The New Music. Theodor W. Adorno

together. On the one hand, you are dealing with the dynamic, with this highly developed awareness of degrees, which is extremely closely connected to the principle of variative development, of thematic work – that is, with the whole sonata spirit in Schoenberg. On the other hand, you have a certain stubbornness of the individual element, which has its own weight in a way one does not find among the other neo-Germans. And precisely this polarity, the fact that Schoenberg is on the one hand far more dynamic than the other composers – here I mean ‘dynamic’ in the sense of progression, of movement, not ‘dynamic’ in the narrower musical sense of piano and forte, I am sure you will understand me – but, on the other hand, he has a stronger sense of the individual musical element, for the – how shall I put it? – for the disconnected, I would almost say, through this tension towards the extremes. This was really a major factor in the collapse of tonality. You can find this element that I just described to you – and which is by no means easy to pin down but lies only in this strange tendency towards persistence – you can also find this in the mature Schoenberg in a certain sense, in the things I once referred to as ‘blotches’¹¹ – that is, in certain irrationalities, shall we say, in certain individual aspects that set themselves apart from the context, that cannot be entirely absorbed by the overall dynamics, and which stand there as a slightly foreign counterweight to those dynamics. Those of you who truly know Schoenberg’s work know exactly what I mean by these blotches. For example, the tremolo passage in the first of the op. 19 piano pieces, which I am sure you all know, this is an example of that exact phenomenon. And by identifying this, by highlighting this peculiar irrationality of insistence at the individual level, I come to an aspect that strikes me as not insignificant for the fundamental controversy in which we find ourselves here.

Perhaps I can share an experience of my own with you, for I generally want to attempt to reconstruct experiences and somehow give you access to the experiential core of these things. In 1924, at a time when I was already quite familiar with Schoenberg’s work, I had my first encounter with a work by Webern: the op. 5 quartet pieces,¹² which I now love dearly and consider a great masterpiece. At the time, however, I measured these pieces against the op. 19 piano pieces. And I remember exactly that I was reviewing them, and I wrote at the time that these op. 5 quartet pieces by Webern constituted a step backwards from Schoenberg because this particular form of irrationality, of complete freedom, of being irreducible to thematic connections, had already given way to a form of rationalizing process.¹³ Those of you – and I assume that is almost everyone – who know Webern’s op. 5 very well will know that the thematic work there has already been taken extremely far, and that constant variations are brought about by devices such as shifting entries by a quaver, accordingly shifting the accents. He is really composing with basic cells. Perhaps we will have an opportunity to analyse these pieces very closely. They are very interesting, and unmistakably progressive. But I still remember exactly my feeling that, compared to Schoenberg’s op. 19 – which, if I am correctly informed, was actually written slightly after the quartet pieces by Webern – compared to that op. 19, its systematic nature was a step backwards to an extent, as this sphere of the blotch, this sphere of the true freedom of an organically necessary approach based on the gravity of the music, without seeking refuge in thematic cogency, because that was lost in the process. And I would certainly say that this element in Schoenberg strikes me as one of the most important. Mr Boulez spoke in his lecture of the later Schoenberg, of certain academic tendencies in later Schoenberg,¹⁴ and I would say that these elements I am referring to are precisely the non-academic elements in Schoenberg – that is, those whereby he eludes any formula or rigidity – and really the elements, I would say, that count most today. So this means that one must realize the sense of precisely those phenomena that are not driven and justified by the motivic machine, must understand what they are therefore, and try from that point to take up such impulses, this gravity, the ‘sexual life of sounds’, as he called it,¹⁵ even at the cost of one’s own principles. Measured against what Schoenberg taught, with the importance of scale degrees, measured against this, the passage I played to you is undoubtedly a deviation. It is un-Schoenbergian in this sense but infinitely consistent in a higher sense, because here – and this is the artistically decisive aspect – the reversion to the tonic is the idea. I think one can pinpoint the difference between the technically pre-artistic and the technically artistic very concisely, namely as the difference between false and true: whether a composer cannot get beyond the first degree because they have not yet learnt their harmony properly, or whether a theme is conceived in such a way that its character, its particularity, lies in the fact that it specifically tends towards the tonic, as is the case here – and that is really what we find in such a theme in Schoenberg.

But now, ladies and gentlemen, I am known for my dialectical excesses and must therefore do justice to my bad reputation here too [laughter in the auditorium] by pointing out that this static aspect I just showed you cannot, of course, have the last word in such a song. Rather, Schoenberg’s sense of form is so refined that precisely this somewhat overemphasized tonic has implications for the construction, as the music subsequently moves far away from the tonic – not simply in the sense of using fresh degrees or suchlike, for it is necessary to touch on a somewhat distant tonal region in order to compensate for the damage to the overall construction caused by this overbearing dominant. He therefore follows it with a modulation that goes first to B major, then – after touching on D major again – to F sharp major and from there to E flat, and only then back to the initial D major. So you must understand the harmonic development correctly: although the song clings firmly to its D major character, what is required for this character to emerge is the creation of a certain equilibrium through very marked modulations, through deviations. So already here, in this music, there are what one might call harmonic expanses, harmonic complexes, whose totality creates a kind of balance, and tonality here consists not in the starting point or the goal but rather in this balance, which is brought about entirely through these overarching harmonic complexes. You can already see from this how modern, in a deeper, subcutaneous sense, is the treatment of harmony via this principle of balance, however harmless the musical surface might seem. So now, please note – I will play you a little more – how this D major is set up through the equilibrium between the individual harmonically very distant complexes, and how the music also moves rather far away from the static opening, and nothing static returns [plays Gurrelieder] […] strong emphasis on the tonic [plays]. And now on page 40 we have this famous theme,¹⁶ which is then developed over the whole of Gurrelieder somewhat in the manner of a second subject in a symphony, and which I will only touch on now because of the large intervals that are used freely for the first time. It is very interesting that Schoenberg’s large intervals, which have a very complex history, were initially derived purely from the individual melodic idea and only a little later, in the op. 6 songs, justified after the fact, as it were, as an adumbration of complicated harmonic relationships to which they refer in the manner of arabesques, such as the famous minor ninths in ‘Traumleben’ from op. 6. But here they are initially introduced as a purely melodic idea, and Schoenberg, who often said that innovations in one area are usually accompanied by a certain conservatism in other areas, did not make an exception here: he evidently found the compulsion to use these large intervals so foreign and unusual that here, precisely in this most melodically exposed of passages, he chose an especially simple harmonic skeleton for it. Incidentally, I would like to add that Webern told me on various occasions that both he and Schoenberg – and they did, after all, somehow carry out the great innovations together – that they kept fluctuating between doing it and not doing it, that they only did it with fear and trembling, as it were, and were always worried and tried to go back on it, but then took the chance after all because there was no other way; and I would almost say that some of this fear and trembling, of this worry and this fear, entered the music itself, and that, the fact that there was no other way, that is what gives these things their true force. So, the passage I mean is on page 40 [plays]; now he quite simply repeats the phrase [plays], and then it even appears a third time [plays]. Now, in later years he would surely not have written that for a third time. But you can sense something in it of the tension in which these intervals, which grew purely from the melody, appeared there. I also think – and we will return to this – that all of us really grew up with the idea, at least I thought it for a long time, that the explanation for Schoenberg’s development lies substantially in his