The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (37 page)

Adorno left the project in 1941, critical of the project’s methodology. Paul Lazarsfeld,
the sociologist who headed the project, and Frank Stanton, later to become president
of CBS, had come up with a gadget they nicknamed “Little Annie,” which could instantaneously
and continuously record audience likes and dislikes.
⁹⁴
(It was an early version of that staple of instant polls and focus groups, the dials
that a viewer can turn from positive to negative to mirror their reaction.)

The flow of data that “Little Annie” and other such methodologies provided was, to
Adorno, misleadingly, dangerously context-free. One of the main underpinnings of the
critical theory that he and Horkheimer and the Institute for Social Research had developed
was that reactions
always
have a social context—in fact, it is the very context of society itself that most
reveals its own critique. To regard any data, any reaction, any cultural artifact
as somehow separable from the society that produced it was liable to blind one to
the ways in which society shapes artifacts and reactions in order to reinforce its
own status quo.

No status quo was excepted. The Institute and its researchers were Marxists, but Marxists
who were dismayed at the way Marxism had been hijacked and bureaucratized in order
to lend unqualified support to this or that Communist movement. Adorno’s resistance
toward such sloganeering would resurface in the late 1960s, after he had returned
to Germany, after he had resumed his teaching career, his classrooms full of young
radicals. But when those radicals became
soixante-huit
would-be revolutionaries, Adorno drew back, censuring their reliance on revolutionary
formula rather than critical engagement. His lectures were disrupted by demonstrations;
he died during a Swiss retreat, taken after canceling the year’s remaining classes.
His last letter was to his Institute colleague, Herbert Marcuse, who had supported
the student uprisings. “I am the last person to underestimate the merits of the student
movement,” Adorno wrote. “But it contains a grain of insanity in which a future totalitarianism
is implicit.”
⁹⁵

HE WAS BORN
Theodor Wiesengrund, but, around the time of his emigration to America, settled instead
on Adorno, his mother’s maiden name. (For a time, he also wrote reviews under the
name “Hektor Rottweiler.”)
⁹⁶
His father was a well-to-do assimilated Jew, carrying on the family wine trade; his
mother was an opera singer of Corsican ancestry and Catholic faith. Theodor enjoyed
a fairy-tale childhood, if the fairy tale had been written by a German intellectual.
The philosopher Siegfried Kracauer was a family friend; every week they would read
Kant, Theodor becoming attuned to “the play of forces at work under the surface of
every closed doctrine.”
⁹⁷
He learned the canon of classical music by playing piano duets with his aunt. He
was precocious, sheltered, and spoiled. A friend remembered Adorno enjoying “an existence
you just had to love—if you were not dying with jealousy of this beautiful, protected
life.”
⁹⁸

Adorno was probably the most accomplished musician to ever become a professional philosopher.
He was welcomed into the circle of the Second Viennese School, studying piano with
Eduard Steuermann, and composition with Alban Berg; the latter relationship was particularly
close, with Berg extolling Adorno’s music to Schoenberg while Adorno helped facilitate
Berg’s love affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin.
⁹⁹
Adorno’s music, in the predodecaphonic,
freely atonal expressionist style, shows a talent and technique far beyond mere dilettantism.
In the early 1930s, he began his most ambitious work, an opera based on Mark Twain’s
Tom Sawyer
called
Das Schatz der Indianer-Joe
(
The Treasure of Indian Joe
). The subject might seem a strange fit, but Adorno’s libretto brought out themes
of fear and conformity lurking within Twain’s tale:

But the increasing uncertainty of his status in Germany, not to mention the unenthusiastic
response of his friend and fellow cultural critic Walter Benjamin, led Adorno to abandon
the project after only two numbers.

Adorno focused on his other vocation, philosophy. As might be expected from his childhood
weekends, Adorno’s philosophy was strongly shaped by the German Idealists, by Kant
and, especially, Hegel. But Adorno was wary of the implications of Hegel’s dialectic,
the way it seemed to be led by the nose toward the Absolute by subjective thought—for
Adorno, a subjective point of view didn’t exist outside of the objective society that
shaped it. This was not simply metaphysical hair-splitting; it was, for Adorno, at
the core of why the Enlightenment-born Western world had not only not prevented suffering,
but had produced suffering on an unprecedented level. The Idealistic focus on subjectivity
had missed the objective suffering happening all around it.

Adorno instead would call for a “negative dialectic,” one that would put asunder the
illusory unities that subjective thought imposes on the objective world—“to break
the compulsion to achieve identity, and to break it by means of the energy
stored up in that compulsion and congealed in its objectifications.”
¹⁰¹
In the words of one of Adorno’s best interpreters, Robert Hullot-Kentor: “What Adorno
wanted to comprehend was the capacity of thought—of identity itself—to cause reality
to break in on the mind that masters it.”
¹⁰²
Adorno’s thought used contradiction—often self-contradiction—to jostle reason out
of its subjective biases. The result is his difficult, reflexive, fragmentary writing
style—there is, as Hullot-Kentor puts it, “the sense, on entering any one of Adorno’s
essays, that even in their very first words one has already arrived too late to find
out for sure what any of the concepts mean.”
¹⁰³
But better that than the false assimilation of the concepts into a point of view
unaware of its own distortions.

ODDLY ENOUGH
, a good place to start to understand Adorno’s perception of Beethoven is in his analysis
of another type of music, an analysis that Adorno, in many ways, got remarkably wrong.
Adorno’s writings on jazz are infamous. In his 1936 essay “Über Jazz” (originally
published under the “Hektor Rottweiler” byline), he rehearsed a critique that he never
abandoned: jazz was mechanical, rigid music, repackaging an illusion of freedom in
such a way that only inculcated the conformity necessary for a capitalist, industrial
society to maintain the status quo. Any sensation of freedom in jazz is just a veneer,
detached from the underlying structure, a structure that encourages obedience, not
rebellion.

Beethoven’s syncopation had been “the expression of an accumulated subjective force
which directed itself against authority until it had produced a new law out of itself.”
¹⁰⁴
But in jazz, “the objective sound” (the harmonic and rhythmic repetition) “is embellished
by a subjective expression” (the misdirections of solos, syncopation,
&c
.) “which is unable to dominate it and therefore exerts a fundamentally ridiculous
and heart-rending
effect.” The improvisatory elements of jazz are, thus, just sentimental window dressing,
a halfhearted revolt “against a collective power which it itself is; for this reason
its revolt seems ridiculous and is beaten down by the drum just as syncopation is
by the beat.”
¹⁰⁵

The standard backlash against Adorno’s jazz writing was that he was simply an insufferable
elitist, misreading jazz in order to preserve “high” culture. (As one critic puts
it: “The aesthetic net must not be cast too wide lest it drag up trash.”
¹⁰⁶
) But to classify Adorno’s criticism as mere snobbery is a misreading as well: Adorno
had some regard for the low end of the high-low cultural continuum. In his book on
film music, written with fellow émigré Hanns Eisler, Adorno allowed that movies “such
as ‘westerns’ or gangster and horror pictures often are in a certain way superior
to pretentious grade-A films.”
¹⁰⁷
In
Dialectic of Enlightenment
, Adorno and Horkheimer scolded the “culture industry” for its antipathy to difference,
no matter the provenance: “The eccentricity of the circus, peepshow, and brothel is
as embarrassing to it as that of Schönberg.”
¹⁰⁸
Even cartoons are made to converge on respectability—browbeaten into insisting on
“the very ideology which enslaves them,” audiences end up favoring the properly punished
troublemaking of Donald Duck over the consequence-free hedonism of Betty Boop.
¹⁰⁹

In other words, Adorno’s problem with jazz is not that it isn’t high culture—it’s
that it is neither high-culture
nor low-culture
enough to elude the culture industry. Only art at the extremes of the high-low continuum
could avoid being appropriated: high art because it was transcendent, low art because
it was anarchic. Middlebrow culture was Adorno’s real target—all the aura of art,
but none of its threat to order. Both critics and apologists have noted that Adorno’s
jazz analyses would better correspond to light jazz, “sweet” jazz, the Paul-Whiteman-like
arrangements that would have been prevalent on the radio, if not in those clubs where
“hot” jazz reigned. Conflating the styles
made hash of Adorno’s musicology. But maybe that was part of his point: jazz had been
fairly easily defanged for mass consumption. (Ralph Ellison had
Invisible Man’
s narrator imagine re-creating jazz’s potency in a way reminiscent of Stefan Wolpe’s
Dada experiments with the Fifth: “I’d like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong
playing ‘What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue’—all at the same time.”
¹¹⁰
)

It is no wonder that it was in America, where the appropriation of culture was conspicuous,
even celebrated, that Adorno was most primed to dialectically expose it, and not just
in jazz and popular music. Adorno’s
Philosophy of New Music
, which warns of the fetishizing nature of serialism, dates from his exile, as does
his and Horkheimer’s
Dialectic of Enlightenment
, which took Western rationality to similar task.

But it was also in America that Adorno’s fascination with Beethoven crystallized into
a book—one he never finished.
¹¹¹
The surviving fragments of the project are a particularly diffuse constellation;
one nevertheless can perceive Adorno trying to carve out space for the exceptional
nature of Beethoven’s music.

THE FRAGMENTATION
of the Fifth was, for Adorno, the mechanism by which mass media and mass culture
dragged Beethoven toward middlebrow status. “Radio symphonies,” as Adorno called them—an
on-air mediation of the canon so thoroughgoing that it created a new genre—promoted
a kind of music-as-trivia-answer, substituting recognition for comprehension, encouraged
hearing a part to listening to the whole. It was the difference between musical understanding
and music appreciation.

In 1954, the Book-of-the-Month Club introduced “Music-Appreciation Records,” in which
recordings of the standard repertoire were backed with spoken analysis and musical
examples, “to help you understand music better and enjoy it more.”
¹¹²
The
free, no-obligation tryout record was Beethoven’s Fifth: “You have heard this great
work countless times—what have you heard in it? And what may you have failed to hear?”
Notice the aim of the two-pronged sales pitch—inducing anxiety that one’s individual
experience both requires re-categorization (
what have you heard?
), and is still somehow lacking in comparison with majority opinion (
what may you have failed to hear?
).

Such pressure to conform was at the heart of Adorno’s quarrel with mass media over
music, no matter how altruistic mass media’s intent. Adorno once wrote a scathing
analysis of NBC’s long-running
Music Appreciation Hour
, a show aimed at schoolchildren, hosted and conducted by Walter Damrosch. The show’s
procedure was familiar—break a symphony down into its constituent themes, and point
out structural signposts. But such “atomistic listening,” in Adorno’s reckoning, was
a deliberate alienation from music’s power. “While apparently urging recognition in
order to help people to ‘enjoy’ music, the Music Appreciation Hour actually encourages
enjoyment, not of the music itself, but
of the awareness that one knows music
.”
¹¹³
Understanding, as Adorno posits it—what he calls a “life-relationship” with music—is
open-ended and individual, and thus far too inefficient for mass media, which relies
on the mere illusion of an individual relationship. Recognition, though, is instant
gratification; not everyone can experience the Fifth as transcendent, but everyone
can recognize when the main theme comes back. It is in such recognition that the media
advances its own interests over that of Beethoven’s:

Reducing the Fifth to a parade of themes subordinates it by substituting a kind of
musical score-keeping for a true engagement with the musical whole. It was the same
sort of bait-and-switch that Adorno sensed in one of Walter Benjamin’s critical experiments:
Benjamin had attempted an analysis of Baudelaire consisting solely of juxtaposed quotations
of Baudelaire’s own writings, a mosaic list that would, in theory, produce a self-evident
argument. Adorno chided him: “You superstitiously attribute to material enumeration
a power of illumination that is never kept.”
¹¹⁵