‘There is a bullet in his head on the left side’, said his mother. Karl had shot himself on the Sunday, but the bullet did not penetrate the skull. Beethoven was distraught: ‘My Karl has shot himself’, he said, ‘there's hope that he can be saved; – but the disgrace that he has brought me; and I loved him so.’ Beethoven's love for his nephew, however, was an obsessive one. His suffocating embrace had driven Karl to the hills of Baden in the summer of 1826 to take his own life. The suicide attempt had the desired effect – the composer's life was shattered. Some commentators claim to hear the repercussions of this ordeal in Beethoven's last quartet, but in fact it is the other way around: Beethoven had already driven his music to self destruction – Karl, in a sense, was enacting the music. And the motive for suicide? Karl mentions the ‘weariness of imprisonment’.

It is an apt phrase: the weariness of imprisonment. Adorno could have uttered these words, except they would have been universal – the absolute suffering of history and the total incarceration of humanity.