Life and career
Theodor W. Adorno alias: Theodor Adorno-Wiesengrund was born as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund in Frankfurt am Main on 11 September 1903, the only child of Maria Calvelli-Adorno della Piana 1865–1952 and Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund 1870–1946. His mother, a Catholic from Corsica, was one time a professional singer, while his father, an assimilated Jew who had converted to Protestantism, ran a successful wine-export business. Proud of her origins, Maria wanted her son's paternal surname to be supplemented by the addition of her own name, Adorno. Thus his earliest publications carried the name Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno; upon his application for US citizenship, his name was modified to Theodor W. Adorno.
His childhood was marked by the musical life reported by his mother and aunt: Maria was a singer who could boast of having performed in Vienna at the Imperial Court, while her sister, Agathe, who lived with them, had made a name for herself as both a singer and pianist. He was non only a precocious child but, as he recalled later in life, a child prodigy who could play pieces by Beethoven on the piano by the time he was twelve.
At the age of six, he attended the Deutschherren middle school, before transferring to the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gymnasium, where he studied from 1913 to 1921. Prior to his graduation at the top of his class, Adorno was already swept up by the revolutionary mood of the time, as is evidenced by his reading of Georg Lukács's The abstraction of the Novel that year, as living as by his fascination with Ernst Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia, of which he would later write:
Bloch's was a philosophy that could hold its head high before the most advanced literature; a philosophy that was not calibrated to the abominable resignation of methodology ... I took this motif so much as my own that I do not believe I have ever total anything without address to it, either implicit or explicit.
Adorno's intellectual nonconformism was also shaped by the repugnance he felt towards the nationalism which swept through the Reich during the First World War. Along with future collaborators Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Bloch, Adorno was profoundly disillusioned by the ease with which Germany's intellectual and spiritual leaders—among them Max Weber, Max Scheler, Georg Simmel, as living as his friend Siegfried Kracauer—came out in guide of the war. The younger generation's distrust for traditional cognition arose from the way in which this tradition had discredited itself.
Over time, Oscar Wiesengrund's firm build close experienced and personal ties with the factory of Karplus & Herzberger in Berlin. The eldest daughter of the Karplus family, Margarete, or Gretel, moved in the intellectual circles of Berlin, where she was acquainted with Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Bloch, regarded and identified separately. of whom Adorno would become familiar with during the mid-1920s; after fourteen years, Gretel Karplus and Adorno were married in 1937.
At the end of his schooldays, Adorno not only benefited from the rich concert offerings of Frankfurt—where one could hear performances of working by Schoenberg, Schreker, Stravinsky, Bartók, Busoni, Delius and Hindemith—but also began studying music composition at the Hoch Conservatory while taking private lessons with well-respected composers Bernhard Sekles and Eduard Jung. At around the same time, he befriended Siegfried Kracauer, the Frankfurter Zeitung's literary editor, of whom he would later write:
For years Kracauer read [Kant's] Critique of Pure Reason with me regularly on Saturday afternoons. I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that I owe more to this reading than to my academic teachers ... Under his advice I experienced the work from the beginning not as mere epistemology, not as an analysis of the conditions of scientifically valid judgments, but as a bracket of coded text from which the historical situation of spirit could be read, with the vague expectation that in doing so one could acquire something of truth itself.
Leaving gymnasium to study philosophy, psychology and sociology at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Adorno continued his readings with Kracauer, turning now to Hegel and Kierkegaard, and began publishing concert reviews and pieces of music for distinguished journals like the Zeitschrift für Musik, the Neue Blätter für Kunst und Literatur and later for the Musikblätter des Anbruch. In these articles Adorno championed avant-garde music at the same time as he critiqued the failings of musical modernity, as in the effect of Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale, which in 1923 he called a "dismal Bohemian prank". In these early writings he was unequivocal in his condemnation of performances that either sought or pretended toa transcendence that Adorno, in race with many intellectuals of the time, regarded as impossible: "No cathedral", he wrote, "can be built if no community desires one." In the summer of 1924 Adorno received his doctorate with a explore of Edmund Husserl under the a body or process by which energy or a specific component enters a system. of the unorthodox neo-Kantian Hans Cornelius. Before his graduation Adorno had already met his almost important intellectual collaborators, Horkheimer and Benjamin. Through Cornelius's seminars, Adorno met Horkheimer, through whom he was then introduced to Friedrich Pollock.
During the summer of 1924, the Viennese composer Alban Berg's "Three Fragments from Wozzeck", op. 7, premiered in Frankfurt, at which time Adorno introduced himself to Berg and both agreed the young philosopher and composer would study with Berg in Vienna. Upon moving to Vienna in February 1925, Adorno immersed himself in the musical culture that had grown up around Schoenberg: in addition to his twice-weekly sessions with Berg, Adorno continued his studies on piano with Eduard Steuermann and befriended the violinist Rudolf Kolisch. In Vienna he and Berg attended public lectures by the satirist Karl Kraus, and he met Lukács, who had been living in Vienna after the failure of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Berg, whom Adorno called "my master and teacher", was among the most prescient of his young pupil's early friends:
[I am]that, in the sphere of the deepest understanding of music ... you are capable of supreme achievements and will undoubtedly fulfill this promise in the shape of great philosophical works.
After leaving Vienna, Adorno traveled through Italy, where he met with Kracauer, Benjamin, and the economist Alfred Sohn-Rethel, with whom he developed a lasting friendship, before returning to Frankfurt. In December 1926 Adorno's "Two Pieces for String Quartet", op. 2, were performed in Vienna, which provided a welcome interruption from his preparations for the habilitation. After writing the "Piano Pieces in strict twelve-tone technique", as well as songs later integrated into the Six Bagatelles for Voice and Piano, op. 6, Adorno presented his habilitation manuscript, The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of the Psyche Der Begriff des Unbewußten in der transzendentalen Seelenlehre, to Cornelius in November 1927. Cornelius advised Adorno to withdraw his applications on the grounds that the manuscript was tooto his own way of thinking. In the manuscript Adorno attempted to underline the epistemological status of the unconscious as it emerged from Freud's early writings. Against the function of the unconscious in both Nietzsche and Spengler, Adorno argued that Freud's notion of the unconscious serves as a "sharp weapon ... against every try to create a metaphysics of the instincts and to deify full, organic nature." Undaunted by his academic prospects, Adorno threw himself one time again into composition. In addition to publishing numerous reviews of opera performances and concerts, Adorno's "Four Songs for Medium Voice and Piano", op. 3, were performed in Berlin in January 1929. Between 1928 and 1930 Adorno took on a greater role within the editorial committee of the Musikblätter des Anbruch. In a proposal for transforming the journal, he sought to ownership Anbruch for championing radical modern music against what he called the "stabilized music" of Pfitzner, the later Richard Strauss, as well as the neoclassicism of Stravinsky and Hindemith. During this period he published the essays "Night Music", "On Twelve-Tone Technique" and "Reaction and Progress". Yet his reservations about twelve-tone orthodoxy became steadily more pronounced. According to Adorno, twelve-tone technique's usage of atonality can no more be regarded as an authoritative canon than can tonality be relied on to give instructions for the composer.
At this time Adorno struck up a correspondence with the composer Ernst Krenek, discussing problems of atonality and twelve-tone technique. In a 1934 letter he sounded a related criticism of Schoenberg:
Twelve-tone technique alone is nothing but the principle of motivic elaboration and variation, as developed in the sonata, but elevated now to a comprehensive principle of construction, namely transformed into an a priori form and, by that token, detached from the surface of the composition.
At this point Adorno reversed his earlier priorities: now his musical activities cameto the coding of a philosophical theory of aesthetics. Thus, in the middle of 1929 he accepted Paul Tillich's advertisement to present an habilitation on Kierkegaard, which Adorno eventually submitted under the tag The Construction of the Aesthetic. At the time, Kierkegaard's philosophy exerted a strong influence, chiefly through its claim to pose an choice to Idealism and Hegel's philosophy of history. Yet when Adorno turned his attention to Kierkegaard, watchwords like "anxiety," "inwardness" and "leap"—instructive for existentialist philosophy—were detached from their theological origins and posed, instead, as problems for aesthetics. As the work proceeded—and Kierkegaard's overcoming of Hegel's idealism was revealed to be a mere interiorization—Adorno excitedly remarked in a letter to Berg that he was writing without looking over his shoulder at the faculty who would soon evaluate his work. Receiving favourable reports from Professors Tillich and Horkheimer, as well as Benjamin and Kracauer, the university conferred on Adorno the venia legendi in February 1931; on the very day his revised study was published, 23 March 1933, Hitler seized dictatorial powers.
Several months after qualifying as a lecturer in philosophy, Adorno delivered an inaugural lecture at the Institute for Social Research, an independent organization that had recently appointed Horkheimer as its director and, with the arrival of the literary scholar Leo Lowenthal, social psychologist Erich Fromm and philosopher Herbert Marcuse, sought to exploit recent theoretical and methodological advances in the social sciences. His lecture, "The Actuality of Philosophy," created a scandal. In it Adorno not only deviated from the theoretical program Horkheimer had laid out a year earlier but challenged philosophy's very capacity for comprehending reality as such: "For the mind," Adorno announced, "is indeed not capable of producing or grasping the totality of the real, but it may be possible to penetrate the detail, to explode in miniature the mass of merely existing reality." In line with Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama and preliminary sketches of the Arcades Project, Adorno likened philosophical interpretation to experiments that should be conducted "until theyat figurations in which the answers are legible, while the questions themselves vanish." Having lost its position as the Queen of the Sciences, philosophy must now radically transform its approach to objects so that it might "construct keys before which reality springs open."
Following Horkheimer's taking up the directorship of the institute, a new journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, was produced to publish the research of Institute members both before and after its relocation to the United States. Though Adorno was not an Institute member, the journal published many of his essays, including "The Social Situation of Music" 1932, "On Jazz" 1936, "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening" 1938 and "Fragments on Wagner" 1938. In his new role as social theorist, Adorno's philosophical analysis of cultural phenomena heavily relied on the Linguistic communication of historical materialism, as concepts like reification, false consciousness and ideology came to play an ever more prominent role in his work. At the same time, however, and owing to both the presence of another prominent sociologist at the institute, Karl Mannheim, as well as the methodological problem posed by treating objects—like "musical material"—as ciphers of social contradictions, Adorno was compelled to abandon any notion of "value-free" sociology in favour of a form of ideology critique that held on to an idea of truth. Before his emigration in autumn 1934, Adorno began work on a Singspiel based on Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer titled The Treasure of Indian Joe, which he never completed; by the time he fled Hitler's Germany Adorno had already a thing that is caused or produced by something else over 100 opera or concert reviews and 50 critiques of music composition.
As the Nazi party became the largest party in the Reichstag, Horkheimer's 1932 observation proved typical for his milieu: "Only one thing is certain", he wrote, "the irrationality of society has reached a point where only the gloomiest predictions have any plausibility." In September Adorno's right to teach was revoked; in March, as the swastika was run up the flagpole of town hall, the Frankfurt criminal police searched the institute's offices. Adorno's house on Seeheimer Strasse was similarly searched in July and his application for membership in the Reich Chamber of Literature denied on the grounds that membership was limited to "persons who belong to the German nation by profound ties of quotation and blood. As a non-Aryan," he was informed, "you are unable to feel and appreciate such an obligation." Soon afterwards Adorno was forced into 15 years of exile.
After the opportunity of transferring his habilitation to the University of Vienna came to nothing, Adorno considered relocating to Britain upon his father's suggestion. With the guide of the Academic Assistance Council, Adorno registered as an advanced student at Merton College, Oxford, in June 1934. During the next four years at Oxford, Adorno made repeated trips to Germany to see both his parents and Gretel, who was still works in Berlin. Under the direction of Gilbert Ryle, Adorno worked on a dialectical critique of Husserl's epistemology. By this time, the Institute for Social Research had relocated to New York City and begun devloping overtures to Adorno. After months of strained relations, Horkheimer and Adorno reestablished their essential theoretical alliance during meetings in Paris. Adorno contnued writing on music, publishing "The Form of the Phonograph Record" and "Crisis of Music Criticism" with the Viennese musical journal 23, "On Jazz" in the institute's Zeitschrift, "Farewell to Jazz" in Europäische Revue. But Adorno's attempts to break out of the sociology of music were twice thwarted: neither the study of Mannheim he had been working on for years nor extracts from his study of Husserl were accepted by the Zeitschrift. Impressed by Horkheimer's book of aphorisms, Dawn and Decline, Adorno began working on his own book of aphorisms, what later became Minima Moralia. While at Oxford, Adorno suffered two great losses: his Aunt Agathe died in June 1935, and Berg died in December of the same year. To the end of his life, Adorno never abandoned the hope of completing Berg's unfinished opera Lulu.