Here is an early example of Adorno’s stark formulations:
“It is conceivable that
Beethoven actually wanted to go deaf – because he had already had a taste of
the sensuous side of music as it is blared from loudspeakers today. ‘The world
is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.’ Karl Kraus” (31).
Then he quotes George Groddeck: “‘Beethoven went deaf so that he could hear
nothing but the singing daemon within him.’” Later, Adorno comments on the
composer’s solitude in the midst of “the plebian habitus of his humanity…which
– suffering and protesting – feels the fissure of its loneliness. Loneliness is
what the emancipated individual is condemned to in a society retaining the
mores of the absolutist age” (45). As his music “goes beyond” the conventions
of “bourgeois society,” Beethoven “exceeds the bounds of a reality whose
suffering imperfections are what conjures up art” in the first place (47).
The first forty or so pages
of Adorno’s book offer many such stark paradoxes (often seeming to mix Hegel,
Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche) in what amounts to a sort of overture of fragments,
a disassembly of motifs; these motifs are also presented in a more integrated fashion
in a sequence titled “The Mediation between Music and Society” from Introduction to the Sociology of Music
(43-49). From about page 50 to 123, the commentary focuses more fully on
Beethoven’s middle period and particularly on the significance of sonata form with
some attention to the powerful example of the Appassionata sonata (also, in the
midst here, there is a chapter discussing the symphonies, the Eroica, etc.). The
seventy pages following page 123 are focused more fully on Beethoven’s late
works.
For Adorno, the significance
of Beethoven’s music results, on the one hand, from its power as form, its
autonomous structure of expression, and on the other hand, from its resistant engagement
of his society’s “ideology,” its assumed values and power relations. This dual
emphasis is clear at the very start of Adorno’s commentary when he declares
that the “ideological significance” of Beethoven’s music is that it is “a voice
lifted up, that it is music at all,” and this significance is heightened beyond
the ordinary because, for Beethoven, the very possibility of having an uplifted
voice is placed into question by bourgeois ideology – is falsified by its domination
of thought and expression (6).
Beethoven’s music attempts to
overcome that “crushing” domination and the seemingly patent “a priori untruth” and falsity of having a
voice in the first place in such a society, and he does so by creating music
which is continually in process, absorbing, moving, and dodging among
conventions, and “unfolding truth” from “nothing,” from the barest motifs: “Beethoven’s
work can be seen as an attempt to revoke the a priori untruth of music’s voice, of its being music at all,
through its immanent movement as an unfolding truth. Hence, perhaps, the
insignificance of its starting point: this is nothing…” (7). I’m reminded of
the notion of “making music” I broached in my last post – that in performing
Beethoven’s work, one seems to be not only witnessing but participating in the
creation of the piece, the working out of motifs, the resolution of tensions,
the upwellings of feeling: in short, we feel we are participating with
Beethoven in ‘making’ the music.
What we witness and “realize”
in sound, in Adorno’s view of Beethoven, is music in the very process of creation: music that “brings forth
itself...as a tour de force, a
paradox, a creatio ex nihilo…a
‘floating’” experiment, forming music out of the simplest details, even as – in
this Marxist-Hegelian view – its form is “mediated” and “comprehensible only in
terms of its function within the reproduction of society as a whole.” The
“liberated details” of his music enact and resist – through a process of
estranged open-endedness – the concept that in “bourgeois”
society all is “interchangeable” or “fungible,” that no individual detail (no
musical note, banknote, or person) exists in itself and everything exists in relation
to the whole (34). Beethoven’s reimagining in music of the relation of parts to
the whole confronts and intentionally disturbs the typical bourgeois listener, for
whom the “amusement” of music is embraced as “a way to defeat boredom” (8), as
a distraction from the ennui familiar to Baudelaire.
“If Beethoven is the musical
prototype of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, he is at the same time the
prototype of a music that has escaped from its social tutelage and is
esthetically fully autonomous, a servant no longer. His work explodes the
schema of a complaisant adequacy of music and society” (43), and the music does
so by “reconstructing out of freedom” the otherwise self-deluded bourgeois
assumptions about the power of self-projection and the free will to impose a masterful
unity.
“By its power, his successful
work of art posits the real success of what was in reality a failure,” for “that
bourgeois society is exploded by its own immanent dynamic – this is imprinted
in Beethoven’s music,” whose creative process both reproduces and puts to shame
(“explodes”) the “esthetic untruth” of bourgeois expressiveness and freedom,
which are revealed as a deluded nullity in comparison to the power of the music
(46).
Though my account here may
well misrepresent (or at least fail to clarify) Adorno’s difficult formulations, I’ll
keep trying and turn to Adorno’s treatment of the Appassionata sonata in my next post.
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