And now let us turn to a matter decisive for the deepest understanding of National-Socialist theories of race. During the many thousands of years it took for the system of humanity [menschliche Ordnung] to arise, all the various positions described herein – which, taken as a whole, make up what we call a world perspective [Weltanschauung] – are harmonized in the individual races. The racial inheritance [Erbgut] thus harmonized produces – against racial distinctions –certain unfolding developmental tendencies and boundaries, and these are of a completely determinate nature. Every race has its own task in this regard, but the exercise of determining such distinctions is of no concern to us here. We know one thing, however: the system of humanity is holy. Those groups of men who believe they can contradict such a system will become estranged from what we call ‘life’. They will vegetate. They will become the products of certain developments. Rasse und Musik.1
There is music to Adorno’s prose, a blend of sonority with allusion that connotes music behind the words.2 Built in hinge-like fashion, it emerges in the form of contrasting pairs – copula – in expressions such as the following, taken from Minima Moralia: ‘Wahr sind nur die Gedanken, die sich selber nicht verstehen. (1996b: 216). Fortuitous translation sometimes accentuates this musical quality, capturing the conjoining of sound and meaning, the contrast between thought and understanding: ‘True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves’ (Adorno, 1974: 192). Liberal translation brings out the rhythmic balance (as dactyls in dimeter): True thoughts alone/Do not understand themselves. As does paraphrase with sonorous alliteration: The criterion for truth is the capacity for self-misunderstanding. Although it is seldom entirely consonant or harmonious, there is music to Adorno’s prose.
Schoenberg produced good ‘musical prose’, as he called it (meaning actual musical notes arranged in a fashion similar to prose).3 Paired contrast of harmony and melody is the central paradigm by which he described Western European classical music.4 Balanced pairing is ubiquitous in that repertoire. In truth it is a grand homogenizing vehicle, harmonizing in both figural and literal sense the diverse idioms in the language of what is called ‘classical music’. Adorno fell heir to the tradition of formal pairing in his composition studies with Alban Berg (Schoenberg’s student) in Vienna in 1925.
There are limits, however, to Adorno’s use of Schoenbergian paradigms. Schoenberg’s musical aesthetic was idealist, calling for a consonant and unitary perspective.5 Adorno’s musical prose does not depend upon consonance but on dissonance of idea – the dissonance struck between ‘truth’ and ‘lack of understanding’ in the quotation above. The effect is to produce a balance built upon imbalance, equilibrium based on disequilibrium, sonorous consonance betrayed by conceptual dissonance.
I shall use the term hinge, after Adorno’s use of the German Scharnier, to describe these dissonant pairs in Adorno’s writings.6 In Negative Dialectics, Adorno describes the negative dialectics of non-identity as a hinge. Negation determines the non-conceptual in the concept through a form of reflection that changes direction as if swinging around an axis: ‘To change this direction of conceptuality, to give it a turn toward nonidentity, is the hinge [Scharnier] of negative dialectics’7 (1973b: 12).
The hinge takes on material form in the paired disequilibrium found in much of Adorno’s prose. Adorno brings forth a concept (‘truth’) and then swings around immediately so as to confront it with its conceptual converse (‘lack of understanding’). The two form a pair superficially like that of Schoenberg’s paradigm. But with a moment’s reflection we see that the two do not fit together – cannot be made to fit together – except as paired incommensurates. As incommensurates they cannot be led to a cadence, their contrasting characteristics cannot be erased, folded limply into stasis. Their contradiction is too fundamental to be resolved into unity, except by negation.8
Consider the renowned first sentence of the Introduction to Adorno’s Negative Dialectics: ‘Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed’ (1973b, 3). The comma marks a hinge; it sets up the antipathy between the adjective obsolete and the verb construction to live on. Philosophy was once obsolete, [hinge] so philosophy lives on by obsolescence. Once the subject matter of eternal truth, philosophy now lives on freed from the claims to eternal truth that rendered it obsolete. There is a slapstick – Chaplinesque – quality to Adorno’s prose: heading off in one direction it meets square in the face with its walking stick aimed forcefully in the opposite direction.9 In the remainder of this chapter I shall rely upon ‘hinge’ as a theoretical framework. To avoid the pedantic use of hinge in quotations, I shall prefer instead a diagonal enclosed in parentheses as follows: [/].
The roots of the hinged construction are beyond consideration in this chapter. Let it suffice to say they lie in the contradictions of the bourgeois consciousness and in the transfiguration of labor as producer of capitalist wealth, value as more value, as Marx discerned it after Hegel. Thus Marcuse cites several constructions from Hegel’s Jenenser Realphilosophie:
Mechanization, the very means that should liberate man from toil, makes him a slave of his labour. ‘The more he subjugates his labor, [/] the more powerless he himself becomes….The more mechanized labour becomes, [/] the less value it has, and the more the individual must toil’. (1960: 78–9)10
In Adorno’s hands, the construction becomes often biting in tone, but the fundamental antagonistic relation of mechanization (and capital) to labor is preserved.
So too the full extent of the construction and its various forms lies beyond discussion here, except to note that it appears to have been cultivated by Adorno as he wrote for publication.11 The sketch published as Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music (1998a) rarely offer hinges. The following is a notable exception: ‘With regard to construction it will be decisive to identify the moment of negativity in the perfection of the middle works, [/] a moment which took the music beyond this perfection’ (1998a: 99). As the sketch nears completion, Adorno turns to the hinged construction:
Art-works of the highest rank are distinguished from others not through their success – for in what have they succeeded? – [/] but through the manner of their failure. For the problems within them … 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 its 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. (1998a: 100)
This leads to a final grand statement – both in concept and expression – of the hinged idea success [/] as 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. (1998a: 100, emphasis added)
The presence of hinged construction attests to the degree of musical fluidity with which Adorno can express his ideas. Detecting hinged constructions, we know that Adorno is in full voice.
In Adorno’s German, the hinge often takes the form of the je…desto… construction, often translated as the more…the less…. The following is taken from the Schoenberg essay in Prisms:
The more [Schoenberg’s music] gives its listeners, [/] the less it offers them. It requires the listener spontaneously to compose its inner movement and demands of him not mere contemplation but praxis. (1967: 149–50)
There are in fact two hinges at work here, one per sentence. Consider the terms more and less: Schoenberg’s music gives more [/] and in doing so gives less. Consider contemplation and praxis: Schoenberg’s music requires of its listener less contemplation; [/] it requires more work, ultimately requires praxis, contemplation’s antipode.
The hinge in both these instances is the unstated concept of work – or with greater precision, labor (in the sense noted above with reference to Marcuse). The more the worker labors in the growth of capital, the less their labor is valued. The worker cannot go to a concert – certainly a concert of Schoenberg’s music (indeed any concert associated with the accumulation of capital) –without being forced to work, and the more they work to gain understanding the more Schoenberg’s music gains currency – cultural capital. The worker in the guise of listener is forced by Schoenberg ‘to compose’ the form of the work, to compose its ‘inner movement’, so difficult to discern in Schoenberg’s dissonant oeuvre. This is not leisure. Instead, Schoenberg’s music confronts the ossified notion of leisure in capitalism by means of hinged negation. Schoenberg’s music turns the contemplative search for musical truths into labor.12
As noted, Schoenberg’s tonal frame of reference – balanced musical contrast ending in a unitary expression of tonality – cannot be stretched to encompass Adorno’s prose. If it could, then the two contrasting elements poised around a hinge would collapse into banal synthesis. Adorno’s dissonant expression would become a limpid consonance worthy of a Hallmark greeting card: ‘True thoughts alone, lead to understanding’. Instead, by its hinged, reflexive examination of ‘truth’, Adorno’s proposition provokes a conceptual 180-degree turn: an immanent contradiction emerges as truth – truth juxtaposed negatively against understanding. In Adorno’s hinged world, truth undercuts itself through understanding.
Hitherto, philosophy sought to close the door on questions of truth and understanding. Finding it shut, Adorno wrests it open. Again and again, the hinged door slams – shut, open, shut, open. Adorno’s negative dialectics operates as if produced by a wind in the night at a remove just far enough to disturb our sleep but obviate doing anything about it.
Schoenberg saw his music as perfectly synthetic. On the one hand, he contrived a historical synthesis by casting himself as the inheritor of Bach, Brahms, and Wagner. On the other, he saw his music as eternally German, embodying a national identity.13 His synthetic music embodied universal ahistorical musical ideas [Gedanken] in absolute musical shapes [Gestalten] unprejudiced by relationship to material matter or form.14
Adorno was perennially suspicious of such ‘hapless generalizations’. Like Beethoven’s late works as noted above, Schoenberg’s music rendered an immanent historical verdict: the only possible musical synthesis was [/] that such a synthesis was no longer possible. All truly synthetic musical works took the impossibility of synthesis as their subject: such a work was necessarily ‘a failed attempt to reconcile objective antinomies’ (1998a: 100).
Looking to establish a new means for presenting musical materials as expressive content, Schoenberg contrived ‘atonal’ and ‘twelve-tone’ compositional styles. Both styles, however, express the impossibility of a synthetic musical content.
In Schoenberg’s so-called ‘atonal’ works, from about 1911 to 1919, opp. 11 and 19 notably, the composer attempted to breathe life into musical creation by means of a drastic autonomy in musical form. With the piano pieces op. 11 and op. 19 in particular (alongside the Second String Quartet), Schoenberg undertook a fundamental rethinking of musical harmony and tonality.
By their brevity and compression, the Six Small Piano Pieces, op. 19, are exemplary in this regard. For the layperson and expert alike, there are no readily discernible tonal patterns. Schoenberg makes only the slightest reference to the internal dynamics of ‘classical’ or ‘traditional’ tonality and form. It is possible to argue that these are replaced by new tonal dynamics. But to do so is to miss the point: these pieces express the impossibility of musical form [/] by formal means. They bristle, argue, hover – but go nowhere. The fourth piece is most representative, for it comprises a mere thirteen measures of music. Its most salient features are the three sweeping gestures from high to low that move across the keyboard. But precisely what tonal gravity drives this descent lies beyond rational comprehension. For the expert and the average listener alike, it is possible to detect something going on, but impossible to say what that is by means of tonal syntax and grammar.
The opus 19 pieces are rooms without windows or doors, without entrance or egress. In truth, they belong to the long tradition of musical miniatures for the piano, with precedents in, for example, Chopin’s Preludes, and Schubert’s Moments Musicaux. But unlike those keyboard miniatures, tonal musical form is gone. In celebrating op. 19, we celebrate the persistence of a long tradition of expressive keyboard miniatures, [/] alongside the destruction of its expressive tonal foundation.
Schoenberg believed otherwise. He sought to continue the expressive tradition of Brahms and Wagner, thus assuring the continued superiority of German music for the foreseeable future. But as musical rooms without entrance, his music allowed no verification of content – stylistic tradition or national orientation. Thus Schoenberg’s claims were at once both without basis [/] and irrefutable. Branded as entartete Kunst by the Nazis, Schoenberg’s claims were overturned immanently: without rational access to musical content, there was nothing preventing the Nazi aestheticians from branding the works anti-German, and denying vociferously any comparison to Brahms or Wagner.
Pared beyond the minimum, the historical content of these works becomes a verdict of unprecedented breadth: the issue of the eradication of content encompasses the total history of music [/] by denying it. As Adorno puts it in Perspectives of New Music, these works require a new philosophy, a philosophy of new: ‘Today a philosophy of music is possible only as a philosophy of new music’ (2006: 13). Anti-historical in this sense, these works become by default the music of the ‘present’; they are ‘new music’ since they cannot reside in the past they deny. Being thus by default a music of the present (since there is nothing authentic but the present), they negate the authentic category so fundamental to ‘classical music’, the category of historical timelessness –of ageless musical truth.
In terms of the traditional criteria of authenticity (which we shall turn to at greater length in a moment), Schoenberg’s atonal works are inauthentic. But in hinge-like fashion, they derive a new authentic historical identity as anti-historical music, as authentically inauthentic. Their new authenticity is achieved through negation. The situation is thus: present day music can be written [/] only by denying the historical criteria for a musical present.
Schoenberg’s music is eternally German but only through the immanent negation of Schoenberg’s clearly moribund Völkisch myth of German national identity. Ironically, the rise of nationalist German fascism confirmed the new German identity of these works [/] by attempting to destroy them.
Seeking traditional forms of authenticity in Schoenberg’s atonal works, his listeners are forced to look outside the works for historical justification, precisely the thing these works –by being only and exclusively new music – deny. In seeking historical justification thus, his listeners come to a sublime understanding of the immanent historical truth of these incomprehensible works [/] by misunderstanding them.15 To return to the maxim at the beginning of this chapter, Schoenberg’s listeners demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of how truth can be affirmed through misunderstanding. With uncompromising instinct, they know how the search for free and spontaneous contemplation of music can be turned into the labor of negation. The antinomy immanent here calls to mind that most horrible phrase ‘arbeit macht freie’.
In the twelve-tone works that appear around 1923, Schoenberg attempted to restore the equilibrium of form and content of diatonic tonal music, again by appeal to extreme means. Schoenberg sought to recreate tonal formal tensions between chromatic pitches by ordering them as a tone row.16 In any tone row, all twelve chromatic pitches must be sounded before any given pitch can be repeated. The order in which each of the twelve chromatic pitches sounds will differ from row to row, however.17 Each row is understood as part of a row ‘matrix’, this comprising an original or ‘prime’ row, with forms related to prime by transposition, inversion, retrogression, and all combinations thereof.
Schoenberg held that a twelve-tone row had an expressive internal kinetics, like that of seven-pitch diatonic tonality. But this is impossible on two accounts. On the one hand, the sheer number of tone rows and their serial variations available to the composer (twelve factorial) creates an expanded [erweitert] tonality well beyond the comprehension of the listener. On the other, all the compositional potential of the tone row is contained within the row itself and its forms, and not within a compositional inspiration [Einfall] particular to a single work. Any given row can be used in countless works. Once the row is settled on, the composer has nothing more to develop in the way of tonal materials. Their sole task is to place the predetermined pitch successions of the row in such a way as to create a seemingly unique musical object.
For Adorno, the twelve-tone procedure rendered its own historical verdict. By serial abstraction, it obscured any historical record such as that found in the developing material of classical music. In classical tonality the number and kind of tonalities was determined historically by evolving material constraints (such as tuning and temperament) and by the growth of a bourgeois audience capable of a requisite musical sophistication. By means of its pitch materials (melody, harmony, timbre, and even rhythm) each diatonic work located itself in terms of a historical continuum of developing tonality: thus the difference between Bach and Brahms is evident in the way each composer interprets an evolving musical grammar and syntax according to the materials available and the capacities of their audience.
As noted, however, the formal potential of the twelve-tone row was as good as infinite to the contemporary music listener and thus materially abstract. If a twelve-tone work was subject to historical-material developments, its history was unavailable to its audience. As Adorno put it, such developments were settled on the composer’s worktable long before the work met its audience.18 In summary, the twelve-tone work does not present to the listener an evolving historical relationship linked to concrete musical materials. Instead, the individual work is merely an articulation of an abstract row idea, timelessly absolute in its ontology.
Thus in his twelve-tone music Schoenberg arrived ironically at much the same window-less rooms as he produced in his atonal works. Twelve-tone tonality is present historically in all works in the same way, past, present, and future. Being thus completely abstract, the twelve-tone technique is ahistorical – it destroys material history – much as did the atonal pieces of op 19.19
In lieu of contemplating twelve-tone music in the disinterested fashion he preferred, Schoenberg’s listeners (those who bothered to listen intently) set to work deciphering the twelve-tone row and its forms, much to the composer’s ire. This results in superficial listening, called ‘row fetish’, where the expert listener counts the row pitches. Ironically, Schoenberg’s expert listeners went after the abstract twelve-tone idea, thus abandoning the individual expressive idea Schoenberg sought to revive after classical music.20
Along these abstract lines, Schoenberg’s atonal and twelve-tone works are inauthentic art. Contrived in the composer’s mind as authentic, they negate authenticity by the very nature of their material, which is indecipherable and lies remote from historical-material relation. Whatever subjective residue lies in the composer’s conception of the work is estranged by the opacity of atonality or by the abstraction of the twelve-tone idea. Despite his descriptions thereof, it is as if Schoenberg conceived atonality and the twelve-tone method unwittingly out of the estrangement and abstraction of his own situation. Schoenberg, attempting to immerse himself in the waters of authentic German Völkisch nationalism, situated himself on an island just downstream from Robinson Crusoe.
Taking into account Adorno’s hinged perspective, we turn now to the term authentic [authentisch or more often eigentlich] and its antonym inauthentic [nicht authentisch or uneigentlich] as they might apply to Adorno’s music criticism. At the heart of bourgeois musical aesthetics lies an ideal notion of authenticity, that a work of music is the concrete and particular realization of abstract and eternal musical verities.
Lydia Goehr has described the museum-like institutions this produced, notably the Werktreue concept. Therein she describes the mindset of musical romanicism: ‘Composers enjoyed describing themselves and each other as divinely inspired creators – even as God like – whose sole task was to objectify in music something unique and personal and to express something transcendent. Bizet described Beethoven not as human, but as a God’ (1992: 208). From this perspective, an authentic composer, such as Beethoven, has both a special insight into eternal musical truths and the capacity to realize such truths in characteristically individual forms. Schoenberg is an exceptionally forceful exponent of such authenticity, the details of which are worked out in the essay collection Style and Idea, in particular the essay ‘New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea’.
I myself consider the totality of a piece as the idea: the idea which its composer wanted to present…. An idea can never perish…. One thinks only for the sake of one’s idea…. An idea is born; it must be moulded, formulated, developed, carried through and pursued to its very end. Because there is only ‘l’art pour l’art’, art for the sake of art alone. (1975: 122–4, emphasis in original)
In the context of musical modernism, the traditional concept of authentic – the notion of a pure musical verity – carries with it the antonym inauthentic. To a modern musical sensibility – either reactionary (Schenker, Pfitzner) or progressive (Busoni, Ives) – life has lost its state of grace. Without grace, music is an inauthentic expression of humanity. Schoenberg, in this regard, is not a modern – neither reactionary, nor progressive. He firmly believes in the possibility of a modern authentic grace, the possibility of a concord between an eternal musical idea and its concrete representation as singular musical Gedanke.
Nor is Adorno strictly a musical modern. The very notions of an authentic musical state of grace and its demise would be highly suspect to him. Instead the contradictions immanent in a concept of musical grace will emerge as a negating concord – a second authenticity. If there is a singular musical Gedanke to Adorno’s aesthetic, it is the idea that musical authenticity is possible only as the negation of musical authenticity. Thus he can say of Mahler:
[I]t is only in the moment of inauthenticity [des Uneigentlichen] that the lie of authenticity unmasks, and Mahler has his truth [Wahrheit]…. From inauthenticity the irreplaceable essence is distilled – a meaning that would remain absent if the particular were to be entirely and genuinely identical with itself. Objectively Mahler’s music knows, and expresses the knowledge, that unity is attained not in spite of disjunction, but only through it. (1992: 32–3, translation altered)
The basis for this is a fundamental ontological insight, derived of Heidegger’s reflections on death, of which only a glimpse is to be had from the following:
For the ontologist, whole-being cannot be the unity of the whole content of real life but, qualitatively, must be a third thing; and thus unity will not be sought in life as something harmonious, articulated, and continuous in itself, but will be sought at that point which delimits life and annihilates it, along with its wholeness. (1973a, 146)
From this perspective, music criticism involves three states. The first is the bourgeois state of authenticity exemplified by Schoenberg. The listener is presented with an authentic object for leisured contemplation. The second is a state of negation produced when bourgeois musical idealism meets the realities of class difference arising under the aegis of developing capitalism. Such a state is made readily apparent to the average listener the moment a work of Schoenberg is played. The third is a state of critical recognition. It prizes bourgeois music as a vehicle for the understanding that bourgeois truths do not understand themselves: ‘True thoughts [being] those alone which do not understand themselves’.
Adorno’s first task is to reveal the negation implicit in the traditional concept of musical authenticity, and thereby to reveal such authenticity as inauthentic. He does so, for example, by questioning the fundamental nature of musical reception: given that the composer does their work authentically, then there should be nothing left for the bourgeois listener to do but listen. As Adorno notes in Schoenberg’s case, however, the listener must ‘work for their leisure’. Since it involves the collaboration of the listener, this renders the work of the composer as inauthentic, as fragmentary and thus false.
Through negation, Adorno produces a second state, an ironic critical perspective, a critique of the falsehood implicit in bourgeois authenticity: ‘You came here to be entertained, but, hah! Herr Schoenberg put you to work!’ Were Adorno to stop here, he might be called merely a good ironist, seated comfortably on the balcony of Lukács’ Grand Hotel Abyss, mocking the straights.
But there is a telos to Adorno’s music criticism, a truly critical approach to music. Music is not merely ironic; it is a symptom of the broad malaise of labor and leisure in modern capitalism, the symptoms of which are not readily available even to the most technically advanced bourgeois mind. By means of music, the parlous state of truth in modern capitalism can be understood by critical thought, albeit negatively.
In essence, Adorno’s ultimate task is the constitution of a third, critical state of musical analysis, coming after bourgeois authenticity and its negation. His aim is to describe a new musical authenticity, a fully critical vision of music under capitalism in all its variety, with which to replace the naïve authenticity of bourgeois musical aesthetics. Such a vision would become the point of departure for praxis – an authentically critical musical situation (and thus an exit from Lukács’ famous balcony).
Recall our initial hinged quotation: ‘True thoughts alone [/] do not understand themselves’. The definition of authenticity with which Adorno closes his Philosophy of New Music is written in much the same key: ‘Perhaps that art alone would be authentic that would be [/] liberated from the idea of authenticity itself, of being thus and not otherwise’ (2006: 158). In essence, every authentic construction in music will produce its own reversal. Every authentic construction will become thus inauthentic – ‘liberated from the idea of authenticity’. Expressed in terms of antonyms, every authentic work will become liberated from itself by first becoming inauthentic.21
From this perspective, Schoenberg’s music is an authentic representation of its time. It is not authentic in the composer’s naïve bourgeois terms. Instead, its authenticity is produced in spite of and by that selfsame naïve conception. It negates Schoenberg’s idealist and timeless naïvety. True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves: the truth of Schoenberg’s music lies in its revolutionary capacity to not understand itself.
This concept of a dialectically transformed authenticity, an authentic inauthenticity, is key to the theoretical framework adopted here, but it owes a debt to Max Paddison’s chapter ‘Authenticity and Failure in Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music’, in the Cambridge Companion to Adorno (2004). In the context of Adorno’s music criticism, Paddison arrives at a revision of authentic as inauthentic, as authenticity reestablished after negation.
For Paddison, the pre-modern authentic is based upon the idea of a real and original musical work, a unique entity along Adorno’s lines of ‘being thus and not otherwise’. The principal condition for ‘being thus and not otherwise’ is autonomy in intent and in practice: the authentic artwork exists in-and-of-itself.22 Being absolutely self-contained (l’art pour l’art as Schoenberg states), it is thus authoritative. Beethoven is an authentic and authoritative composer producing works that cannot be otherwise, a blend of urtext and genius. In this regard, he and others like him are held by bourgeois musicology to be fundamentally timeless, noumenal, directly in touch with truth.
To this definition, Paddison adds the caveat failure, and his definition of authentic begins a slow pirouette toward the inauthentic as if around a hinge. The inauthentic is produced by contrivance and fakery, and by external determinants, not by an original creative impulse. Thus it is a counterfeit, and lacking unique identity, it is capable of mass reproduction (2004: 201).
The consistency of artworks is the aspect that enables them to share in the truth, [/] but it also implicates them in falsehood (Adorno, 1976: 242, cited in Paddison, 2004: 211).
And:
At this level the consistency of the work and its integrated totality, its truth and authenticity, put forward initially as universal principles, are seen as false, as illusory, as inauthentic. (2004: 211)
Paddison reckons this new, second stage, inauthentic paradigm as ‘after Auschwitz’. Thus it is by nature reflective, measuring everything by that most horrific watermark, the high tide of Nazi fascism.
His second stage, however, contains within it a new credential. After Auschwitz, truly authentic musical works bear both the responsibility for and the scars of past terrors. Thus they are historic, conditioned by the past. Being historic in this reflective sense, their inauthenticity would compromise the fundamentally non-historical nature of the bourgeois musical authentic. (As Adorno puts it, in The Jargon of Authenticity: ‘Yet history does intrude on every word and withholds each word from the recovery of some alleged original meaning, that meaning which the jargon is always trying to track down’ [1973a: 8].) Thus authenticity surrenders all claims to rising above the whiles of history: ‘After Auschwitz, the authentic works are the failures … “the authentic artists of the present are those in whose works there shudders the aftershock of the most extreme terror”’ (Paddison, 2004: 199, citing Adorno, 1998b: 48). To reiterate, this is a reflexive hinge: after Auschwitz, any truly authentic artwork [/] must fail to be authentic in the old way. Branded by Auschwitz, no work thereafter is authentically unique. All works are but variations upon extreme terror, a music in which the same shockwaves still reverberate. As our epigraph suggests, National Socialism sought to reduce the effects of these shockwaves by racial ‘harmonization’ and the evolutionary elimination of dissonant elements.
Paddison puts this in broad perspective. In customary usage in bourgeois music criticism, authentic implies both a singular purity and a correspondence. The authentic artwork must correspond to a true and unique identity, thus be true to itself (reflexive), while being true to a pure and immutable musical idea (and thus be refractive). To the bourgeois musicological mind, the inauthentic work, on the other hand, will distort its relation to self, through mass reproduction for instance, or distort its origins, by appeal to the extramusical. The inauthentic work will serve a false master – as mere ‘style’ without direct relation to idea (in Schoenberg’s sense) or as a commercial success, a ‘sell out’, a sop to convention. The measure of authenticity in a musical work is thus solely an internal, purely musical thing (l’art pour l’art), a unique correspondence refracting some eternal musical idea. Thus any material – harmony, rhythm, tonality – will be suitable for art, as long as an authentic correspondence to some ultimate and ideal true identity (‘being for itself’) is observed.
Adorno, however, holds that a composer is not free to choose the material of a work without some regard to historical appropriateness. Instead the work will refract the material condition of the world in its content and materials. Paddison puts it thus: ‘Adorno’s position was that the composer’s choice was severely limited by the historical stage reached by the material and … not all possibilities were actually made available. Indeed, he insisted that the material itself made historical demands on the composer to which the composer had no choice but to respond’ (2004: 205).
Both the work and the process of selection will show the nature and limitations of the composer’s consciousness. Even the most technically progressive composer – Schoenberg being Adorno’s example – will sport a regressive consciousness, should they choose to ignore material history.
This puts the onus on the critical listener to discern the hinged authenticity of the musical material. As Paddison puts it:
Authenticity for Adorno is therefore also associated with a modernist, fractured relationship between the individual and the social, the internal structure of the artwork and the external conditions with which it functions, a relationship which imputes a high degree of self-consciousness and self-reflexivity to the work of art at a structural, technical level. (2004: 199)
He places this under the rubric ‘ideological’: ‘The ideological moment of all art can also be seen as “authentic”, in that it acts as a critical commentary on the real material relations of society, whether it wishes it or not’ (2004: 211). At the heart of his reading is a dual state – authentic, and ideological:
What this reading attempts to clarify is a complex problem in Adorno’s aesthetics: that the autonomous, individual work of art can be simultaneously ideological (i.e. a manifestation of false consciousness, illusion, self-deception) and authentic (in the sense of being a form of critical cognition, of critical reflection). Adorno formulates the problem thus:
The fact that society ‘appears’ in works of art both in an ideological and a critical manner is apt to lead to historico-philosophical mystification. Speculative thought is easily duped into thinking there is a pre-established harmony between society and works of art, courtesy of world spirit. Their true relationship is different, however. (2004: 215–16, citing Adorno, 1984: 335)
The reversal of authentic as inauthentic is more than ideology, however. It has a fundamental ontic quality, one with direct implications for Adorno’s music reception. The material nature of every musical work, certainly in late capitalism, is founded on a hinge-like reversal that brings together authenticity and its opposite in a synthetic antagonism, so as to produce a third state, that of authentic inauthenticity.
The authenticity of a musical work as a bourgeois absolute, in-and-of-itself, is joined in hinge-like fashion with its inauthentic antipode, the work’s material nature as shaped by external, historical factors. The combination of the two creates a hinged synthesis, a negative dialectic. We might express it thus:
Authentic works of music appear as absolute and thus self-contained shapes [Gestalten] that realize eternal musical verities [Gedanken]. [/] But in doing so, they express their precise historical moment by suppressing their history and material basis.
Or with a greater simplicity:
The only truly authentic work of music is based upon the traditional concept of musical authenticity [/] framed by the material inauthenticity of modern musical history.
‘After Auschwitz’, or simply in the climate of material modernism, to produce an artistic thing in-and-of-itself, as Schoenberg thought to do, would be inauthentic. To produce, however, a modernist artwork that fails necessarily ‘after Auschwitz’ would be an antinomic success – authentically inauthentic. According to Adorno, this is what Schoenberg did, in spite of his best intentions. Responding to the need for fresh musical works shaped by the material necessities of music in late capitalism, Schoenberg produced rationally authentic atonal and twelve-tone works, [/] whose authenticity could not be rationally deciphered with reference to historical material terms. Schoenberg’s works are truths known by estrangement from themselves. Adorno sets the mark thus, in the broadest terms possible (not simply for music):
As the thinker immerses himself in what faces him to begin with, in the concept, and as he perceives its immanently antinomical character, he clings to the idea of something beyond contradiction. Antithesis of thought to whatever is heterogeneous to thought is reproduced in thought itself, as its immanent contradiction. (1973b: 146)
The essays ‘Missa Solemnis, Alienated Masterpiece’ and ‘Late Style in Beethoven’ are perhaps the most opaque of Adorno’s writings on music.23 Our aim here is to apply the theoretical framework proposed in this chapter – Adorno’s hinge-like constructions linked to the tri-partite scheme of authenticity – to their elucidation. In essence, Adorno argues that late Beethoven derives a critical authenticity from the renunciation of bourgeois musical subjectivity. This is done in hinge-like fashion: using all the compositional means available to him as the master of subjective expression in music, [/] Beethoven renounces musical subjectivity.
To understand the late period, we must revise the customary appreciation accorded Beethoven’s middle-period music. The middle-period works are received customarily as the exemplars of authentic classical music. They were understood as such in their day, and continue to be so. The late-period renunciation of subjectivity in Beethoven would appear contradictory, then. To the bourgeois mind, middle-period Beethoven is the very apex of the rising individual musical subject. His accomplishment is a classical Parnassus achieved by way of Bach, Haydn, and Mozart. The middle-period works elicit the rubrics of ‘absolute’, ‘Romantic’, and ‘psychological’. Referred to as ‘heroic’, they connote a singular and thus subjective courage in the face of adversity. Beethoven’s middle-period symphonies in particular affirm the capacity to express the absolute self as Romantic subject matter.
The middle-period works, however, support a class that distinguishes itself by myths of absolute disinterest and the subjectivity of superior intelligence, and which claims as its just rewards the accumulation of capital at the expense of the laboring class. Middle-period Beethoven is inauthentic in this regard. It is neither absolute nor authentically subjective. Instead, it expresses middle-class subjectivity. It serves as a vehicle for class division and the reinforcement of the bourgeoisie. Seen in this light, it is music applied to the goal of class division. And as applied music, it negates those absolute pretensions it would pretend to espouse.
Adorno saw this uncritical perspective as dependent upon a spurious conception of totality, the ‘affirmative element’ in the middle period. The unqualified affirmation of Beethoven’s oeuvre negates the historical material fact: middle-period Beethoven is bourgeois music through and through. Drawing on Rose Rosengard Subotnik’s work (1991), I noted Adorno’s suspicions in this regard:
Classicism is a deception. Adorno calls it the ‘self-deception of totality’…. Only the works of the late style are truly objective: ‘Beethoven’s last works are the objective answer’. Beethoven’s middle-period work is a manufactured falsehood…. For Adorno the late style responds to a suspicion sown by mediation: ‘To the musical experience of the late Beethoven the unity of subjectivity and objectivity, the roundedness of the successful symphony, the totality arising from the motion of all particulars, in short, that which gives the works of his middle period their authenticity, must have become suspect’. As Adorno puts it: ‘He saw through the classic as classicism. He rebelled against the affirmative element, the uncritical approbation of Being, inherent in the idea of the classical symphony…. He must have felt the untruth in the highest aspirations of classicist music: that the quintessence … is positivity itself’. (Dineen, 2011: 65–6)
From Adorno’s perspective, Beethoven’s middle period is inauthentic, a contrived representation of synthetic unity. In the late works, however, Beethoven defines his subjective musical will [/] as the power to destroy this inauthentic musical subjectivity.
The opaque quality of the late works responds to the inauthenticity of the middle-period style. Lengthy sonata forms, expressive melodies, expanded tonalities – the late quartets and sonatas carry forth the innovations that lend the middle period its veneer of radical subjectivity. But the late works – the Missa Solemnis in particular – take up this radical content in such a manner as to show the middle period’s conventional foundations, as conventionally bourgeois.24
In its current, uncritical state, musicological criticism misses the real issue by referring to the late style works as enigmatic. From a material class perspective their meaning as works of material musical criticism could not be clearer. They fight against the pigeon-hole the bourgeois critic would place them in – as middle-period heroism transformed into bathos. The enigma here lies not with the music but rather resides in the limitations of the critic’s mind, given as it is to flights of fancy fed by an aesthetic of immaculate conception.
Adorno picks up the notion of understanding in terms of truth and understanding. Writing about the industry of traditional Beethoven criticism, he says:
After all that has been written above, it might appear that the Missa characterized in all its uniqueness, could now be understood. But the dark quality of the work, perceived as such, does not brighten without further analysis. To understand that one does not understand is the first step toward understanding but is not understanding itself. (2002: 579)
That is to say, most critics stop after declaring the enigma of the late works. To gain true understanding, they should not fault the work but examine the enigma of their own criticism.
Against the forces of classicization, late Beethoven pushes back by exploding musical subjectivity, shattering it into ‘shards’ as Adorno puts it. Thus Beethoven ‘alienates’ music from bourgeois thought. In doing so, the late works, notably the Missa Solemnis (called an ‘alienated masterpiece’ by Adorno), create authenticity afresh, but in the form of a critique of the inauthenticity fundamental to bourgeois music making. The authentic critique of subjectivity therein is an enigma to the bourgeois mind, a cul-de-sac from which there is no egress by means of bourgeois consciousness. (This included Beethoven’s consciousness. Despite renouncing subjectivity through all the musical means available, Beethoven, as bourgeois subjectivity’s greatest exponent, could not pass the threshold of conscious renunciation.)
Certain ideas presented in the ‘Missa’ and ‘Late Style’ essays are familiar to us, such as the notion of extraordinary musical labor, of effort expended on the part of the listener. In light of late Beethoven, we can see these ideas as elements in the renunciation of an inauthentic subjectivity. Thus Adorno refers to the critic Krezschmar’s ‘chief difficulty’ with the Missa ‘with reference to the large number of short musical images which require the listener to organize them into a unity’. As Adorno put it, Kretzschmar was ‘at least’ onto something: ‘Kretzschmar has at least named one of the alienating symptoms which the Missa exhibits’ (2002: 571). The Missa moves in a direction that will lead to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music, toward making the listener’s labor a fundamental part of the musical commodity. Thereby, bourgeois listeners are alienated from the musical work (or challenged to surrender their bourgeois subjectivity).
At the heart of our attempt to elucidate Adorno’s late-style essays lie three essential ideas framed in three enigmatic quotations. While not rife with hinged constructions, the very thoughts themselves are of a hinge-like quality.
Adorno prefaces the first of these passages with the following: ‘The human idea asserts itself … only by virtue of convulsive, mythic denial [/] of the mythical abyss’ (2002: 577). For Adorno, the late style denies the abyss created by bourgeois subjectivity, an abyss carried out to mythical proportions (the grand heroism of the symphonies) so as to obscure its falsehoods. The inauthenticity of such an abyss as false heroism cannot be denied by simple, rational argument. In order to destroy the bourgeois myths of music, Beethoven must create an opposing vehicle of comparable mythical proportion while using bourgeois technical means. This presupposes an ‘indifference’ in technique – as if the bourgeois techniques of musical composition were to be stripped of their class purposes, while retaining their technical basis. Adorno establishes a notion of grand mythic proportion in classical music, the approach to an infinite nothingness through extreme compression.
In its aesthetic form the work asks what and how one may sing of the absolute without deceit, and because of this, there occurs that compression which alienates it [the work] and causes it to approach incomprehensibility. This is so perhaps because the question which it asks itself refuses even musically the valid answer. The subject then remains exiled in its finiteness. The objective cosmos can no longer be imagined as an obligatory construct. Thus the Missa balances on point of indifference which approaches nothingness. (2002: 578)
Here Adorno refers to an ‘absolute’ forced into exile by the finite nature of bourgeois objectivity. If there was an authentic absolute in music, it has been exiled, sequestered, pushed to one side by false representation. The absolute, like truth, cannot be known except as that which one cannot know, given the limitations of one’s class consciousness. As a good bourgeois, one cannot pretend simply to ‘sing about’ such an absolute without raising charges of deceit. By simply singing – addressing the absolute in contrived bourgeois terms – one would attempt to mask its incomprehensibility, and thus fail the untruth in the work’s truth.
To such false bourgeois representations of the absolute, the Missa is ‘indifferent’, says Adorno. The Missa acknowledges such representations, but treats them as spurious, as flawed, not worth countenancing except by distancing oneself from them.
The subject of the Missa, then, is the mythical failure of bourgeois musical thought. The latter is worthy only of indifference, of getting over it, ita missa est. As Adorno says: ‘Unity transcends into the fragmentary…. The gap between both becomes obvious and makes the impossibility of aesthetic harmony into the aesthetic content of the work; makes failure of aesthetic harmony [/] in a highest sense a means of success’ (2002: 581).
To know true freedom, the musical subject gives up its autonomy in favor of ‘heteronomy’, as Adorno calls it. Only by freely alienating itself from subjectivity – by ‘pseudo morphosis’ with alienation and alienated forms – will the autonomous subject succeed:
The autonomous subject, that subject which otherwise cannot know itself capable of objectivity, secedes from freedom to heteronomy. Pseudo morphosis to an alienated form, at one with the expression of alienation itself, is supposed to accomplish what otherwise would be incapable of accomplishment. (2002: 581)
The late works are archaic in a fundamental sense (and not merely by allusion to archaic forms such as fugue, addressed by conventional musicology). They take the middle period in its entirety as their horizon, as the archaic point of reference. And they pose the question: is all bourgeois music archaic, and if so, is music making still possible? Style in late Beethoven (and late Bach as well as Schoenberg) is not forward looking, not concerned with the present, but retrospective. The question is not ‘What is possible?’ but rather ‘What is still possible?’:
The aesthetically fragile in the Missa Solemnis, the denial of conspicuous organization in favor of an almost cuttingly strict question as to what is at all still possible, corresponds in deceptively closed surface to the open fractures which the last quartets demonstrate. The tendency to an archaicization which here is still tempered, is shared by the Missa with the last style of almost all great composers from Bach to Schoenberg. They have all, as exponents of the bourgeois spirit, reached the limits of that spirit without, however, in the bourgeois world ever being able to climb beyond it on their own. (2002: 581–2)
This critique of the late works runs completely counter to customary musicological thought. Whereas Adorno depends upon historical material frameworks, musicologists customarily address Beethoven’s late-style works in terms of subjectivity expressed as ‘biography and fate’. As Adorno puts it:
The usual view explains this with the argument that [late works] are products of an uninhibited subjectivity, or, better yet, ‘personality’, which breaks through the envelope of form to better express itself, transforming harmony into the dissonance of its suffering, and disdaining sensual charms with the sovereign self-assurance of the spirit liberated. In this way, late works are relegated to the outer reaches of art, in the vicinity of document. In fact, studies of the very late Beethoven seldom fail to make reference to biography and fate. It is as if, confronted with the dignity of human death, the theory of art were to divest itself of its rights and abdicate in favor of reality. (2002: 564)
Appeals to biography and fate are extraneous to the actual work of music criticism. Authentic criticism should address the material of the artwork – the historically determined material quality of the artwork, its determinate form. Authentic criticism, however, is displaced by evocations of subjective spirit and suffering.25
A similar thread is spun in Adorno’s description of Bach’s angry devotees and their musico-critical jurisprudence, in the essay ‘Bach Defended against His Devotees’, in Prisms (1967). In the process of defending Bach’s music against ‘inauthentic’ performance, Bach’s actual music is set to one side. It is sequestered, as Adorno put it above, in the ‘vicinity of the document’, the Gesamtausgabe or grand critical edition which sits like a volume of trial precedents on a lawyer’s bookshelf. For his devotees, Bach’s music exists solely as a point of reference. Like a set of laws, it is referred to only when broken. It serves solely as a means to determine performance infractions, as leisure turned again into work, the labor of jurisprudence. For the devotee of late-style Beethoven, as described by Adorno, the actual music is likewise set to one side by musicologists. It exists solely as a yardstick to measure reconciliation to impending death – Beethoven’s death.
The ‘usual view’ of late style in Beethoven is ad hominem: the meaning of the music is determined by the subjective person of the composer. Beethoven was entering the final phase of his life, ergo the arcane style of his late works. But if biography were the substance of music criticism, then, as Adorno tells us, ‘every notebook of Beethoven’s would possess greater significance than the Quartet in C-sharp Minor’ (2002: 564).
Rather than reflecting biography and death, the late works and their vaunted style are refractory, bending light away from the subjectivity of the composer. Adorno expresses this as follows, in his customary hinged style:
The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is [/] the irascible gesture with which [subjectivity] takes leave of the works themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art. (2002: 566)
The late works do not express bourgeois subjectivity. They are instead the detritus pushed aside by a new heteronomous subjectivity that achieves wholeness by failure. As noted, Adorno called them ‘splinters’, remnants that express the impossibility of subjectivity under the regimes of capitalism: works are ‘ –no longer, at this point, an expression of the solitary I, but of the mythical nature of the created being and its fall’ (2002: 566).
In summary, Beethoven carried on composing in his late style with all the power and facility of the middle period. In doing so, however, he showed that power and facility for what it had become, a mythical falsehood. Only a technically accomplished bourgeois composer like Beethoven could envision the contradictions of musical subjectivity in bourgeois nineteenth-century Vienna so as to arrive at an authentic material critique of musical subjectivity. In this regard, Beethoven resembles Schoenberg, who, in Style and Idea, recounts the following: ‘In the army, a superior officer once said to me: “So you are this notorious Schoenberg, then”. “Beg to report, sir, yes”, I replied. “Nobody wanted to be, someone had to be, so I let it be me”’ (1975: 104).
Surely in Adorno’s thought, there existed some musical Arcadia, above the tides of negative dialectics. Given a lack of evidence in Adorno’s writings, let us posit such a world as a thought experiment. In our Arcadia, veracity is ever dependent upon the awareness of dialectics: every truth is maintained in terms of its provisional opposite in a continual process, as transient intransigence. In this Arcadia, the wind blows freely through the windows and doors of every musical work.
Adorno’s world, however, was no Arcadia, but a world filled with fascist terrorism. We often forget how this extended to music.26 We are tempted to envision the musical object of terrorism to be as forceful and violent as the state itself, thus aggressively loud, assaulting the ears much as police truncheons assault protestors, along the lines of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. As our epigraph suggests, however, the music of the Nazi state was designed not to confront dissent directly, but instead through harmonization. It was to assert a grand racial homogeneity – Volk – in response to the fractious Weimar republic. In this regard, its singular adherence to one aesthetic was authentically contrived, as authentically Völkisch, as a veracity rooted in the falsehood of a true German people. Musical fascism depended for its force more upon threats to its purity – upon the specter of racial impurity – than on purity itself. But it kept these largely quiet, the specter lurking in the dark, a threat to be drawn out from time to time as a warning. In public, fascism preferred a homogeneous face.
In this way, Nazi Germany lacked any vehicle for discerning immanent negation. Under its oppressive harmony, authenticity could be neither questioned nor verified. The creation of a Völkisch culture extended not only to production but also to its laudatory and uncritical reception. Thus, in The Jargon of Authenticity, Adorno could speak of ‘authentics’ talk’ and a ‘cult of authenticity’ (referencing Heidegger) and link it to fascism:
Prior to any consideration of particular content, this language [the jargon of authenticity] moulds thought. As a consequence, that thought accommodates itself to the goal of subordination even where it aspires to resist that goal. The authority of the absolute is overthrown by absolutized authority. Fascism was not simply a conspiracy…. Language provides it with a refuge. Within this refuge a smouldering evil expresses itself as though it were salvation. (1973a: 5)
Surely this was what Adorno bore in mind when speaking of a culture industry, meaning thus an industry of both production and reception – the two united under the rubrics of folk and race. Given that Nazi music criticism could not countenance the possibility of an inauthentic aesthetic, there could be no third authentic stage based on an objective assessment of music as cultural-industrial ideology. Such criticism was not allowed in any official Nazi organ.
Musical rooms in Nazi Germany were thus designed without doors or windows, without entrance or egress. And without hinges. Their contents lay firmly sealed behind a façade. A critical musical content was thus rendered inconceivable, either by a grand homogenizing vehicle that silenced criticism from without, or by windows, doors, and walls so thick and immovable that no plaintive cries could penetrate to the mercy of the outside world.
1. Waldmann, 1939: 18. Translation is this author’s.
2. ‘Every poem is music – a determined, persuasive, reliable, enthusiastic, and crafted music’, Oliver, 1998: ix.
3. Schoenberg’s model was Brahms. See the essay ‘Brahms the Progressive’, in Schoenberg, 1975.
4. See Schoenberg, 1967. Schoenberg’s principal model is the first eight measures of Beethoven’s F Minor Piano Sonata, op. 2, no. 1, which he called the ‘sentence form’. But compare the balanced pairing in the familiar ‘Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques’, followed by ‘Dormez-vous, Dormez-vous?’, or ‘Three blind mice, three blind mice’, are paired with ‘See how they run, see how they run’.
5. Schoenberg’s idealism is a constant in all his speculative essays, especially those collected in Style and Idea (Schoenberg, 1975, see for example p.132). The late Patricia Carpenter wrote at length in this regard. See her edition of Schoenberg’s Gedanke Manuscript, with Severine Neff and Charlotte Cross, as Schoenberg, 2006. And see Carpenter, 1984, on Schoenberg and Kant.
6. This usage of hinge was raised at an Adorno seminar held during the annual meeting of the American Comparative Linguistics Association at Providence, Rhode Island in 2012. I am indebted to Gerhard Richter, among other participants, for helping to sharpen the idea in the seminar’s colloquy.
7. ‘Diese Richtung der Begrifflichkeit zu ändern, sie dem Nichtidentischen zuzukehren, ist das Scharnier negativer Dialektik’. Adorno, 1975: 24.
8. In this sense, Adorno’s musical prose might be called dissonant.
9. See Adorno, 1996a, and 2002: 51, on Chaplin.
10. Citing Hegel, Jenenser Realphilosophie, I: 237.
11. Compare, for example, Lectures on Negative Dialectics (2008) and Negative Dialectics (1973b). The former is largely devoid of hinge, while the idiom fills the latter with dissonant music.
12. Compare Hardt and Negri (2000): 217, on ‘increasingly immaterial forms of affective and intellectual labor power…’.
13. See Schoenberg, 1975: 173.
14. On Schoenberg’s relation to politics, see Dineen, 2009.
15. See the reference to the ‘sublime understanding’ of Mahler’s jackass in Adorno, 1990: 149, and see Dineen, 2011: 9.
16. See the two essays entitled ‘Composition with Twelve Tones’, in Schoenberg, 1975: 214–49.
17. And the pitches of the row can be played individually as a melody, or (in imitation of harmony) they can be combined to sound at the same time.
18. See the chapter ‘Technique’ in Dineen, 2011: 73–101.
19. For this reason, Schoenberg introduced antiquated forms such as the gigue and the ‘sentence form’ into his twelve-tone works. See Spinner, 1960.
20. See Schoenberg’s riposte to Richard Hill in Style and Idea (1975: 213–14).
21. The potential this has for redeeming Adorno’s oft-disparaged remarks on popular music cannot be explored here, but see Dineen, 2011: 34–49. Compare Adorno, 2002: 71: ‘The differences in the reception of ‘classical’ music and light music no longer have any real significance’.
22. Hanslick, 1986 and Clive Bell, 1916 are often taken as a point of reference for this position.
23. Both are reproduced in Adorno, 2002. Compare Said, 2006.
24. See Said, 2007: 245: ‘Beethoven, who stands for the newly triumphant bourgeoisie’.
25. Compare Sullivan, 1960.
26. See Evans, 2005: 187–218.
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