'Scars of damage and disruption are the modern's seal of authenticity.' Adorno Aesthetic Theory What does Adorno mean by 'authenticity'? The concept undoubtedly occupies an important place in his aesthetics and pervades his thinking to a remarkable degree, even when the term itself is absent. But as is the case with much of his conceptual framework, his notion of authenticity is never directly defined or addressed, and its meaning has to be inferred from its relation to other concepts. This apparent fuzziness makes it prone to dismissal as mere rhetoric and lays it open to the accusation that it serves no other purpose than to conceal summative and unsubstantiated value judgments on artworks under a cloak of unattributed authority. It can appear to lack a clear identity. Its dependency on its relation to clusters of other concepts becomes obvious enough when one considers claims like the following in Ästhetische Theorie (1970): 'The seal of authentic artworks is that what they appear to be appears as if it could not be prevaricated, even though discursive judgment is unable to define it' (AT, 199).

Introduction

Adorno's Philosophie der neuen Musik was published in 1949, at a decisive turning-point for music in the mid-twentieth century. In this highly influential book, Adorno put forward a dialectical reading of the New Music in the form of a critique of its two most extreme representatives, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The effects were dramatic, providing a rallying cry for the generation of new composers emerging in the immediate post-war years, and who were to become associated both with the rejection of neoclassicism and with the espousal of the multiple serialism of the Darmstadt School. The reception of Adorno's critique by the two protagonists themselves was in some respects contrary to expectations. Schoenberg, who disliked Adorno, saw it primarily as an attack on himself, thus going directly against the general view, which regarded Adorno as the great advocate of the Second Viennese School. But at the same time Schoenberg also sprang to Stravinsky's defence, annoyed by Adorno's treatment of his old adversary. Stravinsky, on the other hand, remained silent – in public, at least – thus making it difficult to gauge the extent to which Adorno's critique of his music may have played any determining role in the composer's own spectacular change of direction in the early 1950s, when he himself abandoned neoclassicism and turned to serialism. This has, naturally enough, prompted speculation. Célestin Deliège, for instance, has argued:

By the second half of the nineteenth century music had achieved a central position among the arts, to the extent that, as Walter Pater put it in 1877 in his now celebrated aperçu, ‘all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’. This registered a remarkable change in the aesthetic status of music in the hundred years from the 1780s to the 1880s. From an art form regarded as a pleasant but meaningless entertainment without cognitive value, music had come to be viewed as the vehicle of ineffable truths beyond conceptualisation. Although the idea of art music as an autonomous, non-conceptual reflection of inwardness upon itself had remained a constant throughout this period, what had changed was the perception of music by the other arts and the interpretation of this non-conceptuality, particularly in philosophical aesthetics. While the focus in this essay is on music and ideas in the period from 1848, the centrality of the concept of autonomy to the other arts by the late nineteenth century also provides other vantage points from which to view a phenomenon which was to become largely naturalised within music itself. It can be argued, indeed, that for this very reason music calls for awareness of its reflections outside itself, in particular in literature and philosophy, in order for the implications of its autonomy and non-conceptuality to be recognised more fully. An example to illustrate this point is to be found in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s infamous novel A Rebours of 1884, a work which takes to its extremes the retreat into the inner world and the rejection of the dominant Realism and Naturalism of its time.

A casual survey of Adorno's writings on music could well give the impression that his theoretical concerns emerged fully formed in the 1920s and did not change substantially thereafter. There is some truth in Friedemann Grenz's observation that ‘Adorno's thought had remained always constant, without periods of change, that there had been no development in it’ Indeed, the unity of thought throughout his work is striking, and there are evident connections between even the most occasional of the early pieces and the large-scale philosophical writings of his last years. Nevertheless, there is also a sense in which Adorno's work does show development over time. It moves from the early non-Marxian writings to an idiosyncratic reception of Marx and Hegel influenced by the neo-Marxism of Lukacs and by the attempt of the Frankfurt School to bring about a fusion of Marx and Freud. In addition, Adorno's emigration years in the United States were marked by an abrupt encounter with empirical sociology and psychology, while the period of his return to Frankfurt in the post-war years was characterized by a certain consolidation in his philosophical and critical method in works like Negative Dialektik and Ästhetische Theorie. All these developments have implications for his aesthetics of music.

Adorno's interpretation of Mahler's music would seem to legitimize as ‘authentic’ a very different relationship to material and a very different conception of form from that suggested by his interpretation of Schoenberg. This difference, which has the character of a contradiction, calls for examination, as it has implications both for the concept of musical material since the ‘demise of modernism’, and for the theoretical consistency of Adorno's dialectical aesthetics. As a conclusion to this study I shall focus the discussion particularly on issues arising from Philosophie der neuen Musik, drawing also on the views of a number of Adorno's critics.

In very general terms, I suggest that the contradictory character of Adorno's work needs to be seen in two ways. On the one hand, as has been emphasized throughout this study, contradiction is a calculated feature of Adorno's methodology. He understands the object of enquiry itself to embody the contradictions of the social forces and relations of production, and his interpretative method aims to reveal and decipher this ‘contradictoriness’ as the ‘mediation of opposites through their extremes’. The concepts he employs can themselves only be understood when seen within the larger conceptual context which, I have argued, underlies all his writings, and which is itself characterized by the idea of the ‘constellation’ of opposites within which each concept takes its meaning.

‘The forms of art record the history of mankind more impartially than do documents’, writes Adorno in Philosophie der neuen Musik. As we have seen, Adorno argues that the truth and authenticity of art works is not to do with the amount of ‘historical relevance’ or ‘social commitment’ consciously invested in them by their creators. It has instead to do with the extent to which the artist responds to the demands of the material ‘in itself’ – demands which are historical and social in character because the material is already historically pre-formed. Thus, the philosophical interpretation of musical works involves the deciphering of their historical and social content through tracing the mediating links between autonomous works and the heteronomy of empirical reality – links which are embedded, however, in the material and structure of the works themselves.

Although predicated on the music of Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School and viewed from the perspective of the avant-garde, Adorno's concept of musical material does not simply represent the progressive and ideological view of music history characterized by continuity which is suggested by certain commentators (for instance de la Fontaine and others, including Dahlhaus).

In Adorno's very early writings the idea of ‘musical material’ itself remains as yet rather unfocused. It is only later that the concept receives its most comprehensive formulation - that is, in Philosophie der neuen Musik. Indeed, the whole argument of that book is predicated on the idea that it is not what ‘musical sounds’ are in themselves – their natural, physical qualities – that is significant, but rather what they have become in any particular instance. Adorno maintains that it is in the relationships of sounds one to another, which are historical in character, that social relations are sedimented, albeit in purely musical terms. Nevertheless, although Philosophie der neuen Musik offers a version of the concept in its apparently most complete form, it is argued here that a clearer understanding of what is meant by ‘musical material’ is to be gained from a careful examination of how the idea of the mediation of music and society unfolds in Adorno's work from the late 1920s up to the period of his exile from Germany in the mid-1930s.

Berg's Sonata op. 1 and its relation to Wagner's Tristan

In his analysis of Berg's Piano Sonata op. 1 Adorno focuses on the work very much from the perspective of its extreme motivic economy, and consequently mainly in relation to Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony op. 9. He also, of course, discusses it in terms of ‘continuous transition, ’ but certainly, and rather curiously, gives this aspect of the work less emphasis. The relation to Wagner is not really mentioned in the analysis of the Sonata in Berg: Der Meister des kleinsten Übergangs, although the Wagnerian influence is considered at some length in connection with Berg's music in general. But although Adorno, in emphasizing the importance of Wagner's influence on Berg, does not follow this through in his analysis, he does drop some hints in the article ‘Berg and Webero - Schonberg's heirs’ (1930) suggesting a link with Tristan which I would like to pursue in more detail here. In doing this I hope to show that, even where Adorno's own interpretations are fragmentary and lacking in careful and consistent analysis to back up his insights, they can, if regarded as aperçus needing critique and further development, lead to valuable new perceptions.

The suggestion that there is a strong link between Berg's music in general and Wagner's Tristan in particular warrants being followed up by means of immanent analysis - particularly in the case of the Sonata op. 1, given the special significance Adorno attaches to it within Berg's total compositional output.

‘Material refers to all that is being formed’, writes Adorno in Ästhetische Theorie. As we have seen, however, Adorno insists that ‘material’ is not simply that which is formed and shaped in the compositional process of any particular musical work, as ‘raw material’ (Stoff); musical material is itself already historically ‘pre-formed’. That is to say, musical material is mediated not only because it is shaped, more or less consistently, within the form of the work itself, but precisely because it is already historically and culturally pre-formed before any individual act of composition even begins.

But here lies the ambiguity: Adorno appears to emphasize the general concept of material over that of the particular musical work. It is the ‘progress of musical material’ he seems to see as a manifestation of the ‘progress of spirit’, rather than the individual musical work. One is left to assume that the general progress of the material can exist only in and through its manifestation in particular works, although this is not directly stated.

The absence of a fully formulated concept of mediation within Adorno's ‘Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik’ has been commented on in the previous chapter. As we saw, Adorno had written in 1932 that ‘a solution to the problem of mediation in music has by no means been found; it is rather only that the location of the problem has been designated with greater precision’. However, in spite of his recognition of the problematic character of the relation of music to society, and of the ‘natural’ and ‘historical’ within musical material, Adorno could be accused of continuing to use the concept of mediation in his subsequent work as though the very application of the term itself served to resolve the underlying problem. In view of this it is important to see the concept as part of a broader historical context of ideas.

Although Adorno claims to focus on the ‘unique particular’ and insists that mediation cannot be understood in the abstract, but only through the examination of concrete individual instances, there are nevertheless features of the concept and of its context of ideas which can usefully be identified at a level of generality.

In a well-known scene in Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus, the Devil, in one of his transformations before the troubled composer Adrian Leverkühn, appears as the philosopher Adorno. With delicate understatement and a hint of caricature, Mann sketches the contradictory character of this most influential and controversial of twentieth-century writers on music. He highlights the extremes: intellectual sharpness combined with vulnerability, a cultivated tone which threatens to flip over into stridency, and fleeting visions of art's ‘promise of happiness’ juxtaposed with a cultural pessimism which sees the ‘new music’ on course for oblivion. ‘What is art today? ’, asks Adorno as Devil, and declares: ‘the decent impotence of those who scorn to cloak the general sickness under colour of a dignified mummery’.

In his most famous book on music, Philosophie der neuen Musik (on which Thomas Mann had drawn heavily in the writing of Doktor Faustus), Adorno uses the metaphor of the stranded sailor's ‘bottle-post’: radical works are like messages in bottles thrown into the sea, such is the extremity of their alienation. They tell the truth about our predicament in the world, but do so indirectly, in cipher form. It is the task of a critical philosophical aesthetics to decode and interpret these fragmentary ‘messages’, which nevertheless resist interpretation and retain something of a riddle-character.

In his essay ‘Thesen zur Kunstsoziologie’ (1967) Adorno writes: ‘Sociology of art, according to the meaning of the words, embraces all aspects of the relationship between art and society. It is impossible to restrict it to any simple aspect, such as the social effects of works of art. This effect is itself only a moment in the totality of that relationship. ’ Thus there is a sense in which the concerns of Adorno's sociology of art permeate all levels of what is here, for convenience, being called his ‘aesthetics’. However, as was suggested in the earlier part of this study, Adorno's ‘sociology of music’, in the narrower sense of the term, does also have a very specific focus of its own: that is, it seeks to reveal the ideological dimension of music. Music's claim, since the Enlightenment, to be autonomous, is false consciousness when seen in relation to its social function as commodity. As ideology critique Adorno's approach is twofold: to examine the social content of musical material, and to consider the social function and context of music and musical works.