The New Music. Theodor W. Adorno

help adding another thought to this. And here, if you will allow it, I would also like to modify certain views for whose genesis I am not entirely without responsibility. What I am referring to is the entire complex of the innate movement of the musical material. I scarcely need to tell you what I mean by this, or how important this question is, and how much the musical material pushes of its own accord towards certain consequences – that is, how it is really the case in music that, if one has said A, one must also say B, and how much the whole development of music in each individual work and in historical terms follows precisely this innate movement. But art is, after all, always a relationship between subject and object. And, once and for all, one should not think that one can enter the realm of objectivity by simply crossing out the subject. The objectivity of art is not a remainder, not a residual concept; it is not something that is left over when the subject withdraws and instead surrenders to a demand that supposedly lies purely in the material, or in the so-called primal elements of art; rather, this demand is naturally mediated time and again by the artistic spirit and the artistic consciousness, and thus always assumes the work and effort of the concept, which means the work and effort of subjectivity. And if I am not mistaken, then music history has reached a stage today in which the concept of the material’s innate movement threatens to be fetishized somewhat – that is, to be separated from this relationship with the subject that intervenes in and transforms the material, and without which there can really be no such movement of the musical material. But if that is the case, it is probably true that, from the most central perspective, the musical material is not actually so decisive on its own. You all know that Schoenberg, in his later days, repeatedly fell back especially on the material from the period around the Second String Quartet and the Chamber Symphony, that he completed a major conception such as the Second Chamber Symphony as a mature or old man, and he operated with this earlier material in a number of such excellent works as the Kol nidre.⁸ Moreover, he kept saying – and I think he was very serious when he did so – that he felt as close to the works of his youth as to those of his mature years, and that he by no means disavowed something like Gurrelieder. He was not as modern as those of his critics who, when they heard a bar from Gurrelieder, automatically reacted with the gesture of ‘Aha, Wagner’ and considered the matter closed. And if I could help you to leave behind some of these clichés, for example that of ‘exaggerated late Romanticism’, which really only conceal what was actually going on in the music, then I would expressly welcome that as a by-product, as a further by-product. At any rate, I wanted to say that, if Schoenberg kept returning to this material, then this means that he was actually more interested – and I mean that not in a psychological and private sense but in the objective sense that it is more objectively interesting – in the procedures, the forms of control, the kind of possibility for shaping a musical sense that played out in the engagement with the material, and not so much the material as such. This means that the older Schoenberg, in such works as the Second Chamber Symphony, in the second movement, worked with this material from the younger Schoenberg from the perspective of all his experiences with dodecaphony. And we could show you in detail – the specialists among us who are here, such as Kolisch and Leibowitz⁹ and myself, as well as a few others – that this tonal piece did indeed profit from all the achievements of the twelve-note technique. And, by the same token, one might say that the real principles of construction, which are far more important for dodecaphonic music than the objectified and reified rules, that these can really all be found in the early works. In a moment I will give you an example, one that I hope will be slightly surprising for you, to illustrate this. So, in other words, I think that, if we examine these works, we should concern ourselves more with what was composed and with the manner of composition than with the mere question of what was used to compose. For if one can compose properly and has something that must be composed, then the modernity, that is, the right material, will come of its own accord, as it were; there is no need to worry a great deal about that. But one should, for heaven’s sake, no longer consider it an achievement today, or a matter of great boldness or sophistication, to operate with a certain material that means nothing in itself before something genuinely convincing has emerged from this material, and thus has a very primitive sense.

Now, I already hinted that the notion of the young Schoenberg, that this is not, as the cliché would have it, a pre-Schoenbergian Schoenberg but actually already the whole Schoenberg, just under a seed leaf of sorts; it is the Schoenberg in whom all the substantial elements of mature composition are already present but still wrapped in a husk of traditional material, which is at last burst open by the forces already active within it, so that it simply falls off like a seed leaf, as Hegel describes in his Phenomenology,¹⁰ allowing the new to emerge in a pure form. Now, in this understanding of the young Schoenberg, we can say that this part of his output, which encompasses no more than ten or eleven works, is already divided very clearly into a number of periods, and that the young Schoenberg himself already exhibits a very clear arc of development. For purposes of orientation – I hope you will forgive my pedantry – I would speak of three basic periods and first describe these to you in brief. I am not familiar with the works that predate the publication of op. 1.¹¹ I once had the opportunity to take a glance at a string quartet and a piano work at Mrs Schoenberg’s home, but I was certainly not able to examine these closely enough to venture an assessment of any kind. At any rate, the Schoenberg we know – from op. 2 onwards, at least – is already not only an absolutely distinctive composer but also very much the real Schoenberg. Now, this ‘first period’ would include the first three books of songs and Verklärte Nacht, and these are works in which one can truly see him stretching himself and expanding and gradually attaining full control of the material; and precisely because everything is very much in flux here, very much in statu nascendi, these first works, especially the op. 2 and op. 3 songs and Verklärte Nacht, are eminently instructive. These are followed by a period that one might consider a period of fully-fledged mastery and is characterized by Gurrelieder and the symphonic poem Pelléas et Mélisande. If I am not mistaken, these two works are among the greatest and most significant masterpieces within the framework of the style generally known as the ‘New German School’. They are absolute equals of the most mature works by Strauss and Mahler, both in their technical sophistication and in their originality, and one really has to see everything that is contained in these works to understand, to understand fully what he then left behind. And the third period of the young Schoenberg, that would be the period that begins with the First String Quartet and the op. 6 songs. I think that the production of these works actually overlapped, or that maybe the quartet is even earlier than the songs. Some of the op. 8 songs also seem to be earlier, so the chronology is not accurately reflected by the opus numbers. This is the period in which Schoenberg’s principles of construction first emerge in their pure form, in which he takes up the problem of sonata form, in which he addresses the problem of thematic work in the sense of an extreme compression and motivic economy and in which, finally, Schoenberg’s polyphony is also taken to an advanced level. So they are the works in which his peculiar way of working with chromatic scale degrees, and treating them as degrees in their own right, is consistently employed, though today I will give you an example of this that already appears in one of the early songs. So that would be the approximate chronology. And you know that the op. 10 quartet, the second quartet, in a sense summarizes this entire process of development by having a first movement with the highest degree of tonal construction and a second whose expression goes to the utmost extremes in a certain visionary manner, then the third relates the preceding movements to each other through variative development before the last movement truly breaks with tonality and truly enters the realm of freedom.

Now, let me say a few things about op. 1, though I only have the song ‘Abschied’; I do not know the other song, ‘Dank’, so I cannot say anything about it. First of all, I noticed something which I feel a little proud to have detected. I have, on various occasions, developed the idea that Schoenberg’s approach can largely be understood as a synthesis – forgive the rudimentary term – as a synthesis of Brahms and Wagner. I mean this in the sense that the chromatic, expressive and highly sophisticated material of Wagner’s harmonic language has merged with Brahmsian compositional principles, namely his completely seamless and consistent thematic work. This is not a synthesis in the sense of simply adding together these two elements, of course; one has to imagine a consummate interpenetration of these two principles in the