EDITORIAL AFTERWORD

Adorno wrote the notes on Beethoven, like most of his first drafts of planned works, in notebooks he kept from his youth until the day before he died; forty-five of these notebooks, of different formats and sizes, are among his posthumous papers. By far the major part of the notes on Beethoven is in the following four notebooks:

Notebook 11: School exercise book without cover; 159 pages, format 19.9 × 16 cm, partly in Gretel Adorno’s handwriting. To be dated from about early 1938 to 10.8.1939.

Notebook 12: So-called ‘Buntes Buch’, cardboard cover; 118 pages, format 20 × 16.4 cm. A few entries in Gretel Adorno’s handwriting. – Dated: 1.10.1939 to 10.8.1942.

Notebook 13: So-called ‘Scribble-In Book’ II, plastic cover; 218 pages, format 17.2 × 11.7 cm. – Dated 14.8.1942 to 11.1.1953.

Notebook 14: Brown leather cover with gilt edges; 72 pages with writing (of 182), format 17.3 × 12.2 cm. – Dated 11.1.1953 to 1966.

Isolated notes for the projected book on Beethoven are to be found in eight further notebooks of Adorno’s, which have been used for the present edition:

Notebook 1: So-called ‘Grünes Buch’, green-brown leather cover with gilt edges; 108 pages, format 13.6 × 10.8 cm. – Dated: approx. 1932 to 6.12.1948. Notebook 6: Black school exercise book with cloth spine; format 20.6 × 17.1 cm. – 1st part, pages not numbered: references for book on Kierkegaard (‘finished 29.10.1932’); 2nd part: 135 pages, ‘Aufzeichnungen zu einer Theorie der musikalischen Reproduktion’ (to be dated from approx. early 1946 to 6.12.1959).

Notebook II: Brown octavo notebook marked ‘II’; 142 pages, format 15.1 × 9 cm. – Dated: 16.12.1949 to 13.3.1956.

Notebook C: Black octavo notebook, marked ‘C’; 128 pages, format 14.9 × 8.9 cm. – Dated: 26.4.1957 to 26.3.1958.

Notebook I: Black octavo notebook, marked T; 144 pages, same format as ‘C\ - Dated: 25.12.1960 to 2.9.1961.

Notebook L: Black octavo notebook, marked ‘L’; 146 pages, same format as ‘C’. – Dated: 18.11.1961 to 30.3.1962.

Notebook Q: Black octavo notebook, marked ‘Q’; 145 pages, same format as ‘C’. – Dated: 7.9.1963 to 27.12.1963.

Notebook R: Black octavo notebook, marked ‘R’; 149 pages, same format as ‘C’ – Dated: 15.10.1963 to 4.3.1964.

Adorno usually wrote the entries in his notebooks in ink, less often with ballpoint pen and only exceptionally in pencil. Sometimes the notebooks contain entries in Gretel Adorno’s handwriting together with his own: Adorno dictated such notes to his wife in shorthand; she then wrote them out in the notebook in use at the time.

The text of the present edition is based on exact and repeated perusal of all the manuscripts in the Theodor W. Adorno Archiv; the relevant notes have been included and printed in full. The attribution of the notes to the material of the Beethoven book was as a rule unproblematical. Adorno worked through his notebooks afterwards and marked the fragments belonging to the Beethoven complex with a B at the beginning, or, less often, by writing out the name of the composer. Where such a mark by Adorno’s hand is missing, it was put in by Gretel Adorno, undoubtedly on behalf of her husband, if not on his instructions. In the printed version such markings are referred to in the footnotes only if they make attribution of a note to the Beethoven book seem provisional or not yet entirely certain.

On the arrangement of the fragments by the Editor, this has already been explained in the Preface (see above, pp. ixf). To justify the procedure selected, Karl Löwith – in a similar case relating to the late work of Nietzsche – has produced convincing arguments which will be quoted here:

Anyone who wants not only to read successively notes made at different times, but to understand the ideas in their context, and in their variations and discontinuities, must himself seek out and ‘compile’ those which belong together in terms of their content, and keep apart those which are together only by chronological accident. But for the proper guessing and combining, collating and distinguishing, penetrating and clarifying of a scattered train of thought, mere philological and historical pointers are wholly inadequate supports. (Karl Löwith, Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 6: Nietzsche, Stuttgart 1987, p. 517)

– However, a chronological list of Adorno’s notes is also important, and indispensable for the clarification of certain questions, and the reader will find this in a comparative table (see below, pp. 253ff); at least the relative dating of the individual fragments is guaranteed by their sequence in Adorno’s notebooks, which were always filled chronologically. Where Adorno has dated fragments individually – which, clearly, he usually did if a note was especially important to him – this is stated in the Notes section.

The orthography of the fragments has been unified and coordinated with current usage. Adorno kept his notebooks solely for himself; they were never intended to be read by others. In addition, the Beethoven notes were written over a period of more than thirty years: both these circumstances explain the not infrequent irregularities and inconsistencies in their handwritten form. The Editor has decided not to preserve these in the printed version, as this would unnecessarily have made the book considerably less legible. The equation of scholarly editions with transcripts of handwritten diplomatic notes, which has been widely adopted recently, was refuted a good while ago by Rudolf Pannwitz – in the same context which provoked the comments by Löwith just quoted. Pannwitz calls such a practice a ‘photocopy not of the sequence within consciousness, but of the sequence of its conversion into pencil and ink’ (Rudolf Pannwitz, ‘Nietzsche-Philologie?’, in Merkur 117, vol. 11, 1957, p. 1078). The Editor could not be content with such a photocopy, with regard either to the orthography or to the arrangement of Adorno’s fragments on Beethoven. An edition, and particularly the editio princeps, of a work uncompleted by the author has to support and assist the text, not to make its reception as difficult as possible and finally to stand in its way.

In contrast to this, but with the same intention, Adorno’s punctuation has been taken over almost unchanged from his manuscripts. For Adorno each punctuation mark had ‘its own physiognomic value, its own expression, which cannot be separated from its syntactical function but is not exhausted by it either’ (GS 11, p. 106). This applies all the more to first drafts, in which Adorno was not yet thinking about punctuation in detail, but letting himself be carried along by the flow of ideas and language, trusting that these would find their own expression. [Naturally, this physiognomic character of punctuation, and some of the punctuation errors which might have thrown light on the author’s thought processes in the original, could not be carried over into the English translation – tr.]

All additions by the Editor are enclosed in square brackets. Where corrections have been made by the Editor, this is stated in the endnotes. – In his notes Adorno often used the letter B instead of writing the name Beethoven; this has been tacitly written out in the printed version. – Factual explanations have, as far as possible, been included in the text, again in square brackets; only where the need for more lengthy formulations prohibited this are the explanations included in the endnotes. – The unambiguous identification of Beethoven’s works, often referred to by abbreviations in the text, posed a certain problem. When Adorno uses the opus number or familiar names (‘Appassionata’, ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata, Eroica, and so on) the identification is regarded as given. In all other cases the Editor has added the corresponding opus numbers in square brackets. – Examples of notation, which Adorno seems always to have written from memory, are printed from the facsimile of his handwriting.

The Editor thanks Elfriede Olbrich and Renate Wieland: the former produced the roughly deciphered copy of large sections of the manuscript; the latter gave help and information on technical musical questions. But, above all, thanks are due, from the reader as well as the Editor, to Maria Luisa Lopez-Vito, without whose committed collaboration this edition could not have been produced.

March 1993