The New Music. Theodor W. Adorno

the violin tutor at the Darmstadt course from 1953. In 1954 it was announced that Adorno, ‘in collaboration with Rudolf Kolisch and Edward [sic] Steuermann’, would give five lectures on ‘New Music and Interpretation (with Musical Demonstrations)’. In 1955 Kolisch directed a three-day chamber music course in the form of open rehearsals of Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte, op. 41, for string quartet, piano and speaker.

      7 7. Ernst Křenek (1900–1991), who changed the spelling of his name to ‘Krenek’ after emigrating, taught composition at the summer course several times from 1950. In 1954 he gave the evening lecture ‘Ein Komponist gibt Rechenschaft’ [A composer gives account]. Adorno continued to use the original pronunciation.

      8 8. Kol nidre, op. 39, for speaker, mixed chorus and orchestra (1938). The text is the main prayer sung on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement in Judaism, which renounces all oaths and promises made during the last year. In a letter to Paul Dessau from 22 November 1941, Schoenberg wrote on this subject: ‘From the very first moment I was convinced (as later proved correct, when I read that the Kol Nidre originated in Spain) that it merely meant that all who had either voluntarily or under pressure made believe to accept the Christian faith (and who were therefore to be excluded from the Jewish community) might, on this Day of Atonement, be reconciled with their God, and that all oaths (vows) were to be cancelled’ (Arnold Schoenberg, Letters, ed. Erwin Stein, trans. Eithne Wilkins. [London: Faber & Faber, 1964], p. 212).

      9 9. René Leibowitz (1913–1972), composer, music theorist and conductor, wrote Schoenberg and His School (1947) and Introduction to Twelve-Note Music (1949). He taught composition at the summer course in 1948 and 1949. In 1954 he gave six lectures on the late works of Anton Webern and spoke about a recording of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder that he had made as a conductor. In 1955 he taught composition again. His pieces were often performed at the course. Leibowitz, not least because of his work at Darmstadt, was very significant for the reception of Schoenberg’s work after 1945. Adorno wrote of him: ‘If atonality and twelve-note music are no longer dismissed in the Western world as a German folly, and have established themselves in a very serious sense, this is to an inestimable degree thanks to his initiative. I would especially emphasize that he organized secret concerts of modern music at great personal risk during the occupation of Paris – truly an example of a heroic mentality’ (Letter to Wolfgang Steinecke, 11 February 1955, Darmstadt International Music Institute [IMD]). Pierre Boulez took private lessons with Leibowitz from 1945 to 1947 but later turned against him and the predominance of the Schoenberg school, which Leibowitz represented in Paris.

      10 10. Adorno is probably thinking of the following passage from the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit:It [the conventional opinion] does not comprehend the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive unfolding of truth, but rather sees in it simple disagreements. The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. […] Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. (G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977], p. 2)

      11 11. The works in question are short piano pieces, songs, and a four-movement string quartet in D major (1897), which ‘can be seen as concluding the first phase of Schoenberg’s development, which followed the model of Viennese Classicism, especially Brahms’ (Josef Rufer, The Works of Arnold Schoenberg: A Catalogue of His Compositions, Writings, and Paintings [London: Faber & Faber, 1962], p. 85).

      12 12. See Johannes Brahms, Four Serious Songs for bass voice and piano, op. 121 (1896).

      13 13. ‘Verwandlung’, from bar 320.

      14 14. Adorno means the funeral march after Siegfried’s death in Götterdämmerung, Act 3, end of scene 2.

      15 15. Claude Debussy, Proses lyriques for voice and piano to texts by the composer (1892–3).

      16 16. Regarding the importance of Richard Dehmel (1863–1920) for Schoenberg, see Schoenberg’s letter to the poet from 13 December 1912: ‘[…] your poems have had a decisive influence on my development as a composer. They were what first made me try to find a new tone in lyricism. Or rather, I found it even without looking, simply by reflecting in music what your poems stirred up in me’ (Schoenberg, Letters, p. 35).

      17 17. Trans. Richard Stokes, from The Book of Lieder (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), pp. 281f.

      18 18. Regarding the concept of ‘developing variation’, see Schoenberg, Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), p. 129.

      19 19. This term in its technical usage refers to the historical song structure known as ‘bar form’, in which a stanza (the Stollen) appears twice and is followed by an unrepeated element (the Abgesang, literally ‘closing song’) (Trans.).

      20 20. The word for suicide used here is Freitod, which literally means ‘free death’, in the sense of a freely chosen death (Trans.).

      21 21. The Book of Lieder, p. 282.

      22 22. See Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 175–210 (Chapter X, ‘Secondary Dominants and Other Nondiatonic Chords Derived from the Church Modes’).

      23 23. See Alfred Lorenz, Das Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner, Vol. 1: Der musikalische Aufbau des Bühnenfestspieles Der Ring des Nibelungen (Berlin: Max Hesse, 1924), pp. 15–52; Adorno is presumably thinking of this chapter, in which Lorenz speaks at length about the function of the unity of key.

      24 24. Adorno is referring to the tenth song, ‘Das schöne Beet betracht ich mir im Harren’ [I gaze upon the beautiful flowerbed as I wait].

      25 25. ‘Erhebung’ (Richard Dehmel), op. 2, no. 3.

      26 26. The final song from Schoenberg’s op. 2 is entitled ‘Waldsonne’ (on a poem by Johannes Schlaf). Egon Wellesz wrote in his book Arnold Schönberg (Leipzig, Vienna and Zurich: E. P. Tal, 1921), p. 72: ‘The two other songs of this opus, “Erhebung” after Richard Dehmel and “Waldsonne” after Johannes Schlaf, are, in keeping with their literary material, far simpler than the first songs in harmonic and melodic terms. “Waldsonne” in particular, with its enchanting piano accompaniment, is among the compositions with which Schoenberg gained his first supporters in the general public.’

Lecture 2: 2 June 1955

      […] without me too, you do not need me for that; rather, I simply mean to show you a few things that I assume will not be entirely familiar to all of you, and aspects in which especially the connection between this early Schoenberg and the later becomes apparent, and in which you can learn something – and that is the intention of all my attempts here – something about the origins of the sense, the formal sense, the formal function, about several things that appear in a concretized form only in the mature works. Here you can trace the impulses, as it were, that are later present in an objectified form in the mature works. Because one needs to have these impulses before one can objectify them, I think it is very important for you to gain an understanding of precisely these impulses here.

Now, I would like to begin by reminding you of something of which more or less all of you will be aware, namely Schoenberg’s famous metric irregularity, the fact that the eight-bar period was truly, finally and radically dethroned for the first time by Schoenberg, whereas deviations from the eight-bar schema in traditional music such as Schubert or Mendelssohn, to name only two, always had the character of an exception rather than anything decisive. You now find this metric abundance – that is, a constant change between even- and odd-numbered periods and between short and long models – you already find that very clearly in Verklärte Nacht. And this is once again connected to a thematic character, namely the fact that Schoenberg often lays out the themes by developing them from elements that keep appearing and