

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Concerning the reproduction theory

The following arguments are essential to the question of the transformation of musical listening into reading with an exact idea of the text:

A.    The necessity of seeing something that is essentially spiritual mediated through its sensory representatives, rather than absorbing this representative itself into the spirit, is infantile. Just as today none but retarded peasants read aloud in order to be able to read at all, and just as the mere lip-movements have survived as a rudiment from the reading of prayer-books, this might very well also be the fate of music one day. There is no reason whatsoever to consider the sensual sound of music more fundamental to it than the sensual sound of words to language.

B.    Whereas any musical performance is fallible, the truly precise idea gained from reading can serve as the ideal for performance that cannot be attained as such. The musical work is thus cleansed of the fortuity of its realization, so to speak.

C.    Performing music has an element of talking people into something, convincing them, an element of propaganda about itself, and thus shows its affiliation to the dominant culture industry of today. One could exaggerate and say that any performance of a musical work has the air of being an advertisement for it. Compared to this, the realization of music in the imagination would present purely the work itself, without making the slightest concession to its context of effect.

D.    The works would, for the most part, be beyond the reach of wear and trivialization.

E.    The obsolete separation of work and reproduction would be liquidated.

NB The reproduction theory must contain instructions that are far more concrete, far closer to the content.

Ts 49562

Notes

239    The following two notes are the oldest surviving ones; Adorno wrote them down in what he called his ‘blue book’, which the editor of the Beethoven notes refers to as a ‘school exercise book without cover’ (see Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, p. 249), and which was not accessible until after the printing of the Notes Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction. The reproduction of the notes follows a copy made by Elfriede Olbrich.

240    Adorno is probably referring to bar 29 et seq. of the Violin Sonata, op. 24.

241    See note 87, p. 250.

242    See the note on p. 68.

243    Friedrich Schiller, Die Räuber, IV, 4: ‘You are weeping, Amalia? – And he said this in such a tone! In such a tone – I felt as if time itself had grown younger – the past springtimes of love came back to me in this tone! The nightingale called as it had then – the flowers breathed as they had then – and I lay in ecstasy on his neck …’

244    The PhD chemist Gretel Adorno (1902–1993), née Karplus, had been married to Adorno since 1937.

245    Adorno's aphorism from 1929; see GS 18, p. 19.

246    The conductor Heinrich Hollreiser (b. 1913) worked mainly as a guest conductor from 1964 onwards.

247    See note 216, p. 261.

248    The pianist and harpsichordist Edith Picht-Axenfeld (1914–2001) taught at the Musikhochschule in Freiburg from 1947 onwards; she was married to the philosopher Georg Picht.

249    This is the opening sentence of the second section – ‘Appearance’ – of the second volume of Hegel's Science of Logic (G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller, London: Routledge, 2004, p. 481).